I wanna do something new, so here's the start of something I'm gonna call the
Total Drama art style yapping session
An off-handed term I use to describe East and Southeast Asian characters with a frightenly yellow skintone, derived from one of the symptoms of aforementioned disease.
Basic context: yellow skin on Asians, for those unaware, is typically an offensive caricature that is tied to racist ideas that formed at some point in the 19th century
It was a disturbingly common aspect of Total Drama character design that perplexes me to this very day for multiple reasons, but there's one that I wanna focus on
See, other shows within the same era of TD colored Asian characters similarly. Not all shows did this, mind you, but it was enough to be noticeable. If these shows lasted long enough or came back for any reason, any Asian character that returned with it was color corrected accordingly.
Total Drama is strange in this regard because they actually went backwards. In the beginning there was Heather (and if you wanna take Todd Kaufmann at his word, Katie) and they look perfectly fine.
Then, after 2 sets of contestants with no Asian characters in their cast, they come back in the show's first (and only canon) spin-off and well, i'll let you diagnose the condition
While I very much doubt that Fresh TV were being maliciously racist, this certainly wasn't a freak accident from them, either. basically most other background characters were also given a shade like this. this was a new standard for character design they adopted going forward, bleeding into the baby show as well
what gets even crazier is that this almost ended up applying to the reboot as well. we've all seen the early concepts for MK at this point and how much of a lemon she was. This design managed to make it into the initial airing for the first reboot season in Italy before she was changed a mere week later and stayed that way for every subsequent release of the reboot duology
what prompted Fresh to adopt this color palette in the first place, why it subsequently took them roughly a decade to release it was weird, and why they had this realization right as they started releasing reboot material is beyond me, but i'm glad they've seemingly abandoned this design philosophy and that we hopefully won't be seeing this again
and don't get me started on how yellow MK somehow co-existed with Chase
