Intelligent Systems, let me speak with y’all right quick about Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave because I have questions. Why is it, in a game that has the most non-white characters I’ve ever seen in a Nintendo-published product, with those characters encompassing a legitimately surprising wealth of skin-tone diversity, that y’all insist on incorporating dark-skinned characters that look like corpses?
Three of the four hero characters in Fortune’s Weave are people of color. There’s the young boy Cai, the vengeance-fueled Leda, and the powerful queen Theodora. Cai and Leda are lighter-skinned, but very clearly brown, but it’s with Theodora that I throw up my hands and go, “not this ashy shit again.”
I don’t understand why this beautiful, powerful, well-designed brown woman looks like she bathes in a tub of baby powder, skin untouched by the restorative qualities of shea butter or vaseline. She’s the queen of a desert nation, that bitch has to know what moisturizer is; it’s a matter of survival! And it’s not just her that’s been hit with the corpse-beam. Her two retainers, Tobias and Bonaparte, are similarly afflicted, and players can give Eshmel, the game’s fifth and true protagonist revealed during yesterday’s Nintendo Direct, an ashy pallor along other customization options including hairstyle and body type.
Living brown people don’t look like this. If Theodora and her two retainers were the only brown people in the game, I’d still be upset, but I’d leave it be. Getting brown folk in a Nintendo product is, in itself, so incredibly rare that I’d be all right that the inclusion was made at all, even if done poorly. But what’s so frustrating about this is that Intelligent Systems has demonstrated not only in this game but in previous Fire Emblem entries that its developers know what brown skin is supposed to look like. There are also numerous characters in Fortune’s Weave alone that demonstrate this.
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The rainbow of brown skin tones suggests that the choices made for Theodora might be intentional and if so, I hope that’s explained. And while it’s not totally perfect (and really what game can be?), I’m glad these characters exist and that developers are making more conscious choices about inclusivity in video games.