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Notes -
Hogwart’s Legacy has gotten controversy because of Rowling’s transgender kerfuffle, but the game has another representation issue: it prevents you from playing as a pale-skinned Northern European. You can’t play with the natural skin tone of the book’s characters, or the author, or the race of the actors in the films.
JK Rowling is an Anglo-Saxon, a Briton, with fair pale skin. Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson also have pale skin from (mostly) Northern European ancestry (Radcliffe is half Eastern European). Pale skin of this type is a genetic feature of certain human populations. These are pale folk; they belong to the global minority who have pale skin. Putting Rupert Grint in the Mediterranean sun wouldn’t result in a tan, but a burn.
For some reason, the game designers have decided to prevent you from playing a pale-skinned character. The most pale you can make it is closer to my skin tone, which is partially Southern European. You can see the skin options here as well as normal apolitical people complaining about not being able to represent themselves in the game. A post on the game’s subreddit got thousands of upvotes from Northern Europeans confused why there isn’t a pale skin feature.
I find this actually complaint-worthy. Surely whoever was responsible for the skin modifier has seen the movies in which the cast has largely fair skin. Was this some kind of weird progressive move that the devs made, some bizarre “deal with it Anglos” to dab on racists? It bothers me because I go on Twitch or YouTube and I see pale Harry Potter fans forced to play someone who does not represent their actual ethnicity... when the books and the movies were clearly representative of their culture. To be clear, a variety of races and skin tones are an excellent idea — my befuddlement is just at the exclusion of the original skin tone of the Harry Potter franchise.
Quick edit: while you might think, “only a user here would notice such a thing”, there really are a number of normies concerned about this issue.
Looks to me like a swatch of skin tones under a hot color temp bulb.
That said, I really appreciate everyone and their brother trying to find a way to culture ware this 6.5/10 piece of tie in media. Shows how brain poisoned this whole thing makes us.
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