13th December 2015, 8:54 AM
The lack of dark skinned Nintendo characters does factor into things. A lot of people ask "why doesn't Nintendo make Japanese characters?" but that's really a matter of artistic style. Japanese people, from what I understand, see Link and Zelda as Japanese. Now take a look at a game like Jade Empire, where the art style is borderline racist in their depiction of Chinese people, exaggerating everything traditionally "different" between Europeans and Asians. They just stop short of the buck teeth of WW2 propaganda, but it gets uncomfortably close, and that's par for the course with that "D&D van art" style (mind you, I generally have never liked that art style anyway). I say this because basically Nintendo has never even bothered with nationalities outside their own country.
This lends itself to the singular fact that Japan is actually more culturally xenophobic than even us Americans. The world of FF7 is home to exactly one black man, for example (with a white kid, but genetics would allow for that if there's exactly one black man). Now, while that character (Barret) LOOKS like Mr. T, it took US translators to make him SOUND like Mr. T (part of the reason I wish they'd retranslate that game at some point). FF13 gives us another black character, but he's basically emulating a Hollywood black character in an action movie (and that one can't be blamed on the translation). To that end, I dunno, maybe Nintendo is actually afraid to put someone who isn't either "Japanese" or a literal race-free cartoon character like Mario, out of fear of "doing it wrong". That's not really the way to handle that though.
Look at Disney. They only JUST started putting black characters in their main line fairy tale movies, and The Princess and the Frog ended up doing bad by Disney standards. Unfortunately, executives learned a lot of terrible lessons. Executives tend to assume EVERY unique part of a badly received product is responsible for the failure (rather than actually asking people what they didn't like), so now they're convinced that no one wants a black lead ("I told you!" says the racist hollywood exec) and that fairy tale movies need "edgy" one-word titles from now on (the upcoming Jack and the Beanstalk movie is going to just be called "Gigantic", continuing the annoying trend of otherwise good movies like Tangled (Rapunzel) and Frozen (The Snow Queen)). In fact, when they added the non-traditional looking princesses to their "Disney Princess" merch, they completely changed their body types to look like all the other disney princess styled princesses.
So, we've got troubles as well.
This lends itself to the singular fact that Japan is actually more culturally xenophobic than even us Americans. The world of FF7 is home to exactly one black man, for example (with a white kid, but genetics would allow for that if there's exactly one black man). Now, while that character (Barret) LOOKS like Mr. T, it took US translators to make him SOUND like Mr. T (part of the reason I wish they'd retranslate that game at some point). FF13 gives us another black character, but he's basically emulating a Hollywood black character in an action movie (and that one can't be blamed on the translation). To that end, I dunno, maybe Nintendo is actually afraid to put someone who isn't either "Japanese" or a literal race-free cartoon character like Mario, out of fear of "doing it wrong". That's not really the way to handle that though.
Look at Disney. They only JUST started putting black characters in their main line fairy tale movies, and The Princess and the Frog ended up doing bad by Disney standards. Unfortunately, executives learned a lot of terrible lessons. Executives tend to assume EVERY unique part of a badly received product is responsible for the failure (rather than actually asking people what they didn't like), so now they're convinced that no one wants a black lead ("I told you!" says the racist hollywood exec) and that fairy tale movies need "edgy" one-word titles from now on (the upcoming Jack and the Beanstalk movie is going to just be called "Gigantic", continuing the annoying trend of otherwise good movies like Tangled (Rapunzel) and Frozen (The Snow Queen)). In fact, when they added the non-traditional looking princesses to their "Disney Princess" merch, they completely changed their body types to look like all the other disney princess styled princesses.
So, we've got troubles as well.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)