Genshin Impact, the runaway hit of the mobile gaming space with five hundred thousand players online at any one time across its multiple platforms is in the news for a mistake their developers repeated again. The mistake they repeated was whitewashing new characters that they were introducing.
In 2022, they were releasing a new set of characters for the region of Sumeru, teasing and releasing pictures on X (formally twitter) the general sentiment was quickly made known as dozens of commenters made clear the fact that these characters should not be white since the obvious inspiration of the theme was North Africa along with Southeast Asia.
In 2021, they fans discovered a video of Genshin developers started referencing indigenous dances for the hilichurl enemies painting them as animalistic. Fans made their distaste be known and were readily quitting the game altogether.
Who did they Whitewash this Time?
The new region “Atlan” has no official release date as of yet and decidedly so since players and the voice actors of the game also let their thoughts be known about this issue too. This new region is based on Latin America and on gods of Africa. Despite the region being based primarily on those countries, all the characters featured were white, although there were those excited to have their cultures represented in-game it all came crashing down with the reveal of the characters.
Players wasted no time in letting their distaste be known as they pointed out how low Hoyoverse (the developers of Genshin Impact) have stooped to allow themselves to repeat this again and again. Players made sure to find depictions of these gods and goddesses to show the blatant white washing committed by the developers and making it clear that they expected them to do this since it seems they do not care to learn from their mistakes on racism and misrepresentation.
Ororon, one of the new characters is based on Olorun, a deity from the Yoruba region of Africa who is considered a leader of Yoruba Pantheon. Knowing this information, Hoyoverse still made the decision to make Ororon white. Another character Mavuika, is based on a Maori fire deity called Mahuika; has been represented as white. Kinich, a character based on the Mayan sun god of the same name has also been shamelessly represented as white.
This time it seems the fans have had enough and decided to start a petition on the matter. The petition asks Hoyoverse to stop the white washing along with “#BoycottHYV” on social media to gain as much attention as possible on this. Several artists have also weighed in and corrected the mistake in representation made by Hoyoverse. Voice actors of Sucrose and Yomiya have also spoken out making it clear that it is not at all okay to misappropriate the culture while trying to paint it as “inspiration”. Multiple users have pointed out how Hoyoverse could’ve made this mistake again since a quick google search would’ve made it clear what shade of color their skin would be instead of white.
Some have stated that it is the time to wait and see what “apology” Hoyoverse writes up to say that “it will not happen again” and how harmful it is to hijack a race’s culture as the filler only to do it next time. As mentioned before, Hoyoverse did not do this for the 2nd time, this is their third 3rd time doing this.
Conclusion: They got Time to Fix it
Since the date of release for the new region hasn’t been announced people have been outspoken about how there is time to fix it. Although multiple articles state that the release of Atlan is imminent. But the main issue here isn’t with the characters, its with Hoyoverse’s inability to understand what they are doing wrong here.
It is fine to base your universe’s characters on deities and cultures from around the world and from different times if need be but only for the all characters that are “inspired” by these deities and cultures to be in the end, white is blatantly insulting at the very least and full blown racist at the worst. Hoyoverse should make a response with changed skin tones or they will witness a nose dive in its amount of players.
