I really wish Ninty would branch out with the Zelda IP, and make a game about maybe the Gerudos or something because there is a lot of diversity in Hyrule that really isn’t explored to the extent it could be.
I don’t know if the Gerudos would be considered “black”, so to avoid being insesitive I will say that they are PoC and could be a great starting place if anything.
The Gerudo in BotW are actually pretty diverse amongst themselves. You get a whole bunch of skin tones, but they all have red hair.
Not exactly a protagonist but
Nearest thing to a person of colour in the Mario universe (by way of the WarioWare franchise)
It does feel like they’re at least aware of it with Splatoon, BoTW and Arms but they’ve a long way to go.
Yeah the Gerudo are interesting and they reflect certain real world ethnicities with lot’s of different skin tones but all of which share an ethnicity and identity. I think ‘hispanic’ is one? (I’m ignorant on that so correct me if I’m wrong)
The reason we don’t is that Japan is one of the least diverse countries on earth.
It shouldn’t be an excuse though. Nintendo is a company with global appeal and their games should reflect this.
It’s always possible it could happen but I wouldn’t bet money on it. Many countries are bad at showing diversity even when they have a diverse population, take a place like Japan and it’s probably worse. Not to say they haven’t done some great diverse characters in various media but some are still stereotypical if there. On Nintendo itself, they don’t exactly do “realism”, Princess Peach who is normally the only female around is often the basic damsel in distress trope. Disappointing really. That DS game where you used her emotions had me wondering wtf were they thinking.
This is a symptom of the problem rather than an excuse, but isn’t Nintendo in particular notoriously insular? I was recently reading an interview with one of the 2 westerners who worked on Breath of the Wild. Everyone else was, if I remember right, Japanese.
The Mario series rarely adds major characters to their canon, much less other humans, so I dunno about that. The most recent character off the top of my head is Rosalina, but aside from her the cast of characters has been pretty static.
Nintendo’s more recent IPs like Splatoon and ARMS both have been better about color representation, though. Even the recent pokemon games give you more freedom when choosing your character’s skin tone, so that’s a plus.
The way I see it Mario characters are created as a reply to a gameplay need and Nintendo is known to always try to design their games focusing first and foremost on gameplay. That´s why Mario´s cast has dinosaurs, small living stars or hats, because those are characters designed to enable the player to eat stuff with his tongue, capture star pieces from a distance or posses beings and objects. Now don´t get me wrong, but I´d preffer if the cast kept on expanding with crazy, distinct characters like those instead of getting more realistic to introduce wider representation (I do feel like Zelda could be great for that due to it´s more “realistic” setting and BotW has already taken some steps).
I would loathe a Mario Kart character selection screen composed of 30+ humanoid characters, even if all of them are very distinct. It´s already a problem with the baby versions and the gold/metal/pink versions, this would only make it worse. It´s like how the selection screen of KOF and cast was really underwhelming (until you got into the game and story) when compared to something like SF2´s: One had 30+ different humans, while the other one had a guy who could stretch his limbs, a green electric beast, a sumo wrestler…It was much more unique and interesting.
So IMO, keep the Mario cast crazy, don´t any more Larios or Laluigis and give us more dinosaurs, talking caps and stuff like that.
Marina is a historical character for Nintendo in that she’s unmistakebly black, and she rocks. There have also been great dark-skinned characters in Zelda.
However, we still need a dark skinned main character, or anyone in the Mushroom Kingdom. (I think one of the Kings in SMB3 was black?) In the end it’s a matter of time, they are getting better over time, their depictions of different cultures are always positive… (Btw, I always equated the Gerudos’ relation with Ganon to Muslims and Islamic terrorism, does anyone else see this?)
Despite Japan not being so hot on racial integration ir inmigration, I think there is hope with Nintendo.
I’d say the Gerudo are a badass mixture of Berber, Arab and Amazon. It shows very clearly in BOTW, where they live in a distinctly Arab town and there are Roman ruins in the Gerudo Desert, pointing to somewhere in the North of Africa/Palestine/Lebanon/Jordan.
And, Hispanic is more of a cultural heritage and geographical origin. I’m Spanish from Spain, I’m white, and while being Hispanic my experiences and family heritage are very different from a Peruvian of indigenous ascent, even though we share the language and aspects of the culture that my ancestors imposed onto theirs.
Yeah, I may be thinking of one of his skins that makes his complexion a bit darker that I think I’ve heard people in the (problematic) Smash community say makes him black
You can play as John Henry in Code Name Steam. He is obviously not an original creation though.
Inclusion isn’t about “checking boxes”.
Are the Gerudo really good representation? Their presentation strikes me as rather fetishistic and reductive and really plays into the whole “Women can be just as strong and powerful as men! (As long as there are no men around otherwise they’d just be women and not any of those things)” trope
But women are depicted in a positive way everywhere in the game. Both the Orni and the Zora show gender equality in their behaviour and have female warriors, the Champions are evenly split by gender, Zelda is shown as a capable, intelligent person, and regular NPCs are very diverse and egalitarian in their behaviour.
The same way the Goron are a tribe where it’s all dudes, the Gerudo are a tribe where it’s all women, and who happen to have a history of abuse by the men who once used to led them.
I don’t entirely know that I agree? Zelda is basically an object that exists to hold off Gannon while you come to save her and while I guess there are female guards among the Zora (I never saw them though I may have just missed it) the temple guardian there just kind of fawns over Link and and her power is of course healing. I say on the whole it’s more Eh then Good and outright Bad when you factor in it’s treatment of trans women. Maybe the game fairs better if you go and collect all of Zelda’s vacation slides out in the world but the writing in that game is so bad I never bothered
This is all rather off topic though
Welp, how to put this, my GF played that part while I was away, so I never got to see it until you mentioned it 
I wasn’t aware there was a trans woman in the game, although the whole “infiltrate the city of women” thing was a bit awkward.
And yeah, let us not derail this thread 
there is an intersection of these things ofc but it seems. weird to me to turn the gerudo into a thing abt their representation wrt gender when this is a thread about race
so like moreover w the gerudo from what i remember in OoT/MM they’re rumoured to come into town to Steal The Menfolk w their Exotic Promiscuity or w/e
not to mention they’re all literally thieves
so uh, that’s probably a little more pressing, honestly
