My girlfriend keeps saying the redesigns of Team Aqua from ORAS are black.

My girlfriend keeps saying the redesigns of Team Aqua from ORAS are black. I keep telling her they're tanned Japanese because they live in Hoenn which is based on Kyushu and mostly work outdoors. What's this board's opinion? Did Team Aqua get race-swapped or are they tanned Japanese? She's saying historically most Japanese people in anime have brown eyes and black hair and foreign characters usually have blue eyes and that nu-Team Aqua is designed to look foreign. She also says that despite the game being developed in Japan and that Hoenn is based on a part of Japan, that the races in the region don't need to reflect real life Japan and because Hoenn is fictionalized that the races can vary within the region.

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  1. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    I feel like it's both. Like you're right and the Japanese audience understands it, but for the westeners these are trendy black people, back in 2014 this craze of blackwashing started. Still weird that May/ Brendan couldn't have a tan or be black. I personally always thought oras Team Aqua were supposed to be SEA in the remakes, but then again I didn't really like any redesign except mayybe oras Courtney. Miss my boy rse Tabitha and my girl rse Shelley

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Wtf does SEA mean?

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        South East Asian

  2. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    My opinion is that you're both moronic and the Team Aqua members are large Hoennian with the occasional immigrants from nearby regions.
    Just stop trying to conflate fictional characters with real life ethnicities, it doesn't work. Especially in Pokemon's case where as its becoming increasingly globalised there are more and more inclusive designs that don't necessarily correspond to the Region's inspirations population.
    Hoenn is not Kyushu, it is BASED on Kyushu. This doesn't necessarily mean the characters are Asian, last I checked Asians weren't red, blue, purple, or blonde naturally and Kyushu didn't have a giant Whale and earthen Godzilla buried under the sea.
    2D is 2D, 3D is 3D.

  3. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    People will go on and say that any anime character that isn't pale is automatically black.
    People rage over being reminded that Nagatoro is actually light skinned and has a tan, and that Chad from Bleach is Mexican. They will go ahead and call you all types of insults, say that you take part of "erasure culture," and so on, even when the reference material literally, and explicitly contradicts their made up reconning.
    People from Kyushu tend to be darker skinned/tanned in comparison to people from other regions of Japan. For example, Tsuyoshi Ihara is from Kyushu (right), and looks looks "brown" in comparison to Kazunari Ninomiya (left), who is from Tokyo.
    You could even use them as a reference point for the team Magma & Aqua skin tones.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      If we want to be realistic, then anime people are mostly shaped on the image of whites, not only because of their facial features and structure, that don't look like chinks but like European, also because of the clear obsession of Japs of making an immense amount of anime protagonists and characters based on Europeans, European locations and making them blonde and blue eyed with pale pink skin

      Hence a classic anime character with brown skin is eventually just a tanned white

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        t. Confidently incorrect

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >anime people are mostly shaped on the image of whites
        Yes.

        Also, JPs and East Asians as a whole, tend to highly regard lighter skin tones as better, and more attractive.
        Japan has always had this whole idea about women from the northern snowy regions being more attractive because they are pale. They even have the term "Akita Bijin" for them.

        Literally they call girls who tan "black gals."

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Depends on how much they believe their own mythology which treats the West as the holy place where the sun goes down.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >"erasure culture"
      They do historical revisionism which is worse.

  4. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Look, don't try to argue with a woman.
    It's a not a fight worth winning.

  5. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    They're brown. The females used to have ginger hair and look white, look at that nose, and they all looked white and had ginger hair apart from Archie himself which has black hair and looks japanese.

    They definitely wanted to underline their brownization and that they're now Black folk by also turning their hair black even though it's anime and colored hair are considered normal. Archie's also the only one in the original that has chink eyes, most anime characters don't have them, the new ones are definitely either African mixtures or the brown Hindi japanese a là Satoshi Tajiri (but even browner)

  6. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Matt's chest reveals his true skin tone.

  7. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    I'm not a huge fan of Shelly and Matt having such drastic redesigns, but Archie is an objective improvement

  8. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Show
    Her
    This
    Douche

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Also Matt's chest.

  9. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    If the re-designs of Team Aqua are tan, then consider me the blackest gorilla homie to have ever existed.
    So apparently "tan" encompasses anything from Nagatoro to these literal black Team Aqua members on this website.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Damn, gorillas now be browsing Ganker?

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