re: rainbow rocket archie.

snapplefacts:

snapplefacts:

i’ve been seeing a lot of people complaining about archie’s appearance in usum on on my dashboard, which is totally fair! i’m disappointed in the sense that i prefer his oras design myself. there’s literally no argument to be had about how it’s the better, more fleshed out of the two, because it absolutely is in every way conceivable.

but i also want to point out that gamefreak is clearly using archie as well as maxie’s rse designs for a Reason. there’s no way they would do the extra work to remodel their older designs in 3D just for the heck of it when they already had their newer 3D models ready and raring to go from oras. and this explicit extra work is to tip us off to the fact that these characters we’re seeing are from the universe that doesn’t have mega evolution! which is a differentiation that would be pretty important to make, because the differentiation between the universe that has mega evolution and the one that doesn’t was Extremely important to oras! namely during the delta episode post-game. it may turn out to be just as important in usum’s post-game.

my main point being, as much as it’s something we should constantly be bearing in mind and questioning of media, there is absolutely NO white washing transpiring here. they share the same name and similar motivations, but as confirmed by the contents of xy and the delta episode in oras, rse archie and oras archie are two totally different characters in the context of the pokemon main series game multiverse.

complain all you want about how much you miss oras archie otherwise! i’ll be complaining right along with you, but please don’t insinuate that gamefreak is doing anything racist or otherwise nasty by using his predecessor instead of him. they’re assuredly not.

here’s something else that i totally neglected to mention! some people were kind enough to allude to it in their tags.

the region of hoenn is based on a place in japan, like 4 out of our 7 main line game regions thus far. more specifically, kyushu. this means that archie, or as he’s named in the original japanese games, aogiri, ISN’T WHITE regardless of his skin tone! he’s a japanese character in a setting inspired by a real life location in japan. dark skinned representation is always going to be important, but we also need to remember that a character’s paleness isn’t necessarily an indicator that they’re caucasian!