Your skin colour versus your character's skin colour

[Lekka Meyren]

Similar to many others here; Lekka is dark skinned and I'm "Norwegian White". (The distinction is I have such a low D-vitamine intake I need pills in winter)

 

Mostly aesthetic choice, She looks amazing in yellow.

[Branson Thorne]

If a male character, I always play my skin color, white but very tan.

 

If playing a female it's all about that chocolate!

[Hyakki]

I'm a mutt of Pacific Islander heritage and therefore, not as pale as Seiko.

 

i, like the fat cat, am striped

WRONG! Fat cats are calico-spotted, there has never been a striped fat cat. You're a bad roleplayist for disregarding the lore.

[Harmonixer]

I myself can vary a bit. I tan incredibly well, I can get really dark, but I stay a relative lightish brown tone I suppose. I'm Thai/Puerto-Rican irl.

 

My characters tend to have very dark shades. Currently I have a duskie. Before that, I had a very dark highlander. In other games that have odd shades, I usually do darker shades of purple.

 

I have a habit of making my characters generally darker if I can help it. I think it started with the fact that I saw it less often. Unless you count the every popular color scheme of black and red, but that's usually armors. I myself favor golds and yellows. Originally it was just to be 'different' and had little to do with my own appearance, even if I do stand out somewhat compared to some of my friends. As time went on, it's just what works for me.

 

I do have a few pale characters on other games, but it's lore reasons. I'd argue I'm not picky when it comes to myself, but I know that I'll always pick darker skin out of habit.

 

Which is funnier yet to me, because I find pale skin really attractive for some reason. A contrast thing maybe?

[Cliodhna Eoghan]

when i first made her, i had planned on clio being in ul'dah so i gave her a bit of a tan....honestly i think the tan shows up more in the art than the actual character but that's okay. living in florida as a transplant form further north (michigan) i usually end up with a tan most of the year as well just from being out and about (with sunscreen on a daily basis.) sooo overall it's pretty close.

 

youkio, my rarely used alt is a bit darker but that was more a ascetic choice cause it looked good with the hair color o3o

[Desu Nee]

Brazilian here, my skin tone is slighty tanned, since I live close, and I do love the Sea. Quki is an albino so she's obviously lighter tone than me, but I suppose it could be considered the same.

[Darien Cadell]

Somehow I'm starting to realize I can tell when it's a Kale thread just by the title, haha!

 

I'm pale fishbelly white and a ginger. My character is black. Not dark-skinned. Actually black. Well, soft grey because they don't let the darkest possible skin tone be actually devoid of light. Or perhaps, like Verad, I should simply admit to also being blue.

 

My previous character was also a ginger, but tanned. I like playing tanned gingers as a pattern. They're a fun kind of anomaly.

[Kismet]

I'm of mixed descent (and have very light tan skin) and I tend to play multiple chars, all of which have different skin tones. For XIV in particular, my two "mains" are very fair, however. I plan to have my Au Ra on the darker side.

[Clover]

My main character has pale skin like myself, while my alt K'mih has tanned skin. My characters' skins vary either depending on their context (in K'mih's case, since she lives under the desert sun, I guessed it's only natural for her to be tanned), or simply depending on what I find pretty (I'd like one of my Au Ras to have a bit dark skin too, for no other reason than me liking it *laughs*).

 

In any case, I do tend to make pale main characters. I don't really know if I that's because I'm pale too, or because most anime main characters are that way. I guess it's a mix of both, as I tend to think in anime terms when I make characters.

 

But yes, it's normal that most people will favour main characters they can feel a bit identified with, at least physically. Characters are, after all, our representation in that world outside RP.

[Oscare]

You wouldn't believe how many times I get asked on a day to day basis if I'm black like my character.

 

 

I'm a fair skin (just slightly above tan, but not really 'olive') male irl.

 

Mod note by FreelanceWizard: Racial slur reference removed.

[Flashhelix]

Fat cats are calico-spotted, there has never been a striped fat cat. You're a bad roleplayist for disregarding the lore.

 

stop being toxic

[industrythirteen]

When I started in MMOs, I gravitated towards pale tones. I'm painfully white, but not entirely sure of my ethnic heritage in its entirety. Polish and English for sure, but, yeah, I'm an American. And probably within the last year I've been digging dark tones when I'm not playing some dragon-demon-alien-bahmi-roe-something. If it's purple, blue or indigo, I'm sold. 

 

Apparently, people can be blue! I was made aware of the kentucky blue people during a conversation last night in fact. [More Reading]

[Virella]

I'm just as pale as gingers, so ehm. Virella is actually a tad more tanned, and she's already pretty pale skinned!

 

And I just roll with whatever suites the character of the race I'm roleplaying

[ArmachiA]

Armi is my skin color, which is ridiculously white because I refuse to tan.

 

But I actually tend to like darker skin tones. Loki is pretty dark (I was going for Middle Eastern Princess), Daej is pretty dark, My Elezen is black (literally) skinned, M'ashaia is deep tanned. I actually REALLY LIKE the dark skin/white hair combo and I don't even know why.

[Edvyn]

pale w/ black hair irl, pale w/ black hair in videogames

i just like vampiric-lookin people ok

[Nebbs]

Skin colour does not tend to matter to me in characters, it is what goes well with the concept and the character. If you were to go outside of this game I have many blue, red and dark skinned characters.

 

However, for Me vs Nebula the skin is the only similarity.

• Hair     Brown/Ginger vs Blue/Pink
  
• Eyes    Green vs Violet
  
• Gender Male vs Female
  
• Race    Human vs Miqo'te
  
• Height  Med vs Short
  
• Body Shape  Med vs Thin
  
• Skin  Fare vs Fare
  

[OttoVann]

Otto will bang the shit out of a black skinned Elezen or a brown skinned one or pale. Doesn't matter much, though sometimes skintones and hair/eye colors matched up the wrong way can look uggo.

[FreelanceWizard]

I had to remove some text that several people reported (and I agree with) skates if not goes over the line of constituting a racial slur. Posts referencing it with no other content were removed. I apologize if your post was eliminated and you felt as if there was additional useful content within it.

 

#magicAdminHat

[YesGood]

I'm a light tan and have been for a long while (lack of sun), and also half-Thai. My characters intentionally range but I have a strong preference for the dark-skinned, light haired types. It's purely aesthetic, at least in my case. I typically build them based first on something I don't feel I see much of (class/race/clan), second avoiding traits I've made on previous characters or that I've seen a lot of, then third straight on my favorite face and colorations of that race, clan, and class(es) combo. 

 

For my first roe, I went dark-red with white hair. For my highlander I went dark brown with blonde hair. For my lalafell it was dark skin dark hair. For my miqo'te I went grey-ish blue skin and blue hair. For my Midlander I went with pale white skin and tealish hair. And finally for my newest roegadyn it's white skin white hair. 

 

I do prefer dark skin because make up, tattoos and lip colors tend to show up better on them. The pale skin tends to make them look faded out and there's less impact with many of the lighter colors while the darker colors all look grey or black and smudged.

 

So for me there's no correlation between my ethnicity and my preferred in-game skin color (except that I'm so used to seeing it that I sort of avoid it?). I think since there isn't a lot of revealed prejudice based on people of varying skin tones (as opposed to varying clans who can have the exact same skin tones in some cases), I'm not sure I could see there being a more emotional empathy unless there's just a preference to have your character look like you, which is great! I think it's nice to have an avatar of yourself in a game especially if you have an easy time not taking things that happen to your character too personally, out of character. For some of us, or at least me, when you have a lot of yourself in your character it becomes harder to separate your emotions so focusing on what I do while I'm creating them helps to create that distance in the first place...

 

If any of that makes sense.

 

TL;DR: While not everyone is bleeding in through their character based on some stronger connections felt by choosing to make the character's skin tone closer to their own, I suppose it exists as a bond for some people. More likely I think what we find visually appealing to put into our characters often goes along with what we find visually appealing IRL. That, in turn, can often be based on the palette range of the people we're most often spending our time with and admiring on a regular basis, or they can be the exact opposite. 

 

For instance, I was raised around my family and their friends who were mostly Thai with light-medium tan skin (Central people) and I'm obsessed now with any pigmentation from pale skin and freckles to the darkest of colors, except for my own. I find all of them beautiful-- but I'm so used to seeing the slight variations of my skin that I'm sort of tired of the brown hair light-tan skin and don't really want to see it in my characters. So... even my Doman is pale and blue-haired.

[Ette]

As a brown girl IRL I GOT WORDS.

 

For introduction sake this is me at the absolute palest I will ever be, link here!

 

And this is J, link here!

 

If your immediate assumption is that I choose Miqo’te so that I could play a roundface browngirl you are 100% correct.

 

Often times I feel like when you’re a brown girl you get typecast into either the sexless fighter chick (who is also from a tribe if you are in a fantasy world) or a sexy bellydancer. As someone who follows a pretty strict “write/draw what you wanna see” policy I can’t really complain about that and then play a myriad of pale characters. So generally I play characters closer to my skintone or darker in different roles. Usually nerds. Or mages. Or both.

 

Listen ok, I have a type.

 

There’s definitely a lot of nuances I’ve picked up from my skin color and how I identify with it to how people write about it. For instance I’ve noticed that for a lot of people “dark skinned” is closer to how I immediately identify “pale skin”. Or people will write about how J is “exotic” when I tried to make her features (save for her eyes) very boring and nondescript even if I changed her skin color.

[Mae]

Kara -- dark

Gardener -- light

Mallow -- dark

Tinne -- light

Whisper -- black

Eltanin -- light

Luc'a -- grey/blue

Swyn -- grey/blue

 

... I think I just choose what looks good for the character I'm making. But I guess if I had to come up with some connection between Kara's skincolour and my own, Kara has approximately the same tone I would have with a light tan before I got sick.

 

These days, I'm... beyond pale. They don't make foundation/concealer pale enough for me, so I have to water down white-base.

[Kyrio Lamansque]

I have a fairly decent complexion, being Germanic/Slav in blood, and enjoying being outside. But that kind of dusky skin that Kyr has.. I'm not entirely sure how one naturally gets it in the first place, in IRL terms.

[Michikyou]

:3 I have charatcers of multiple skin tones, some pale Caucasian colors while the others are relatively dark skinned or a Mediterranean tan. In reality i'm a olive skinned Caucasian woman.

 

._.

 

So..

 

No? and Yes?

[Wymsical]

I'm "go get some sun, geez" white, and my characters usually tend to be in extremes; very dark or literal white, usually with grey/purple/blue undertones. I also generally make characters with more caucasoid features; partially because I'm way better at making them with sliders and also just general personal preference. I used to have a pretty even split in what shade I used for what gender (lighter for women, darker for men) but in the last three or four years I've switched that up more. Sometimes I feel bad that I have very particular 'face structures' that I gravitate towards but hey, everyone's got what they like. 

 

I always like seeing the variety around me in the world, though!

[Gone.]

Never really thought about this before, but I'd say both Vetiver and Foxglove are close in paleness to myself IRL, though Vetiver is a bit more peachy and Foxy more creamy. Not sure if it's subconscious or just a coincidence. Could be both? Who knows.