Controversy Brews After Fan Artist "Fixes" Another Artist's Work By Making Knuckles Black
The ever-sensitive topic of racism in fan art reared its ugly head again last night when an artist decided she had to "fix" another artist's gijinka drawings of Sonic the Hedgehog, Tails and Knuckles as white children by making Knuckles black.
The original post was by @tsuki_s_0623, and shows the main Sonic trio as anime children.
Things went off the rails when Twitter user @mysticmaryy reposted the art but made Knuckles black, writing "Fixed ur shit for u." She was then blocked by the original artist, and proudly declared, "a story in two parts."
@tsuki_s_0623 expressed that they were upset the artist repainted their work without permission, not about the skin color alterations to their original piece.
The situation caused "Knuckles" to trend on Twitter this morning, as people mostly rolled their eyes at @MysticMarry's attempt to "fix" the original piece.
@MysticMarry later apologized for the incident.
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Mace121
Oh boy… Shitheads "fixing" art again, yes? When will they learn by changing the pigment of a character's skin doesn't help Jack & shit? And Jack left town.
Mace121
BTW human Tails looks adorable.
Red123
Tails is always cute!
Zigzagoon
This may be off topic, and I don't really like race swaps in general, but why change them to a darker skin color/non-white race if you're white? At least for non-white artists, there's some type of logic behind it. "All these characters in the cast are white/light skinned and none of them look like me, so I'm gonna make one darker to help my self esteem." But if you're white, making a character darker does nothing but try to get you woke points. Even when I was a SJW, I never did this because I thought "I'm white and it's not really my place to make existing characters that aren't mine darker because it does nothing for me."
BaronVonJello
You said it yourself---woke points. It's all virtue signaling.
"Look upon me, lowly brown people, for I am your white savior."
PrinnyFreak
One of the more interesting developments is that a lot of people have actually pointed out that since Knuckles' ancestors are based on Mesoamericans that would make him more mixed as opposed to black.
MisirterE
Look. If you really want to go down this stupid-ass road, then at least find a cause-to-effect for it. Knuckles is an Echidna. That's an Australian animal. So your options are to either go with a modern Australian (which, given the more modern rap songs and how gullible he is, would be more appropriate), which would make him white, or go with an Aborigine. Slight issue with the above, though.
Aboriginal Australians are generally even darker than the edit, plus you'd have to do a bit more than just change the skin colour to actually be representing them properly.
Never go full woke. You end up not even representing the people you're allegedly trying to support.
Timstuff
Twitter stans are the worst thing to happen to the internet. At least Tumblrinas were either ignored or the subject of mockery, but at least in this instance a stan got put in their place. Usually they project about "bullying and harassment" when they get called out for their bullshit.
winton overwat
Also, Tumblr drama was a lot less public than Twitter drama
RemChi
That fake apology. Fucking shifting "Oh I thought he was CANONICALLY BLACK."
Like you're some kid "Oh I only did it because my friends did it too." no you did it because you wanted to feel special.
HardcoreHunter
I think it's odd to get upset over editing or recoloring an image. Not talking about the rude ass behavior of the person who did it, that one goes without saying. More just in general the "they didn't ask my permission". Like oh did you get capcom's permission to draw edits of their characters in the first place? A large majority of memes are edits of existing things. I could understand more if you removed the artists name from the piece all together and tried to pass it off as your own, I've run into that before where someone edited and was selling artwork from a free fan comic I worked on.
Bart Carr
It's one of those Japanese culture things. Rather than being addressed personally and privately, the person may have felt it was a public (and unfairly) humilliation to have this "shit" art being "fixed" for everyone to see.
Japanese people give a lot of value their social position and will often use these generic reasons and socailly acceptable excuses to avoid confrontations, especially with foreigners.
HardcoreHunter
I don't think that's is really a cultural thing. I think anyone would be offended if someone said "here I fixed your shitty art", as that is being rude and ignorant.
Baithooks
read through some threads and it turns out that the person who orchestrated this all in the first place actually has a history of being very anti-POC somehow and has even admitted it in their latest post.
Lots of people are pissed as fuck now knowing this.
Lord DIO
I would have doubled down by saying something like, "Wow, so just because Knuckles is an Echidna, a race shown to be tribalistic in nature, means he must be black? That's fuckin racist man."
Get PILLS, against my orders
There has been some serious pushback from Japan Twitter lately over this shit.
dug dig
I can't believe this is happening. Have humans hit their lowest?
Square Memester
Someone made a video about it too. I'm pretty sure Japan's tired of cancel culture rebooting favorite characters into dark-skinned, hair-dyed, no-breasted landwhales with pronouns. And I was wondering why the mangas are skyrocketing more than Marvel / DC comics.