Representation/Diversity in the game

What I'm working on today is good meaty stuff for a devlog discussion, and the way I can tell is that I'm afraid to share it and look cringey like I'm overthinking everything or getting it all wrong. Well here goes.

So I'm a white queer person from Utah, not a very racially diverse place. This story (despite being full of sci-fi and absurdist elements) is written a lot from my personal experience, especially around the age for graduating high school that Finn Flynn, the protagonist, is when the story begins. My social circles were really white (and still are) but I'm committed to faithfully representing a broader range of identities, backgrounds, etc. than the ones I was exposed to growing up. I think that's part of growing as a writer, being a good person, practicing empathy, etc.

Luckily the group of people I met in Screenwriting classes were more diverse and queer than a lot of my classes, and enough of them were impressed with my early drafts for FLIES FLIES FLIES that we've now become good friends and I can ask them to help me with better representation in the writing, and also, voice acting!

My friend who is voice-acting for Finn, is Chinese on their mom's side. I had written the character as white with 2 white parents, but having found a talented trans person to portray this character, I knew it was worth doing re-writes to fit the character to the person. So I did that, but for the longest time I've been procrastinating something that's been nagging at the back of my mind for months... which is that I don't think I've ever seen an Asian person with reddish-brown hair like Finn's character sprite:



Before I say much more, I should give credit to the creator of the character sprites I'm using. They're all from sprite packs I purchased on itch.io by PixelJustice. I'm really happy with these packs and there have been enough portraits for all the characters I have planned. It's just that I had chosen this one for Finn before I re-wrote the character. Now this sprite is in both trailers I've released and also appears on the Missing Persons poster in episode 1, which pops up again in episode 2 crumpled up, which I achieved by printing in black and white, then physically crumpling it. So to change the character sprite I'd have to re-do the printing, crumpling, and scanning process. And my printer is out of ink and I can't afford new ink.



So I started googling, first of all to see if I was being stupid and uneducated about hair color genetics. This Quora thread showed me that yes, Asian people can have brown hair and blue eyes:



That said, if I can't remember seeing it in the States, maybe it is rare for Asian Americans? Bottom line, I could probably leave it the same. I'm a little worried that people would assume the character is white, though, based on just the pixel art, and there not being direct references to Finn's mom or Finn's ethnicity in the first episode.

This brown also doesn't match my friend's natural hair color, or the hair-color of my friend who will be playing Finn's mom (Rosalyn). This is the spritesheet I've chosen for her:



I figure making the portrait look more like the actor is as good a reason as any? And I can change the palette of Finn's hair without having to redo the crumpled poster, which is black and white, after all. So I used the eyedropper tool to extract the palette from Rosalyn's sprite, and started applying it on top of Finn's hair to see if it would look ok:

(a partly done frame)



(a finished frame)



Then I realized Finn's lips are red and Rosalyn's aren't. The darker hair even calls more attention to Finn's lips, and it looks like Finn is wearing "feminine" lipstick which Finn, a trans man, would probably not be wearing around the house. (Not saying lipstick is necessarily gendered--but I don't think Finn would like it.)

Here's Finn with the skin-tone lips taken from Rosalyn's sprite:



What do we think? Does it still work? Is this better representation? Did I need to worry in the first place? I'm gonna have to keep thinking about it and seeking feedback before I make a decision.