Was Tifa ever made to be Asian looking?

What I find interesting is this: when the creators have deliberately made a fantasy world where people have different coloured skins but race is not an issue, why are so many people determined to overlay our world's race and races issues onto that fantasy world? It's as if somebody made a delicious healthy sugarfree cake, and then people went and poured sugar all over it. Barret isn't African-American, he's Corelian; Tifa isn't Asian, she's a Nibelheimer, and Yuffie isn't Japanese, Chinese, or Korean - she's Wutaian.

Haha, I guess we do it to make the world palpable to us/easier to relate to.

I don't think the concept is race is necessarily bad in and of itself though? It's just the racism bit that's nasty. Like, I'm a person of colour (I'll work up the nerve to post a selfie one of these days guys, I promise, lol) and I don't mind when people make note of it. My skin and my features are both a reflection of my heritage, history, and culture--all of which are beautiful things! It's when someone wants to dehumanise me on that basis that it becomes a problem, but even then, it's not even my problem. If someone can't see past another person's physical features, that's their loss.

Having said that, I like that race isn't a 'thing' in Final Fantasy, though I don't mind when it's explored in fanfics. Like a headcanon of mine that started developing years ago is that Tifa has a Wutainese/Wutain mum after pausing Advent Children to get a snack and my brother pointing to the screen and asking if Yuffie and Tifa were supposed to be sisters, lol.

What am I saying? Ee gads! Fancy rambles again!

Exploring the concept of race is fine, as long as you understand that you don't have to. I'm a bit leery of it because it can lead to ignoring what actually happens in the gameworld in favour of your pet cause, ie.

Fanon Yuffie: This stuffy traditional society is too much for me, I have to rebel against it's strict gender roles that won't let me do anything!

Fanon Godo: Young lady, get back here and get married to a nice young man! And stop doing unladylike stuff like tree climbing!

Canon Yuffie: I love my town so much that I'm stockpiling weapons so we can strike back at our oppressors!

Canon Godo: Awesome! How can I help? Also, one of your rites of passage is to beat me in a fight, so be sure to sharpen those skills, okay?

Also, I raise an eyebrow whenever 'African-American' is applied to Barret when he lives in a world where neither continent exists.

Edit: I headcanon'd flea as a derogatory description of ninja's hit and run fighting style. Yuffie actually is avery clever fighter in that scene, taking advantage of Rosso's enhanced senses to blind her and escape, banking on the first Shuriken dodge.

What if she is from Texas, she has that rodeo hat afterall. And Tifa's bar has saloon doors.

My own head canon is that Nibelhiem is kind of analogous to almost any place a Japanese person might put their finger down on the map of Midwestern U.S. Their accents, their clothes, and the culture they come from makes me think of mountainous places like Colorado.

The Twilight Mexican said:

LicoriceAllsorts said:

I didn't know the term "flea" was used in DOC. I'm pretty sure it's also used in Case of Yuffie to refer specifically to her Wutaianess. By some angry lady in a market if I'm not mistaken.

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I don't remember anything like that.

As for what Rosso called Yuffie, I believe it was ウータイの忍 ("Wutai no shinobu") in Japanese -- but she may not have been calling Yuffie herself something here so much as exclaiming over "Wutai sneakiness" or something like that. Probably hito could shed more light.

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it was ウータイの忍（しのび）が (i don't know why that line stuck out to me so much, maybe it was just my like of atsuko tanaka). しのび can be either a ninja ('shinobi no mono') or ninjutsu ('shinobi no jutsu')

ChipNoir said:

My own head canon is that Nibelhiem is kind of analogous to almost any place a Japanese person might put their finger down on the map of Midwestern U.S. Their accents, their clothes, and the culture they come from makes me think of mountainous places like Colorado.

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Head canon is head canon, but given the name and the architecture I'd say that town is based on mountain side villages from North/Western Europe - specifically places like you find in Germany, or the Scandinavian countries =P

Strangelove said:

it was ウータイの忍（しのび）が (i don't know why that line stuck out to me so much, maybe it was just my like of atsuko tanaka). しのび can be either a ninja ('shinobi no mono') or ninjutsu ('shinobi no jutsu')

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I was of the understanding that 忍 is "shinobi" when rendered as 忍び, but is just "shinobu" without the び.

But going back and listening to a Japanese video, yeah, she clearly says "shinobi."

FancySycamoreTree said:

Dungeonmaster said:

Animexcel said:

Tifa was always meant to look Japanese Animerican.

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But considering how much hentai they make... i am thinking they are believer in good gene pool, maybe the same reason porn became so popular in United States. Which i cant argue against.

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Haha, whaaaaaaaaaat? Pardonnez-moi, but I'm not following this argument. What's the connection between "good" gene pools and the popularity of pornography in the U.S. ? And, in turn, how exactly does that relate to Tifa's appearance?

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I ment like busty robust appereances, you know... like strongly, fruitfully built people. So the portrayal may be on those ideals.

I guess there's a degree of eye-candy in Tifa's design, but her characterisation subverts that, and afaik it was supposed to. She presents as the archetypal tarty busty barmaid, but in fact she's a serious, committed warrior, a tenacious fighter, a kind of mother-hen to the group, and (apparently) a one-man girl.

never paid attention to race for tifa or anyone tbh. for example depending on preferences zach could look western or east asian. i have always views him as a very handsome "anime" character type looking guy. same for genesis. he's based off an east asian face but he could look western depending on how you view it.

i don't like specifying east asians as "korean faced" or "japanese faced" or anything like that since they're all nationalities anyway, and segregating isn't my thing regarding stuff like that. i guess you could label cloud as a white guy since he has all the classic contributions of one, but again i don't see him as that at all. he's just cloud.

it could also be because i've been exposed to east asians so frequently nowadays, so i'm very used to them.

Yeah I keep seeing people who look at Cloud's eyes in Advent Children and suddenly need him to have Wutaian ancestors and I'm like uhm guys? It's cool but really not necessary? And part of the awkwardness is because of things like the canon/fanon Wutai divide mentioned above. It's just an unnecessary transport of real-world baggage into a fantasy context. If it's doing something for you, great, but it does not actually need explained.

Wutai does come the closest of anywhere to having a cohesive ethnic identity, but all we really know they have is a national one. Fuhito I think is confirmed as Wutaian, but neither Tseng nor Hojo is so far as I'm aware? (To my amusement only the temple guardians have Russian names.)

Chewbaka said:

i don't like specifying east asians as "korean faced" or "japanese faced" or anything like that since they're all nationalities anyway, and segregating isn't my thing regarding stuff like that.

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Well I mean it's about the same as wandering around Europe trying to tell the French from the Romanians from the English from the Swedes from the Spaniards, yeah? (Only, ah, with a slightly narrower color palette.) There are broad categories of facial structure etc people statistically fall into in various regions, and if you match the statistical norm then you 'look like' where you're from. Lots of people don't match, and lots of people's nationalities don't 'match' their ethnicities, and lots of people don't match anywhere particularly to look at, but the categories do exist.

And of course some of it isn't actually your features at all, but the way growing up in a given culture (or subculture) teaches you to hold your face. Sulu on Star Trek smiles like a dude from California, because Takei is. In the episode Black Cat he comes onscreen with no expression whatsoever because he's being mind-controlled and it was a startling moment for me because he had never looked that Japanese before. Not because Japanese people don't make expressions but because they make subtly different ones.

Reminds me of how I had this Chinese-American friend in college who lied as a hobby. One time she tells me she's Korean; I, believing her completely because me but genuinely surprised because she had a Chinese family name and extraordinarily Han-looking features, "Oh, wow, amazing, you don't look Korean!" (I had gone to high school with a relative metric fuckton of girls from South Korea for reasons.)

She freezes completely for about half a second; conversation moves on. A few hours later I'm like 'oh. she was lying again wasn't she.'

I once saw this woman get five people to try to explain toast to her for twenty minutes. She wasn't even keeping a straight face by minute ten.

For Barret, and the randomized thin distribution of dark-skinned folks in general, I have a Stupid Idea of which I am quite fond. These people are not detectably an ethnic group, in-setting; they have no homeland. There are a few more of them per capita in Corel than elsewhere but not a lot more.

They could be thinly settled refugees from the destruction of some ancient (though not Ancient) civilization, but that doesn't actually square very well with the data, although it is adequately tragic for the setting.

For me, the most coherent assumption is that the dark skin genes proliferate through the population on about the same basis as blonde hair ones. There's that one family in North Corel that's an old pale man, a dark young woman, and a pale child. Recessive dark skin explains everything! (I mean so does adoption but hey, this also explains why nobody ever assumes Marlene's adopted just by looking at her!)

In my Excessively World-Built AU Wherein Sephiroth Was Adopted By Cloud's Parents Before Cloud Was Born, I have a ridiculous lengthy excursus discussing the history of the Corel area and how it was ruled for a long time by a dark-skinned dynasty so dark skin became a sign of nobility and families did their best to marry into it, and even hundreds of years later, long after that nation collapsed, there's a certain lingering assumption that dark-skinned men are the inheritors of kings.

This allows me to interpret Barret's inexplicable lion's share of blame for supporting the reactor when so did everyone but Dyne, and his determination to be Leader and the way he eventually relinquishes it with a certain amount of relief at being able to acknowledge he's not actually any good at it, in terms of growing up with a cultural expectation that as a black man he is an automatic target of deference and respect. Yay fantasy!

That would be cool.

wow i said a lot of words in the middle of the night srry