To celebrate Lunar New Year, the VALORANT devs have been regularly posting on their official Twitter account, sharing a new lore story that involves Neon, Sage, and Jett, three of the Asian agents in the game. The three of them are traveling on what they are calling a “Lunar New Year adventure.”
Though this is a great way for the game to highlight its diversity and celebrate a major international holiday, one graphic designer called out the artwork featured in the Lunar New Year posts for whitewashing one agent’s skin tone.
“I didn’t want to talk about this but I feel like as a Filipino it’s irresponsible if I don’t talk about it,” said Twitter user Uberchain, who was vocally supportive of Neon’s release early last year. “This happens in fanart all the time but this is official art of Neon.”
Other agents in the game, Reyna and Raze, for example, are often featured in fan illustrations with a lighter skin tone. But for official artwork to have this discrepancy is disappointing for many fans who finally felt represented by the game’s first Southeast Asian character.
Let’s take a look at some of Neon’s past artwork versus her most recent portrayal in the 2023 Lunar New Year story. This picture (below) is from 2022.
In this image, where Neon, Sage, and Jett call Brimstone, Omen, and Killjoy back at the VALORANT headquarters, it’s clear Neon has a darker skin tone than both Sage and Jett. In contrast, here is the recent Lunar New Year image (below) that has sparked the most critique from fans.
Neon has a significantly lighter skin tone here. Uberchain said in her post that she had “considered lighting and other factors,” but still couldn’t get behind the recent images of the Filipino agent.
Neon’s addition to VALORANT in early 2022 was a huge milestone. She was also added alongside League of Legends champion Zeri, who is also Filipino. At the time, many Filipino fans, content creators, and designers expressed how happy they were that there was finally representation of Southeast Asia in a mainstream game.
While many games with large playable character rosters like VALORANT usually have an Asian character, they are more often Japanese, Korean, or Chinese than Southeast Asian. Neon represents a group of people often left out of mainstream games, and lightening her skin tone, though maybe unintentional, takes away from the integrity of her character.
Some responses to uberchain’s thread included other players asking why they were generalizing Filipino people as having darker skin.
But, the problem is not that Neon doesn’t “look Filipino,” it’s more that Riot is not being consistent with the particular Filipino character they created. Art of Neon before this point has consistently shown her with a darker skin tone, something many players appreciated. Thus, it feels disappointing to see that going away.
“Idk what to say,” uberchain said in her tweet. “I’m sorry but I’m sad.”
