Is Sue black?

I like to think she's just really tan. A few years ago when my sister went on a long vacation to the beach, she got tanned and her skin color was slightly lighter than Sue's.
And no my sister isn't black

 

I apologize in advance if this joke offends you.
Nobody:
Sue: *ahem*

 

sue is that type of brown the animes use for characters that are tomboyish or otherwise sporty
e.g. aoi asahina from danganronpa

Spoiler: warning: anime

 

sue is that type of brown the animes use for characters that are tomboyish or otherwise sporty
e.g. aoi asahina from danganronpa

Spoiler: warning: anime

View attachment 5742

I've... never played Danganronpa. In fact, I know close to bupkis about it. From what I can tell, it's basically Ace Attorney on steroids.

 

Does this make sense? I think she has a darker skin tone but not as dark as in the first image posted.

 

this is kind of a stupid topic, but because i am equally as stupid i will engage with it nonetheless.

brown doesn't necessarily mean black. there are so many people across this planet that are brown without being black.

also, sue is designed by a japanese man who is influenced by japanese character designs. japanese character designs (like most character designs that abstract reality) usually just exaggerate real features. anime tends to represent tanned characters as straight up brown. its weird, but par for the course within anime.

she's brown (maybe just tanned) with green hair. the other humans also have green hair. and if i recall, itoh was also brown wasn't he? and the sakamotos were kinda tan as well. maybe theyre just darker-skinned asians or just tanned. maybe the humans of cave story have different races than we do.

i don't think too hard when it comes to cave story design choices like this. pixel probably just said, "brown and green go well together. they're very natural colors. i will design sue's human form with this in mind" idk.

 

itoh was also brown wasn't he?

He has blue hair, just look at BLink's profile picture, since he always uses him.

 

this is kind of a stupid topic, but because i am equally as stupid i will engage with it nonetheless.

brown doesn't necessarily mean black. there are so many people across this planet that are brown without being black.

also, sue is designed by a japanese man who is influenced by japanese character designs. japanese character designs (like most character designs that abstract reality) usually just exaggerate real features. anime tends to represent tanned characters as straight up brown. its weird, but par for the course within anime.

she's brown (maybe just tanned) with green hair. the other humans also have green hair. and if i recall, itoh was also brown wasn't he? and the sakamotos were kinda tan as well. maybe theyre just darker-skinned asians or just tanned. maybe the humans of cave story have different races than we do.

i don't think too hard when it comes to cave story design choices like this. pixel probably just said, "brown and green go well together. they're very natural colors. i will design sue's human form with this in mind" idk.

I can very much agree with this since that actually makes sense, especially since nobody talks about the hair color and skin tone for a lot of the other characters in the story.

 

The sprites are weirdly-inconsistent when it comes to skin-colour. For example: in their in-game sprites, the Doctor and Jenka are the same colour as Sue, yet their facepics depict them as being closer to Momorin and Kazuma.

If I had to read between the lines... maybe it's not just that Sue is tanned - but that the others are pale. Think about it: they're a bunch of scientists who probably coop themselves up in labs all day, Sue isn't - she's just a kid that was brought along for some reason. Considering how energetic she is (navigating the Egg Corridor alone, claiming to know how to fight, and leading Quote around as they escape the falling island), she might be the outdoors-y type, lining-up with what Xemous said about sporty characters being depicted as darker in Japanese media.

For a less in-universe explanation - the presence of unused pale and dark-skinned human Sue sprites in the transformed Sue/Misery spritesheet might mean that Pixel was undecided on what human Sue was meant to look like in the first place, so he experimented with it, and then settled on a darker colour-scheme so that the transformed Sue sprites had a bit more contrast to them between her fur and her skin. With the lighter colours, they blend together.