COMPLETE TANGENT: this discussion reminds me of some Homestuck drama. The artist made an off-hand statement that the characters, portrayed as paper-white sprites with black outlines, don't really have any "official" race per se, and that he had drawn them that way to look generic and literally colorless. The fandom subsequently lost its shit.
Now on the one hand, it's certainly facile in the extreme to say "oh, but I never SAID they were white." But what he really meant, and later clarified it as, was, "yeah, most people probably take them as white, and sometimes I think of them that way myself, but I have tried to make it a point to avoid any overt signifiers, so if you want to project a different background onto their literally blank canvas, feel free. There's no official right answer." And to some people that was an opportunity to create a flood of non-typical fanarts but to some of them it was just so completely unacceptable.
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Now on the one hand, it's certainly facile in the extreme to say "oh, but I never SAID they were white." But what he really meant, and later clarified it as, was, "yeah, most people probably take them as white, and sometimes I think of them that way myself, but I have tried to make it a point to avoid any overt signifiers, so if you want to project a different background onto their literally blank canvas, feel free. There's no official right answer." And to some people that was an opportunity to create a flood of non-typical fanarts but to some of them it was just so completely unacceptable.