I'm confused. If you have no "answer" as to when an issue is small or big, then how did you decide this particular one is small?
Indeed, why? To me, there's no higher expression of love than standing united against discrimination directed towards any of us, no matter how it manifests.
I would portray an evil character as
doing evil deeds. You know, like evil people in real life don't always have am "EVIL" neon sign pointing at them? Many of the most memorable evil characters in fiction are those who don't have any "oh noes the evilness" cliches painted all over them, and thus both respect the viewer to not be a five year old, and take the time to actually tell us why and how they specifically are evil, rather than generically evil because of their looks (which, really, doesn't get much more shallow than that).
In real life there is no way to tell evil people from good people. Thus, in fiction, any visual shorthand you use to signify evilness is going to be insulting to people with that trait.
It's really not rocket science. At some point this was Asian people for west designers, and for some reason now it's brown people for Japanese designers. Or are you guys going to argue that the "
yellow peril" stage was not really that racist? Seriously, you guys show a worrying lack of historical memory.
Again, you can't (and shouldn't) use "evil" visual signifiers that are present in normal humans without them being insulting (besides plain lazy), but if you just can't be fucking arsed to show and not tell, there's a ton of widely accepted signifiers that aren't blackface-level offensively racist, including:
- Evil smile.
- Evil laugh.
- Evil voice.
- Contemptuous stare.
Notice how many of these cues seem straight out of a Disney cartoon? Well, there's a good reason why. Alternatively, and since we're getting into the realm of cartoonishly evil, use any of the myriad fantasy signifiers:
- Unnatural eyes (color and/or glowing).
- Monstruous limbs.
- Evil Wings (TM).
- Etc etc.
So please, next time you regurgitate again "dark has always been evil" etc. please give it a couple seconds thought.
Persona is such a good example of my point above, because besides the "shadow version" of characters (that
need to be visually signified so that there's no confusion with the originals), these are the evil guys in Persona 3 and 4:]