Wiseman4545

It really irks me to see people try and act like the way to solve the issue of stereotypes is to enter some magical world where anything remotely related to stereotypes never actually happens. Lee is pretty much the least stereotypical "black criminal" a person could possibly conceive. Suggesting that Lee's portrayal as a criminal is unacceptable is suggesting that portraying a black person as a criminal ever is unacceptable, which is ridiculous. What if everyone actually did that? Is it more okay to make every criminal a white person simply because it's not stereotypical? What if Telltale sat down and thought to themselves "We want to make a make character with a criminal past and we'd also like to make him black, but we can't, because that's too much of a stereotype, so we have to make him a different race instead"? How does that not seem totally ridiculous?

The fact that he's a criminal is actually much more important to this game than the fact that he's black btw, so the fact that people are suggesting that his story should have been changed to make it less of a stereotype for a black person is pretty dumb. It would make much more sense to simply not make him black if that was an issue.

It seems to me some people are inherently misunderstanding the issue with stereotypes. Stereotypes are not an issue because a character happens to have an aspect of them that happens to be associated with a stereotype. Stereotypes are an issue because that aspect is often what directly (and solely) defines them as a character. It's not simply "He's a criminal who is also black" it's more "He's a criminal because he's black", or "He's smart because he's asian", or "He's a terrorist because he's a muslim".

Lee is a deep, well-developed character who happens to be black and committed a crime of passion at one point in his life. That is not a stereotype.