Dark-skin Distinctive design Popular franchise

So for context, Nintendo revealed Nessa - Pokemon Sword and Shield's water-type gym leader at their E3 Direct the other day.And the official art as a reference...This naturally got a lot of people hype becauseAnd so the fan art and OC floodgates were opened. We got some really cool stuff which you can see for yourself by clicking this. Anywho, what I want to touch on was this particular piece here.This one image has had art Twitter in a maelstrom for the past few days now. And whew, what a doozy. The Japanese artist Najuco who made this image of Nessa has been accused of whitewashing. Now on one hand, you've got people defending the artist stating that Nessa's got a lighter tone in this image because of a pastel or muted color palette, lighting and other stuff...But there are also who have called BS on the whole "pastel palette" and lighting excuse, stating that dark skin can be portrayed with pastel palettes.and even a few interesting takes on the situation from primarily PoCIt's kind of created a wider discussion of whitewashing art in general, with many artists going out of their way to teach others how to properly depict darker skintones in art.The issue I have with this whole debacle though is that people in the art community have been pretty fuckin' racist in defendingthe original artwork. Like all this talk about how Japanese people have never seen a black person before so it's impossible for them to draw black characters is just ludicrous.To be honest with you, I don't really understand the argument directly above this text considering colorism is still a thing in East Asian countries but let's move on.Anyways, you've also got people purposefully drawing her as white to piss other people off which is just so dumb.Honestly seeing some of this stuff has been an eyeopener. What's taken me aback is that people are 'scared' of drawing dark-skin characters because of this fear of backlash and while I agree it has gotten bad in some places, the fact that it stops you from drawing ANY darker-skinned characters is just ridiculous. This particular Twitter thread is just really sad imo.I get the feeling people are using this whitewashing discourse as justification of not drawing PoC which is its own discussion in itself.Overall though, I think this is a discussion worth having and has produced some interesting takes on what is or isn't whitewashing. Is the lighter skin tone just a stylistic choice? etc.I wanted to know what Era make of all of this.