i feel like a lot of the reason john is portrayed as vaguely brown without being given any like links to actual culture or a direct ethnicity and therefore it just coming across as more of an aesthetic thing is just so that he can like he clearly protrayed as a direct opposite to martin (who’s always portrayed as like a [usually tall] fat blonde/ginger white guy compared to john being a short skinny black-haired brown guy) and this trope is so incredibly prevalent in the fandom mainly due to how it peaked in quarantine in fandoms of largely white queers and typically teenagers and therefore still has that like visible effect on the fanon today. getting off topic but i just really hate how like rigid the ideas are in the fandom as well as the lack of any real thought into any designs that like fit the characters in a different way. sorry this was a tangent and kinda rambling