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I appreciate your earnestness! I appreciate your thoughtfulness!

No, you are not dense, the point I attempted to make at 3b simply unspooled further and faster than I intended.  

What I should have said is that there are many popular interpretations of antiquity and myth that maintain a very narrow and nearly exclusively white vision of who have made meaningful contributions.  These interpretations are as popular with ordinary people as they are with academia and white supremacist organizations (like Identity Evropa).  With the consistent recapitulation of these narrow interpretations, marginalized people find themselves excluded from the discourse and cannot see themselves in antiquity and myth and are made distinctly uncomfortable in the spaces in which they are enjoyed.  When people of color and queer people and disabled people and people of transgender experience are excluded from the discourse about the Past, they are also excluded from the story of the Past.  Then the cycle perpetuates itself. 

Maybe that makes more sense, maybe it really doesn't, but I am grateful that you were listening at all. I am also grateful to the Mino team for creating a story with room enough that we even got here. 

Thank you. 

. . . and I too mourn a meaningful arc for Rey.  And for Finn. 

He's too dark?

At the end of some free-wheeling speculation over a fictional fantasy furry visual novel with a magical hotel set in a metaphysical labyrinth and a main character that can change appearance at will, the constraint that we want to fixate on is that Storm is too dark to maybe be distantly related to a mythical character?

Kopten, if I may call you that, I don't relish singling you out, but you just touched on a few things that can't be left unexamined. 

One - and most importantly - any attempt to ligature race, ethnicity, and skin color to limited physical attributes of animals/anthropomorphic animals/androids/physical projections of A.I./an animated fucking toaster is inherently damaging and toxic and dangerous to members of the community, e.g. trying to treat fur color as a analogue to skin color.  This is racial essentialism. This hurts all of us and limits us, but worst of all it singles out and excludes people of color in the furry community by attempting to remove agency from how they represent and explore themselves. 

Two - maybe due to a misunderstanding or maybe a misapprehension of inherited traits I think it is worth pointing out that it is entirely possible for a white cow to be closely or directly related to a black cow. And, just so we're clear, it is also entirely possible for a dark skinned person to be directly related to a light skinned person. But, see point above, let this point go. Set it free. (Okay, also before I set it free, frequently the telling of these myths point out that the white cow is a meant to be a fated occurrence - a sign, omen, message, gift. Not herds of cattle of a certain color - okay those exist too sometimes in legend and myth like in some worship of Apis but not the point to take away from this.)

Three - I admit to leaving the door open on this one by playing fast, loose, and unscrupulous while discussing myth, so I'm going to state some things that I hope are obvious and maybe a couple less-obvious things too: 

 a) Myth ain't real! It may be honest, it may be revealing, and re-interpreting it can be liberating, but it's just a social construct meant to reify power through narrative. So don't think we owe mythic tradition anything, because people have been meddling with it for millennia. Most of the versions of myth we have been discussing are relatively late, often the most popular, traded and translated and retranslated again and again, and there are usually twenty other tellings, some of which omit whole characters or invent places and new plots. It matters whose telling it is. Whose translation. Whose edition of that same translation. There is no "true" version. No one true unifying myth or retelling (looking at you, Robert Graves). Actually, there've been many references to Ovid's Metamorphoses. Care to guess some of what Ovid is exploring? Myth! Power! Agency! Narrative mutability! In fact, if any of you have time, go read Ovid right now. You can read it in Latin or English with the translations side by side like the Loeb editions! Take and read! 

b) While we were playing around trying to create as many concordances in the popular tradition of myth around Crete, Asterion, Io, Europa, Minos, and Pasiphaë, the endeavoring to draw that line from Io down to Storm through the migration of real ethnic groups is a great example of how myth is really used by nations and states to create arbitrary boundaries and in-groups.  This can be another dangerous and misleading game meant to lend legitimacy to nationalism, ethnocentrism, and all kinds of trouble (read: fucked up shit.)  Autochthony doesn't have to be alienating, and don't let me catch anybody trying to  remove any kind of sovereignty from Indigenous peoples, but it as soon as it is used to enforce some kind of impossible ethnic homogeneity . . . And look, myth in all forms (oral tradition, religious tradition through text, etc.)  are particularly important to diaspora communities, but when the interpreter of this story uses the myth to exclude those who don't resemble those in power currently shaping the mythic history, we land back at trouble (F.U.S.)  So many nations do this or some derivative of it (I don't HAVE TIME  today for discussing manifest destiny in these United States of America).  SPEAKING OF MANIFEST DESTINY - another reading rec - revisit the Aeneid. In addition to many other things it is Roman propaganda reinforcing that the line of Roman monarchy wends back to Troy (its also kinda Augustan fanficiton).  AND ALSO even in the microcosm of the Aegean basin diaspora in the  is a constant! From the (many) Bronze Age depopulations, to the massive 1923 forced population exchange to the very current influx of migrants (who, by the way, are definitely being excluded in part using the exact apparatus we are discussing). 

c) It's a fantasy! The authors have the license to take whatever liberties they desire! And so far they have not made any sort of indication that if Storm is meant to be coded Afro-Brazilian that they will use that against him. They could reveal anything they choose too about any character - Luke could be a literal physical manifestation of American patriotism (ala American Gods - also definitely not the point I am trying to make), Storm could be from folklore, the Olympians, an entirely novel manifestation of supernatural incident,  or some Hittite deity, or just an ordinary man! I am not interested nor going to abide projection of casual, invented, racial limitations - intentional or unintentional. 

Sorry y'all. I done rambled. And Kopten, you are not uniquely guilty of these things - but you just happened to land smack-dab in the middle of field in which I ruminate daily. 

So, for your trouble, here's a shorter, neater response.

TL;DR

Don't try to enforce colorism, please, not in the world, not in furry fantasy, and let us take a long and uncomfortable look at ourselves when we are trying to so. 

Since we have not only established the authors' commitment to detail, but our own too . . . 

[Not only do spoilers and speculation continue, but are explored beyond reasonable measure]

There are a few things that have unlike escaped the authors' attention, so neither should they escape ours!

First, having brought up Io, it behooves us to consider Europa, who was brought to Crete by Zeus in the form of a white bull and purported mother to King Minos! That makes three different god-touched white bovines (Io, Europa, and the lurching bull-father of Asterion) that could have some role to play in the story of how Asterion arrived in his particular predicament. 

Second, while Asterion reports (along with mythic reception) that his father was an "ordinary" bull, besides simple deception, illusions have been established (the passports), and he also mentions that it may have had some effect on his mother, Pasiphaë - myth  suggests that direct contact with the divine can have . . . permanent effects. (RIP Semele). Now, it's also possible that King Minos was in fact Asterion's father, and was in fact a minotaur too, but couldn't openly live as such. (This would also be a great opportunity to explore Asterion and his family's ethnicity as Minoan/Mycenaean/Phoenician/Colchian and the influence of having a mainland presence on Crete  and in Knossos - I mean, his name is Asterion, which would have to be a Mycenaean {early Greek} name, and the minotaur motif doesn't appear on sealstones until the Mycenaean occupation, but I won't develop this any further than this windy parenthetical apophasis/praeteritio.) So maybe Asterion's father is mortal (man, bull-cum-man, bull), but . . .

Third - and this is an interesting one - Zeus  as Zeus Xenios. He's the god of hospitality, travelers, and strangers. This is concerns a bedrock (yeah I'll get to the bedrock later. Actually, no I won't. The bedrock could be crystalized ichor. Which could also imply some other things but not now)  concept of the visual novel, folks! One of Zeus' major responsibilities and purviews is philoxenia, or xenia, which, ostensibly, is a core Minotaur Hotel theme. Look, Zeus comes with a lot of baggage. Is he philandering? Is he selfish? Is he overfond of being over-generative? Is he petty and puny? Is he the possible syncretistic bridge between a much, much earlier myth tradition as represented by the "titans" and meant to be the patricidal god figure that unifies myth-history in the Aegean basin?  Perhaps! But besides already showing a close affection for and as white cows, besides being Very Important on Crete - not only born on Crete, but tradition on Crete also purports that he lived as a mortal on the island and died there, too - besides having sent Hermes to slay Argos Panoptes that he may recover Io (and could in some part explain Argos' enmity and exaggerated piety), besides all those things regarding Zeus' comportment; Asterion has been running what is essentially a cult to Zeus for a very long time now. Whether or not that signifies future incursion of Zeus into the realm, that the line of minotaurs mentioned in Hades' are direct descendants of Zeus, or that Asterion himself is a son of Zeus, is hard to tell. Which is good! Discovery is titillating! (Okay, Posiedon could also be in that family tree, but one god or so at a time, please)

Okay. Last one. If Storm is related to Asterion in any way through a line of hemi-demi-semi-divine minotaurs (anthropomorphic bull men but I already suggested that minotaurs are possibly related to Minos maybe so there could be more than THE minotaur), it's possible that - Storm's eventual presence in the Labyrinth may allow P to manipulate some rules, and it also could be something foreshadowed by Asterion's fear that freedom is only possible by trading one's shackles to someone else. (He did say that, right? Am I misremembering?) 

That's it for this installment of Wall Of Text™!