Meta:Sianachkit Notice
Regarding the removal of previous versions of the Sianachkit skin
Hi! If you're reading this post, you have probably come from Medkit's gallery where we mention a previous version of the Sianachkit skin that has been removed from the wiki in respect of community feedback. In the interest of transparency, this page seeks to explain the situation.
Sianachkit is a skin for Medkit that was originally released in October 2022 during the Bat vs. Rat Phestival, under a different name and design. The skin, in both iterations, was designed by the community member onionsu. The original design for Sianachkit was based on a figure in the culture of the Algonquin people, who are a Native American group mostly living along the Ottawa region of Canada. This figure has been well understood to have great cultural significance to the Algonquin people and Native Americans as a whole, as it represents an extremely personal level of grief of suffering in their unique history as the indigenous peoples of North America. In many respects, those belonging to Algonquin culture have requested time and time again that this figure not be represented casually in media, due to its meaning. This figure is unique in that it is believed mentioning the name or discussing it in depth is a bad omen, and we wish to respect that.
Due to the sensitive nature of this figure, the skin was eventually redesigned into Sianachkit, who is instead based on a figure in Highland Gaelic mythology. The sianach is a deer-monster in Scottish oral tradition, but like many Gaelic figures and mythology, is not considered to be closed culture nor to represent such a unique and unfortunately very real plight of the people it belongs to, unlike the figure in Algonquin culture. Sianachkit is the skin currently available to players in-game today.
While the PHIGHTING! WIKI is not the place for a vast majority of real world politics, we believe in respecting the wishes of our community and those who this skin is genuinely harmful towards. We generally believe in archiving things to the best of our ability, but where archiving would cause good people a lot of pain, we may make decisions of this nature to remove references to retconned skins, lore or designs entirely. If this happens again, we will be sure to write another notice on the matter.
We want to thank boggio for their sensitivity on the matter when it occurred and to the original skin designer for redesigning Sianachkit into a frankly awesome skin! We know this page is a bit more serious than what we might usually write, but we hope to educate younger players on why this skin was removed in the first place. Thanks for reading!
