>>55709458I want to believe you know better and are just saying stupid shit intentionally, but I've interacted with enough brainrotted zoomers who actually don't understand how old games work and fill in their knowledge gaps with modern culture war shit so I can't be certain anymore.
Actual explanation: Gold/Silver are internally monochrome Game Boy games with color enhancements. The sprites were designed in black and white. The characters' lips were all made to be gray so that they stand out from the black outlines. When played on a color system each shade gets mapped to a color palette, but there's a hardware limit of 3 colors per sprite. So white gets mapped to skin tone, black outlines stay black, and gray becomes a custom "clothing" color. But the character's lips are also gray, so when color palettes are applied, their lips take on the same color as their clothes.
Nobody at the time interpreted it as lipstick, because a) they played on a tiny screen that makes it hard to see details and b) slight palette inaccuracies were extremely common in 8-bit games. Only through the view of someone brain damaged by 2020s politics would that be an issue.
