Unpopular opinion: I don't like how Helena's racial identity is framed.
In Alchemised, Senlinyu strongly tied the discrimination/xenophobia Helena experiences to her immigrant status and foreign appearance (in addition to her vivamancy). This suggests they're trying to explore the story through a racialised lens based on real world systemic oppression.
They have stated that Helena is an Italian woman and the text strongly implies that. Etras is Italy-coded (references to warmer climate, people there using expressive gestures, olive trees. Helena's surname is Marino, literally an Italian surname.
That's where my issue lies. Helena's experience in Paladia is written to closely mirror the immigrant experience of POC in Western/white countries. As a foreigner in Paladia who looks visibly different, Helena faces institutional barriers and is subjected to mistreatment and xenophobia. These are things predominantly experienced by immigrants of colour especially if they are visibly non white looking. But then the author goes on to say Helena's ethncity/background is Italian, and Italians are considered white??
I’m from a majority white country with a large Italian descent population and Italian are considered white by themselves and everyone else. In the modern day, Italians are considered white in pretty much all parts of the world, regardless of skin tone. Yes, Helena has curly hair and olive skin which many women of colour have, but those are also common Mediterranean features and having those features do not automatically you non-white. I am sorry but an Italian immigrant in an European country with paler people (e.g. Nordic countries) will not face the same level of xenophobia and racial discrimination as a brown or black immigrant and they are not the same AT ALL.
There are so many debates about whether Helena is a woman of colour or white. It's because she suffers from a racially ambiguous framing. There are contradictions where in official fanarts Helena's appearance can be easily interpreted as a non white woman (in some fan arts she has brown skin in the manor scenes, despite the text saying her skin turned into a pale colour from captivity) The xenophobia and appearance based discrimination Helena experiences also strongly parallel what POC experience in white countries. Yet the author has explicitly stated Helena is Italian (who are widely considered as white), writes her home country as heavily Italy coded and Etras and Paladia is implied to geographically located in modern day Europe. Did the author frame Helena as racially ambiguous in order to appeal to a broader audience and make her more palatable to a white audience? Did they avoid unambiguously making Helena a woman of colour, because a WOC being confined, tortured and raped by a white man would have created very uncomfortable racial dynamics? I don't know.
It feels icky to me that the author essentially uses the emotional weight of POC immigrant experiences on Helena's character without actually explicitly making her a woman of colour. Helena could easily have been based on a Middle Eastern, Latina or black woman. It’s disheartening to see that WOC aren't even represented in a story that heavily borrows on THEIR experiences. IMO, the author should have either left Helena's background unattached to a specific real-world ethnicity/country, or had the guts to unambiguously write as AND state she's a WOC.