la_vie_noire | (no subject)

helens78's post brought a lot of things for me, many of them make me tired. I want to make an entry about English, about the arrogance from native speakers to expect everybody to talk perfect English, even from non-native speakers. Also, Makoto was telling me about this very insidious believe around here that "knowing English gives you freedom" which is... ahahahahahaha, you know. I'm going to make a post about all this soon, but not today.

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I'm going to talk about something else. Again, about Asian peoples erasure in anime and manga fandom. I had a conversation with classmates today that made me rage so much.

I'm not going to say something new, this was very much discussed already.

When I had that discussion in my fandom about putting white actors to play Asian characters, some person was very insistent that "it wasn't their fault if they couldn't think in any Asian actor to play Asian characters."

It's kinda funny, I already talked how is a commodity to consume something and erase the same people that create it, but there is something more that speaks volumes about racial power relationships around these places.

Right now anime and manga are extremely trendy in the Western World. We see lots of white and non-white people consuming and making themselves fans of "Asian culture," specially "Japanese culture" (between quotation marks because we know it's not the real culture they are "fans" of, it's the culture as seen by western lens). But of course, as things are being sold around here, the "cool culture" is Asian, the cool people aren't Asian people. The "cool people" have to be white people. Even in non-white countries like mine. So of course we have white people playing the part of Asian characters. White people are more desirable after all. And white people have to appropriate another culture, they have to make it theirs by being there instead of Asian people.

Japan is cool but only if you have Asian women fetishized and Asian men erased and replaced with white men, you know everybody loves white men.

Some years ago I was talking about Death Note's live action movie with a classmate, when I asked her what she thought about it she told me "ew, do you want one of those Jap to play Light?" (and it's not that I particularly care about the character, but she obviously did). Because, you know, Light Yagami is not Japanese, in her mind he probably is a white kid in an "Asian culture", thus very cool.

And today again my classmates were talking about how anime characters were "western" because Japanese people wanted to have "big eyes".

That's why I have a big problem with people who see no problem in fantasizing about Hugh Jackman as Kurogane, for example. These people are not only very naive and ignorant about racial issues, these people are playing a big part in not only erasing people from a particular culture, but erasing them and replacing the culture with what they picture said culture. And the way they picture it is for western consumption.

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Y'know my first thought of someone putting Hugh Jackman in for someone Japanese is them being an old school Marvel X-men fan and having a momentary brain blip of thinking of Logan and how he fit or did not fit into Japanese culture and life at stages of his history.

But then my second thought is - but do those white fans really think about how a white and western man didn't fit in? Or did they think Logan's isolation had more to do with xenophobia on the parts of the Japanese and parallell that with how Logan's treated in the West for being a mutant.

And I realize wow, they make whiteness not fitting into other cultures the fault of the people of those other cultures - as if (not unlike how they treat First Nations Peoples) the 'exotic' culture's people are meant to die off and leave this ready made set for white people to inhabit and part take of because they'd do it better anyhow.

Yeah, but I don't think they thought that much. You see, the character in question is the typical rude-though one. So of course, I can see the Wolverine's relation, but they just probably thought "OMG PRETTY WHITE MAN!!! WHO PLAYS RUDE GUYS!! TOTALLY IS!!"

But again, I'm not a big X-men fan, I didn't know that about Logan. Hm, pretty interesting. It would be funny because the character in question? Symbolizes and represents Japan and all things Japanese in his canon.

Ahh Logan/Wolverine's big thing for quite a while was being a western Ronin and it was played up that Charles was his Shogun and the Academy equaled his clan. It was tied in some with spaghetti westerns and samurai all transposed to the east coast...

Let me sum up up this way. Jackman is pretty and all. But My Logan will always be Clint Eastwood. Preferably from the days of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.

That said, a character that's all about Japanese exceptionalism is not best represented by Jackman or Eastwood or Leo di Fricking Caprio.

Well, that's very interesting. That would explain some things...

That said, a character that's all about Japanese exceptionalism is not best represented by Jackman or Eastwood or Leo di Fricking Caprio.

Ahahaha, why, do you think so? Damn it.