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.

---

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Of COURSE.

Because mixed race NEVER means anything but white-and-whatever-other-colour. Certainly she didn't mean Korean-Chinese, or Chinese-Japanese, or Vietnamese-Japanese...

Noooo she meant white-japanese of course. Because it was utterly inconceivable that there might be a FANTASY world without white people, or a post-apocalypse world without white people.

(while it's perfectly normal to have post-apocalyptic and fantasy worlds entirely populated by white-as-the-driven-snow people. but introduce a person of colour? Noooo waaaaaaaay. They hAVE to have been mixed with WHITE PEOPLE, because there's no other way coloured people might show up! Ever!)

Because it was utterly inconceivable that there might be a FANTASY world without white people, or a post-apocalypse world without white people.

But what do you mean? IT'S FANTASY! THOSE AREN'T WHITE OR ASIAN! THEY ARE FANTASY PEOPLE. Who look white of course, but we know people, as in without any marker, look white.

(Do you mean people of color would want to be in a world without white people?)

oh RIGHT. FANTASY. Because of COURSE fantasy people are ALL WHITE.

(Well, I meant that how can it be inconceivable that a Japanese writer/artist might draw a futuristic world/fantasy world that is ONLY Japanese people? Why not? just like how can myths and legends of say, Chinese or Japanese or Indonesian culture NOT include white people? Especially in the creation myths? Why the hell not? People want explanations or stories for why THEY are here. They don't know or care about the damn white people. Or they want a future world. WHy do they have to care about the white people, who populate their fantasies with white people, and don't give half a shit about the non-whites?)

*is expressing badly*