me, a black lesbian: i’m uncomfortable with people shipping Black/white wlw relationships where the dynamics are “powerful tough and rough black soldier and protector” and “dainty porcelain princess” since it upholds the stereotype that black women can’t be in need or are undeserving of protection and love
a white: sooo… you hate interracial sapphic relationships? racist lesbophobe
I read this earlier today and tried to ignore it but I just can’t stop thinking about how absolutely terrible it is, so fuck it.
It’s a 16,000 word apologia for fandom’s racism and sexism with a bunch of extremely dubious “statistics” as evidence.
Choice horrors:
“It’s not unreasonable to think that some straight women are interested in m/m because they don’t find women erotically or romantically exciting. And, look, straight people don’t need anybody’s protection most of the time, but trying to shame straight women for their sexualiy isn’t activism.”
Het romance novels are a billion dollar a year industry. The most successful fanfic of all time is het. Lots of women like het romances. The question isn’t, “Why don’t women like pairings with women?” It’s “Why aren’t women who like pairings with women in fandom?”
“Why Are All The Slashers Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?”
What made the author think this was a good idea. Slash writers are not an oppressed minority. This is pure white fragility and entitlement, to imply that your fan fiction tastes make you oppressed and then take the name of a book about black people to explain why you need a safe space. I understand THINKING of this line. I don’t understand PUBLISHING it.
“Step outside of AO3, and you find a very different story. Media Miner, a major multifandom archive of the 00s that is (was?) a hub of Inu Yasha fandom, is 52% het, 37% gen, and only 10% slash…Media Miner: 52% het; 10% slash
Wattpad: 89% het; 5% slash
FFN: more het than AO3 and less slash, but percentages are elusive”
Media Miner has about 150,000 works. AO3 has over a million, Wattpad and FFN over six million. Comparing percentages across those populations is meaningless. More than FORTY PERCENT of the total analyzed fanworks are filed under “percentages are elusive.” The methodology for generating the stats across archives is not standard or randomized. These numbers are completely meaningless.
Cutting and pasting is a pain on mobile, so double fuck it. The race arguments include that American TV and movies are mostly white, so naturally fanfic and vids are white, but also, all of the shows with popular black actors are 90s sitcoms, and no one likes to vid 90s sitcoms; someone once complained that a vid exchange was too white, even though they themselves requested lots of white stuff, and this chaps the author’s ass because she made a vid of a black dude (as a personal challenge to herself to vid everything her recipient requested, of a canon she only watched for the challenge) and she thought the exchange was fine; diversity efforts in fandom are too “doom and gloom”; black characters like Sam and Rhodey aren’t shipped because they’re too emotionally stable; it’s too scary to write non-white characters because you might mess up and be racist (too late, friend!) and writing CoC is “defined by fear” with “no upside” (that is a really disturbing insight into this person’s writing process, actually) and an EXTREMELY creepy aside about how there aren’t enough hot black guys on OKCupid.
There are also a bunch of weird-ass arguments about het and fem slash that are basically, “Fans should stop complaining that there’s no fem slash in Fandom A because there’s fem slash in Fandom B” and “Fans should stop complaining that female characters in media fandom are sidelined because girls in boy band fandom write a fuckton of self-insert fic.” So I guess people who want to read Natasha Romanov/Maria Hill fic should just go read Xena/Gabrielle fic and readers who want Abbie Mills gen fic should just go read a 1D romance?
This meta is a 13-chapter disaster, is what I’m saying.
Apparently this author has been online for like two decades, which means they should have been here through Racefail 09 and the great interracial pairing slur cockup of 2007, AT THE VERY LEAST, ie, they should know better. And yet here we are. I’m sorry, everybody. This thing sucks.
This is a good take on the “meta” I basically refused to read last night and I see that it was basically worse than I expected. Ugh.
I couldn’t get past the title. This person is actively working to silence fans of color. It’s not going to work.
I didn’t read the whole thing but I read Chapter 6: Race and Shipping. Where the author provides a notoriously known statistic results from dating sites to explain that POC aren’t seen as attractive = racist fans shouldn’t be blamed because this is a general problem, and not just a fandom problem. Okay… And then they end up with:
I have calculated that about 20% of my fic and 30% of my vids are about POC. You can go calculate your numbers and feel smug. Or not. I’m betting not.
Translation: ”I don’t see POC as attractive but I’ve written 3 fics with characters of colour, where are my cookies?!!”
- Mod P.
I read this entire clusterfuck, including the comments, and now I’m passing it on for anyone else who, like me, has managed to filter their fandom interaction enough that they didn’t realize this toxicity was still not just passively practiced but actively considered and played out.
None of these points are particularly new, but seeing them outright stated without shame in 2016 is an Experience.
I have to share this one quote about femslash:
When I see someone haranguing a fandom like, say, MCU movie fandom for
not shipping f/f enough, I don’t wonder what’s wrong with the fandom: I
wonder why that fan hasn’t bothered to seek out the many
popular f/f fandoms that do exist. Perhaps the joy of harassing other
fans for their ignoble shipping preferences is greater than the joy of
finding fellow femslashers to squee with?
Guys, this was the problem all along. I’m doing fandom wrong by falling in love with the wrong source text. If I’d only understood that this wasn’t my space to enjoy non-white and/or non-male characters, because the majority of characters are white men, imagine how much happier I’d be in my life.
franzeska’s been heavily involved in western media fandom, esp as a former board member of OTW (which runs AO3) and fandom challenges like yuletide and parallels.
they’ve been spouting yt apologia while fetishizing asian culture for years, this is nothing new. i’m pretty sure i’ve read franzeska saying the same things back when racefail ‘09 was going down. like most of this isn’t surprising bc it is exactly what we saw yt lj fandom peeps spouting in 2007-2010 and i’m personally not shocked that these people learned absolutely nothing. they don’t want to learn and being accountable for their actions.
Yeah I saw the same arguments during RaceFail. If anything it shows that the current toxic environment is one white fans are invested in and HAVE been for a while. It isn’t incidental as much as it’s an environment they’ve actively cultivated using the exact same strategies.
I want to highlight this thread of comments in particular because the “let me school you on fandom history” aspect of this meta is one of the most disingenuous, and it really reveals that the author’s intent is not to “improve civility” but to erase fans of color because she finds writing and vidding about characters of color “joyless,” “defined by fear” and to have “no upside.” I also think it was incredibly shady to roll an “analysis” of slash opposition, the lack of femslash in media fandom and racism in fandom into one post, because arguments about one start to indirectly act as arguments about the other.
Franzeska goes deep into the history of AO3 to talk about why slash is represented heavily there, with lots of links and documentation and references to how she was there and “we” did this or that. Her stated intent in the very first chapter is “to educate by providing historical perspective and non-AO3 context that is missing from most of the frothing rants on this subject,” rants that she believes “[depend].on an ignorance of fandom history” and “[do] little or nothing to stem the tide of so-called ‘whitecock’ juggernauts while making it unpleasantly fraught to write about people of color.”
ALL of those things were happening roughly concurrently with the founding of AO3.* Going into extensive detail about the history of slash fandom without ONE SINGLE MENTION of the history of fandom racism, including in slash fandom, is an effort to erase that history for the comfort of white fans. Rewriting the founding of AO3 and ignoring this history paints slash writers and fans as victims who need protecting from other parts of fandom or fandom spaces (which, by combining this sexism and racism argument, can plausibly be said to refer to “non slash fans” but is in fact primarily fans who are women of color and their allies) and who shouldn’t be disturbed in their safe space while completely ignoring the many, many fans of color** who have made themselves incredibly vulnerable over the past decade to talk about how fandom generally and often slash fandom specifically has hurt them.
**I almost linked to some of them here but then I thought…why would I drag this bullshit back to their door? It’s time for this problem to stay in the family. White people need to start taking responsibility for each other, and hey, change starts with me. Please no one bother Te. My ask box is open.
This entire piece completely erases fans of color and their contributions to fandom over and over and over. When Franzeska says that anti-racist activism in fandom “prioritizes the ‘safety’ of fictional women over that of real women,” she means white women, because women of color have been expressing for YEARS, in very personal and painful writing, that they are hurt by the way fan culture works and that they are withdrawing from fandom because of it. Those women are completely ignored in this calculation. The dichotomy is between fictional characters of color and white female fans. Women of color in fandom literally don’t exist in this argument.
Further, Franzeska dismisses objections to racist tropes or erasure in fanfic as “a flood of precious nonsense” and “concern trolling” using “social justice terminology.” She also says that “[if] there’s one pattern I have seen over and over, it is that people who get up in my face about race and shipping do not produce many fanworks about non-white characters themselves. So why the aggro?” By completely ignoring the last full DECADE of this discussion, she implies that all of these objections are coming out of nowhere from white people who want to score social justice points or fulfill their “duty” by crushing other people’s fun. In fact, women of color have been criticizing this for years, and leaving fandom over it (in the 2006 post linked above, Te discusses withdrawing almost completely from several fandoms with marginalized black characters). EVEN IF the majority of the criticism at this point were coming from white women (which IS NOT TRUE; Franzeska just ignores everyone else), we aren’t concern trolling. We are doing what women of color have asked us for years to do, which is to call out the racism in our own communities in the hopes that eventually we will make it safe for them to return and have as much fun as Franzeska has apparently been having for the last two decades without a second thought about the people she’s hurt.
I read this earlier today and tried to ignore it but I just can’t stop thinking about how absolutely terrible it is, so fuck it.
It’s a 16,000 word apologia for fandom’s racism and sexism with a bunch of extremely dubious “statistics” as evidence.
Choice horrors:
“It’s not unreasonable to think that some straight women are interested in m/m because they don’t find women erotically or romantically exciting. And, look, straight people don’t need anybody’s protection most of the time, but trying to shame straight women for their sexualiy isn’t activism.”
Het romance novels are a billion dollar a year industry. The most successful fanfic of all time is het. Lots of women like het romances. The question isn’t, “Why don’t women like pairings with women?” It’s “Why aren’t women who like pairings with women in fandom?”
“Why Are All The Slashers Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?”
What made the author think this was a good idea. Slash writers are not an oppressed minority. This is pure white fragility and entitlement, to imply that your fan fiction tastes make you oppressed and then take the name of a book about black people to explain why you need a safe space. I understand THINKING of this line. I don’t understand PUBLISHING it.
“Step outside of AO3, and you find a very different story. Media Miner, a major multifandom archive of the 00s that is (was?) a hub of Inu Yasha fandom, is 52% het, 37% gen, and only 10% slash…Media Miner: 52% het; 10% slash
Wattpad: 89% het; 5% slash
FFN: more het than AO3 and less slash, but percentages are elusive”
Media Miner has about 150,000 works. AO3 has over a million, Wattpad and FFN over six million. Comparing percentages across those populations is meaningless. More than FORTY PERCENT of the total analyzed fanworks are filed under “percentages are elusive.” The methodology for generating the stats across archives is not standard or randomized. These numbers are completely meaningless.
Cutting and pasting is a pain on mobile, so double fuck it. The race arguments include that American TV and movies are mostly white, so naturally fanfic and vids are white, but also, all of the shows with popular black actors are 90s sitcoms, and no one likes to vid 90s sitcoms; someone once complained that a vid exchange was too white, even though they themselves requested lots of white stuff, and this chaps the author’s ass because she made a vid of a black dude (as a personal challenge to herself to vid everything her recipient requested, of a canon she only watched for the challenge) and she thought the exchange was fine; diversity efforts in fandom are too “doom and gloom”; black characters like Sam and Rhodey aren’t shipped because they’re too emotionally stable; it’s too scary to write non-white characters because you might mess up and be racist (too late, friend!) and writing CoC is “defined by fear” with “no upside” (that is a really disturbing insight into this person’s writing process, actually) and an EXTREMELY creepy aside about how there aren’t enough hot black guys on OKCupid.
There are also a bunch of weird-ass arguments about het and fem slash that are basically, “Fans should stop complaining that there’s no fem slash in Fandom A because there’s fem slash in Fandom B” and “Fans should stop complaining that female characters in media fandom are sidelined because girls in boy band fandom write a fuckton of self-insert fic.” So I guess people who want to read Natasha Romanov/Maria Hill fic should just go read Xena/Gabrielle fic and readers who want Abbie Mills gen fic should just go read a 1D romance?
This meta is a 13-chapter disaster, is what I’m saying.
Apparently this author has been online for like two decades, which means they should have been here through Racefail 09 and the great interracial pairing slur cockup of 2007, AT THE VERY LEAST, ie, they should know better. And yet here we are. I’m sorry, everybody. This thing sucks.
I didn’t read the whole thing but I read Chapter 6: Race and Shipping. Where the author provides a notoriously known statistic results from dating sites to explain that POC aren’t seen as attractive = racist fans shouldn’t be blamed because this is a general problem, and not just a fandom problem. Okay… And then they end up with:
I have calculated that about 20% of my fic and 30% of my vids are about POC. You can go calculate your numbers and feel smug. Or not. I’m betting not.
Translation: ”I don’t see POC as attractive but I’ve written 3 fics with characters of colour, where are my cookies?!!”
I read this entire clusterfuck, including the comments, and now I’m passing it on for anyone else who, like me, has managed to filter their fandom interaction enough that they didn’t realize this toxicity was still not just passively practiced but actively considered and played out.
None of these points are particularly new, but seeing them outright stated without shame in 2016 is an Experience.
I have to share this one quote about femslash:
When I see someone haranguing a fandom like, say, MCU movie fandom for
not shipping f/f enough, I don’t wonder what’s wrong with the fandom: I
wonder why that fan hasn’t bothered to seek out the many
popular f/f fandoms that do exist. Perhaps the joy of harassing other
fans for their ignoble shipping preferences is greater than the joy of
finding fellow femslashers to squee with?
Guys, this was the problem all along. I’m doing fandom wrong by falling in love with the wrong source text. If I’d only understood that this wasn’t my space to enjoy non-white and/or non-male characters, because the majority of characters are white men, imagine how much happier I’d be in my life.
franzeska’s been heavily involved in western media fandom, esp as a former board member of OTW (which runs AO3) and fandom challenges like yuletide and parallels.
they’ve been spouting yt apologia while fetishizing asian culture for years, this is nothing new. i’m pretty sure i’ve read franzeska saying the same things back when racefail ‘09 was going down. like most of this isn’t surprising bc it is exactly what we saw yt lj fandom peeps spouting in 2007-2010 and i’m personally not shocked that these people learned absolutely nothing. they don’t want to learn and being accountable for their actions.
Yeah I saw the same arguments during RaceFail. If anything it shows that the current toxic environment is one white fans are invested in and HAVE been for a while. It isn’t incidental as much as it’s an environment they’ve actively cultivated using the exact same strategies.
I want to highlight this thread of comments in particular because the “let me school you on fandom history” aspect of this meta is one of the most disingenuous, and it really reveals that the author’s intent is not to “improve civility” but to erase fans of color because she finds writing and vidding about characters of color “joyless,” “defined by fear” and to have “no upside.” I also think it was incredibly shady to roll an “analysis” of slash opposition, the lack of femslash in media fandom and racism in fandom into one post, because arguments about one start to indirectly act as arguments about the other.
Franzeska goes deep into the history of AO3 to talk about why slash is represented heavily there, with lots of links and documentation and references to how she was there and “we” did this or that. Her stated intent in the very first chapter is “to educate by providing historical perspective and non-AO3 context that is missing from most of the frothing rants on this subject,” rants that she believes “[depend].on an ignorance of fandom history” and “[do] little or nothing to stem the tide of so-called ‘whitecock’ juggernauts while making it unpleasantly fraught to write about people of color.”
ALL of those things were happening roughly concurrently with the founding of AO3.* Going into extensive detail about the history of slash fandom without ONE SINGLE MENTION of the history of fandom racism, including in slash fandom, is an effort to erase that history for the comfort of white fans. Rewriting the founding of AO3 and ignoring this history paints slash writers and fans as victims who need protecting from other parts of fandom or fandom spaces (which, by combining this sexism and racism argument, can plausibly be said to refer to “non slash fans” but is in fact primarily fans who are women of color and their allies) and who shouldn’t be disturbed in their safe space while completely ignoring the many, many fans of color** who have made themselves incredibly vulnerable over the past decade to talk about how fandom generally and often slash fandom specifically has hurt them.
**I almost linked to some of them here but then I thought…why would I drag this bullshit back to their door? It’s time for this problem to stay in the family. White people need to start taking responsibility for each other, and hey, change starts with me. Please no one bother Te. My ask box is open.
This entire piece completely erases fans of color and their contributions to fandom over and over and over. When Franzeska says that anti-racist activism in fandom “prioritizes the ‘safety’ of fictional women over that of real women,” she means white women, because women of color have been expressing for YEARS, in very personal and painful writing, that they are hurt by the way fan culture works and that they are withdrawing from fandom because of it. Those women are completely ignored in this calculation. The dichotomy is between fictional characters of color and white female fans. Women of color in fandom literally don’t exist in this argument.
Further, Franzeska dismisses objections to racist tropes or erasure in fanfic as “a flood of precious nonsense” and “concern trolling” using “social justice terminology.” She also says that “[if] there’s one pattern I have seen over and over, it is that people who get up in my face about race and shipping do not produce many fanworks about non-white characters themselves. So why the aggro?” By completely ignoring the last full DECADE of this discussion, she implies that all of these objections are coming out of nowhere from white people who want to score social justice points or fulfill their “duty” by crushing other people’s fun. In fact, women of color have been criticizing this for years, and leaving fandom over it (in the 2006 post linked above, Te discusses withdrawing almost completely from several fandoms with marginalized black characters). EVEN IF the majority of the criticism at this point were coming from white women (which IS NOT TRUE; Franzeska just ignores everyone else), we aren’t concern trolling. We are doing what women of color have asked us for years to do, which is to call out the racism in our own communities in the hopes that eventually we will make it safe for them to return and have as much fun as Franzeska has apparently been having for the last two decades without a second thought about the people she’s hurt.
Britain is not open about the stuff we’ve done at all.
Slavery is taught but that’s about it. And even then the focus is on “We stopped it”, often leaving out the part about profiting from it for 200 years.
The crimes in Ireland are only taught at A Level history, meaning that most of the public is truly ignorant of British colonialism in Ireland. A huge portion of the English public voted Cromwell to be one of the greatest Britons ever, and he committed horrific acts against Ireland and Scotland.
There’s little mention of any imperialism in Africa. When it was revealed the Mau Mau’s would be getting a memorial statue funded by the UK, people were outraged and basically denied that we ever did anything wrong. The Boer and Zulu wars are forgotten, especially the bit about the concentration camps.
There’s absolutely 0 public discussion regarding British imperialism in India. People’s knowledge seems to go as far as “We gave them trains so they should be grateful”. The British tied mutineers to cannons and blew them up. The Indian economy shrank under British rule more than any other nation in the modern era. From about 20% of global GDP (Similar to China and Europe) at the start, to about 1% at independence.
And that’s not even mentioning the Native Americans. Long before someone ever dreamt up the idea of United States, the European colonists were quite happy killing, abusing, and conning the natives.
There’s a reason another phrase for the Union Jack is “The Butcher’s Apron”. You don’t get to be the world’s first hyperpower without slaughtering a lot of people.
A physically and mentally disabled couple said Delaware State Police officers violently beat the husband during an early morning raid at a relative’s home.
The Rehoboth Beach couple – the wife, a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy, the husband, a disabled veteran who takes medication for schizophrenia – allege in a federal lawsuit that commanders failed to train officers in the “constitutional bounds and limits concerning the use of force,” particularly in interactions with disabled people.
Ruther Hayes, was giving his wife, Lisa Hayes, a sponge bath when multiple officers forced their way into the bedroom. According the the report, Ruther attempted to cover his exposed wife, but was beaten and tasered twice by officers. Even after being told Lisa could not use her legs, officers proceeded to point their assault rifles at the disabled woman and “shouted at her to do that which she could not: stand up,” the lawsuit says.
Miss Major: Miss Major: It’s so disappointing. They keep doing this! My first thought is: how dare they attempt to do this again? A few years ago they did another Stonewall movie, and I swear if I saw a black person, it had to be a shadow running against the face of somebody who was white!
It’s absolutely absurd — you know, young people today aren’t stupid. They can read the history, they know that this is not the way it happened. These people can’t let it go! Everybody can’t be white! This is a country of different colors and people and thoughts and attitudes and feelings, and they try to make all of those the same for some reason.
Not like it’s going to work, but damn if they don’t stop trying. It’s bad enough that across the street from Stonewall, they have statues up to commemorate that night. That’s cute, but there’s not a black statue there! The statues look like they’re made from flour and sugar! What is this? Why can’t one of the girls go up and throw up a little makeup on one of these bitches? And I’m sorry, but the last time I checked, the only gay people I saw hanging around there were across the street cheering. They were not the ones getting slugged or having stones thrown at them. It’s just aggravating. And hurtful! For all the girls who are no longer here who can’t say anything, this movie just acts like they didn’t exist.
And these were wonderful, marvelous, smart, intelligent girls. Yeah, we couldn’t get jobs making sixty thousand dollars a year, oh well. But we lived our true selves. We enjoyed our lives. We did what we had to do to survive. And we did! And now they’re acting like, “we’re so grateful that you did this and we’re going to take it from here because you stupid bitches don’t know how to do this.” Yeah, okay. Because I’m not white, I didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, and my parents don’t have money. What does any of that have to do with the facts? Nothing.
Miss Major: Miss Major: It’s so disappointing. They keep doing this! My first thought is: how dare they attempt to do this again? A few years ago they did another Stonewall movie, and I swear if I saw a black person, it had to be a shadow running against the face of somebody who was white!
It’s absolutely absurd — you know, young people today aren’t stupid. They can read the history, they know that this is not the way it happened. These people can’t let it go! Everybody can’t be white! This is a country of different colors and people and thoughts and attitudes and feelings, and they try to make all of those the same for some reason.
Not like it’s going to work, but damn if they don’t stop trying. It’s bad enough that across the street from Stonewall, they have statues up to commemorate that night. That’s cute, but there’s not a black statue there! The statues look like they’re made from flour and sugar! What is this? Why can’t one of the girls go up and throw up a little makeup on one of these bitches? And I’m sorry, but the last time I checked, the only gay people I saw hanging around there were across the street cheering. They were not the ones getting slugged or having stones thrown at them. It’s just aggravating. And hurtful! For all the girls who are no longer here who can’t say anything, this movie just acts like they didn’t exist.
And these were wonderful, marvelous, smart, intelligent girls. Yeah, we couldn’t get jobs making sixty thousand dollars a year, oh well. But we lived our true selves. We enjoyed our lives. We did what we had to do to survive. And we did! And now they’re acting like, “we’re so grateful that you did this and we’re going to take it from here because you stupid bitches don’t know how to do this.” Yeah, okay. Because I’m not white, I didn’t go to Harvard or Yale, and my parents don’t have money. What does any of that have to do with the facts? Nothing.
The Australian Government is considering restricting the sale of Vegemite in “dry” Aboriginal communities, i.e. communities where the government has already banned the sale of alcohol. Because it’s supposedly being used to brew moonshine in bathtubs.
Any documentation of this? Nah, we just have to accept Nigel Scullion’s word that this is happening. And, unlike the celebrated narrative of white Americans fighting Prohibition, that this is a bad thing that needs to be quashed. We certainly shouldn’t take it as a sign that prohibition never actually fucking works, and that a safe, regulated supply of alcohol is much better than pushing people towards moonshine with a mystery concentration of ethanol and other, more toxic fermentation byproducts.
We *could* fund extra mental health resources to address the links between intergenerational racialised trauma, alcohol abuse, and interpartner violence. We *could* be a society where alcohol abuse is treated as symptomatic of illness, where the sufferer deserves compassion and respect.
But nah, much better to treat every Black person trying to buy a jar of nutritious spread as a potential criminal.
I can’t begin to express how much I hate this government.
You know, I’ve thought about this for a while, and indeed I’ve noticed what seems like racism in western views of the Godzilla series - but I’ve never properly been able to articulate or justify my suspicions on the matter. Yet, here we are.
Firstly, this is addressing the Japanese films - the two American films will not be discussed - just a heads up.
Now, Godzilla films have over the years been much maligned in the West. I could get past this if the opinion that these films are distinctly cheap and not-of-value wasn’t so entrenched in the collective opinion of the West. When bringing up Godzilla films, people tend to automatically assume that the Japanese films are inherently bad. They tend to believe that the Japanese are seemingly incapable at making a good film. And this goes beyond just Godzilla (though he is a good example to examine). I personally know several people who see Japanese films as being intrinsically ‘weird’ or just bad. Whilst I (and as it happens, some Japanese filmmakers) do not deny that some Japanese films (and indeed some Godzilla films) do feature undeniably ridiculous or strange plots, to simply generalise and condemn all films a culture or genre has to offer is to go too far. Whilst this isn’t consciously racist, where it stems from, is.
As David Kalat points out in his A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series, (particularly) American prejudices towards the Japanese following WWII fed into this soon-solidified view that the Japanese Godzilla films were to be looked upon with derision - or at least suspicion. If the American public were suspicious of the Japanese as a whole after WWII, then why not share that suspicion for Japanese products - such as their films. And with a genre already considered cheap in the West, the Godzilla series was an easy target.
One of, if not the main source of this derision in the West for the Godzilla series unfortunately is the effects work. People will condemn the ‘suitmation’ technique and believe that it is unable to produce impressive visuals - despite the series proving that belief wrong several times in its 60 year history. And yet at the same time, these same people may praise American filmmakers using the same effects - consider Rick Baker winning his 1976 Oscar for his ‘suitmation’ techniques used in the ‘76 remake of King Kong. Moreover, as David Kalat also says, “Japanese art often values beauty, poetry, or fantasy above realism” American audiences are (now more than ever) conditioned to expect realism - and anything that falls short of that is considered a mistake. It is under this conditioning and ignorance of Japan’s culture that the Godzilla series faces its harshest criticisms.
And it is this cultural ignorance that I draw the word, ‘racism’. It is not a conscious form of racism - one that is not actively thought out against the Japanese, but one which is more subtle, as people ignore or misunderstand Japanese culture and then vehemently criticise it on grounds for which it was not made.
Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts.
I wrote ten thousand words on this exact subject as my final university project earlier this year, and raised many of the same points you do. You can read it here!
A lot of this is good old-fashioned orientalism, wherein the image of the east bears little resemblance to reality but is, instead, a construction against which the west forms its own identity.
Ex: The “cardboard buildings” smear against these films. Of course, anyone who knows the slightest bit about tokusatsu realizes that miniature work in the Toho kaiju films is phenomenal, often far better than the effects from similar sci-fi/horror films in the US and elsewhere at this time. The miniature buildings were nothing like “cardboard boxes,” but by constructing this imaginary version of Japanese special effects in their discourse surrounding eastern film, the west could view its own effects technology as demonstrably superior to the east’s—and this superiority, of course, would be viewed as evidence and manifestation of superiority in most (all?) other categories.
This conception of the west as superior seems to, incredibly, prevent some people from even seeing what’s before their eyes in these films.
OH MY GOD THANK YOU FOR THIS. Every one of my followers and everyone else’s followers should consider reading and reblogging this.
I recall trying to show my nieces and nephews GHIDRAH: THE THREE HEADED MONSTER some years ago while at a Christmas party (the collective parents tend to unload the children on me since, well, I’m still the man-child of the family), and periodically the parents would come in and drunkenly squawk in mock-Asian accents and mannerisms. And keep in mind, 2 of these kids have a father of Japanese ancestry.
i used to participate in the ‘cultural costume day’ that would happen annually and i would wear a really nice red qi pao to school and i’d walk in thru the school doors beaming until someone would come up 2 me, look me up and down and say loudly, ‘is this how u dress at home. u look funny’
i would look around and get confused. why did this person, who i barely even knew, decide 2 come up to me and tell me that my cultural clothes were weird on me when there were so many white ppl and ppl who were not ethnically chinese wearing the same clothes ? the comments continued n escalated and i honestly lost count of the squinted eyes and ‘ching chongs’ that i saw n heard
it scared me and i was ashamed of my own culture. when the same day came again the next year, i went to school in uniform and ppl asked me ‘aren’t u chinese ? obv not. look at us. we’re so chinese right now’. i heard ppl go up to their friends and tell them that their ‘chinese dress’ looked great on them. ‘where did u get it ?’ ‘chinatown, duh’. these white ppl were being celebrated 4 wearing MY cultural clothing. i realised then that it was ok when they were wearing it, bcus it was quirky n fun; but when i wore it i was being excessively enthusiastic abt my own culture n should ‘tone it down’ a little bit. and when i didn’t participate i was shamed for ‘not being chinese enough’
i haven’t worn a qi pao since, tbh
#StopStereotyping
last yr, when a poc classmate of mine decided to make a video of him ‘imitating chinese ppl’, i was curious as to how he would present chinese ppl. so i watched the video! and i was not surprised to find that the entire video was 100% offensive
so i wrote to him, publicly, on his facebook wall, and the first msg he sent me (within 10 seconds of me posting it) was ‘are you trying to ruin my life :(’
racists are so afraid of being called out. racists are so weak. he reported my post, stopped replying to my personal messages of me demanding a public apology, and got my post removed by getting his friends to report it too
it was hard, tbh. having ppl message u and telling u that ‘he was just having some fun’ and that ‘it was just satire, can’t u take a joke?’ and that ‘he never meant any harm, ur just a confrontational bitch’. i can honestly say that i spent a few days crying. i was fighting a meaningless battle bcus none of these racists were going to back down. they were so convinced that they were right, that it was ok to portray chinese ppl as dull, studious, and rude ppl
after a few days he messaged me again and u know what he said ? he said he’s lived in china so he thought he knew how chinese ppl are like. he said that he’s sorry. but that was it. nothing abt it acknowledged anything i addressed about his content. he was just ‘sorry’
#IAmChinese
racists r just ‘sorry’ when they r called out. but they don’t care. they rly don’t give a single shit about whether they insult ur culture or not, bcus it’s not their own
they don’t give a shit about the toxic shit they do with ur heritage. bcus it’s become so normal. i know a lot of ppl say that ‘chinese ppl have it so easy as pocs’ but no one has it easy ? did anyone care when the met gala’s theme was ‘china: through the looking glass’ ? no. no one gave a shit. no one gave a shit when coldplay released that piece of shit song ‘princess of china’
stop appropriating our culture. stop stealing our culture. stop normalising the stereotypes that r attached with our culture. stop mixing us up w other east asians in media and popular culture. stop shaming us for being proud bcus no one else is proud of us. they want our clothes and our culture and our language but not us. that’s fucked up
@my fellow chinese ppl: call racists out. make ppl uncomfortable by using the word ‘chink’. wear ur traditional chinese clothes proudly. and most of all, don’t ever feel obligated to explain urself, bcus nothing will ever make u ‘not chinese enough’
Really, it was bound to happen sometime. a YA novel published– yes, sold in bookstores, about k-pop. please, a show of hands for who will expect the following.
a) it will be written by a non-asian author. b) it will contain the white savior trope. c) the main character will be white, and the narrative will display a flagrant amount of racist and culturally insensitive commentary– and go through a sparse amount of reconciliation for the fact, resulting in a half-assed excuse at labeling it a ~character flaw~
if you answered all the above, then you are absolutely correct. between stunning quotes in the novel like–
there is a lot to work with. snark aside, a few in depth reviews that do a more thorough explanation can be found
here,
here, and here– just a few out of a cursory search, but please, give them a read.
i encourage people who are willing to spread the word and bring the criticism to her attention through through tweeting her twitter account, public instagram account (though please, only on photos of the novel in question, and adressing the critisms about it. we do not condone harassment on her personal life. these are all links that have been publicly advertised as contact methods on her website.) or her goodreads page. this is something that happens over the course of dozens, hundreds of novels, and it’s important that we get the message out that it’s not acceptable.
that it’s an important issue considering this isn’t AFF fanfiction written by bored teens– this is an adult woman profiting off this book geared toward young adults, through publishing houses where asian authors are already so underrepresented. where asian protagonists and main characters are underrepresented. asian authors who have to rely seeing their culture popularized through the work of non-asian authors who couldn’t be bothered representing another culture in a respectful way.
there’s already a fantastic post out about the subject regarding a novel that made similar mistakes, and i encourage you to give it read. one particular quote stands out to me, though.“
if you are writing about a culture that is not your own, especially if you are white, you have to do your research. You have to speak to the communities you are writing about. You have to test the book with those communities, listen, and digest their feedback before releasing it to the public. You have to be aware of what has come before in terms of stereotypes, and you have to take care that you are not simply adding on to those stereotypes. Seriously consider if your book is helping, not hurting, representation. If you are diligent in your research it will show through; if you’re not, you can’t get upset when people come after you for portraying their culture in a disrespectful manner.
“
we don’t just want to be seen in your fantasy novels, where other people get to fabricate what they think we are in a mockery of diversity– we want to be heard.
there is a lot to work with. snark aside, a few in depth reviews that do a more thorough explanation can be found here, here, and here– just a few out of a cursory search, but please, give them a read.
