#Kuei-Jin | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rametarin · 2 years

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An explanation about Kuei-Jin, the 90s and other World of Darkness stuff.

Sooo. Yeah. If you watch H:tP stuff, you may have heard in the audiolog where Marckus goes pubbing that the resident weeaboo (”Grimmaline SMITH from NORFOLK, EYUU KAAYY”) is wrong about the, “special cool Asian vampire” type.

First, the bad/ Why Kuei-Jin from classic World of Darkness are so fucky.

It was the mid-late 90s. I believe, about.. 1997? 1998, maybe? Definitely between 98 and 2000, that-odd. While the more wealthy kids and more connected, worldly kids had more access to Japanese media in the US and Europe, the rest of us had no real interaction with it, and wouldn’t, until the mid-late 90s. The Sci-Fi Channel’s Saturday Anime block slowly helped introduce the idea of a translated Japanese animated phenomenon where it’d show movies and series’ of the time, going back to the 60s and 70s. The language barrier was bigger then, and sources to learn that stuff were fewer, and farther between. There wasn’t the big market for it, like today.

To most Westerners, especially former European colonies and Western Europe, Hiragana and Katakana were completely alien. The language itself was entirely incomprehensible because it didn’t function the way an Indo-European derived language worked, at all. That only added to the foreign mystique. It was like an entirely unsolvable puzzle. And in an era where the internet was just arriving at lower income bracket households because access was limited to using your phone lines (making you choose between having a phone and using the internet for hours of the day) and before the era of easy file sharing like Napster, Limewire and such, the world of anime was just plain not in everybody’s common vernacular. It wasn’t on TV, it wasn’t in most stores, nobody knew what the fuck you were talking about if you asked for it, and you had no basis of even asking for it, since it wasn’t around you.

But the culture was here, with some enlightened few even having access to Dragon Ball manga and anime translations or at least, subtitles, in the early 90s.

So in the span of a relatively VERY short amount of time, 7 years, culturally, the world of Japanese media and its misc. tropes became things western audiences became more familiar with. And, really. Speaking as someone that was a teenager in the 90s, it was a godsend. Violence and sexual themes were somewhat suppressed, socially. Legally speaking, you could have scantly clad 90s girls and guys everywhere, and hyperviolence had little to no taboos in western comics that children could read, outside how realistic it could look. But the sexual taboo remained. Yeah, the taboo among the western religious fundamentalist types, of course..

But also, western feminists.

The same western feminist that would demand free and exposed nipples on a thing because the female body was not an object to censor, would also say you weren’t allowed to ‘objectify’ and depict female bodies as a source of tittelation and fingerwag at “western society” for “sexualizing” the female body, “for profit.” They weren’t as openly criticial of capitalism for the sake of capitalism, at the time- they knew that was a hill that they’d die on trying to fingerwag morally and spread their message to other girls, so they kept it to being about female class autonomy and bodily integrity and how evil men were “exploiting iconic femininity for their own profit,” so it was kind of a tangential thing. The invisible conclusion. Instead they focused on how all the sexy female bodies (and they focused EXPLICITLY on THEIR bodies, female bodies, because transgenderism was not even in the conversation yet, because they didn’t care about male bodies but also ‘because WOMEN are the oppressed sex!’) were drawn and depicted by “cigar smoking old white MEN in a male dominated, female hostile, Old Boys Club industry.” And that meant those whom sentimentally agree but don’t do anything but regurgitate other peoples objections and vitriol would parrot those lines. That meant if you were a young lad buying a comic book with some big Lady Death boobies on it, and anybody in your community saw you buying it, they could assassinate your character by gossiping about how you were buying those, “sexist booby kids books” and that was their signal to lower your standing on the grounds you were a “sexist.” (synonymous with misogynist.) This war on comic boobies and the readers that enjoyed them drove a massive wedge between many young comic readers and comics, and it’d be some time before that stigma lifted.

So you had to leave it up to omission when dealing with girls your age. If they thought you read, “those childish, juvenile, nerdy, maladjusted comic books written by old, perverted, misogynistic white male trash,” then you were as good as a fedora wearing Nice Guy today. The stigma against Marvel and DC comics readers as pre-teens and teenagers as things explicitly for maturity stunted manchildren was rampant as a sentiment, and was impressed on those girls that wanted to seem mature for their age.

So, that meant you walked a minefield whenever you spoke to girls about comic books and many videogames, because all it took was a sort of verbal bee-dance from one before suddenly girls you knew that a few weeks ago LIKED those things, after meeting with the Problem Glasses and hearing her mean spirited tangent about how NO western comics were good because they all disrespected women and were run by men, would perform outrage and hating them now, and everybody that liked them. Whomever they knew liked them were given a silent grace period of omission from judgement before they might circumstantially check in to see if they’d, “grown up” in that time, and stopped actively buying or consuming that media, and if they happened to be in a situation to learn about a persons literature buying habits and learned you still bought comic books, or “bad videogames,” they’d de-person you and avoid you for a while. The same as they’d avoid someone they thought was a Ben Shapiro listener or a Mens Rights Awareness person. Whether or not that was true.

It was very rough. ANY depiction of a woman doing anything in a comic could net criticism and an eyeroll and hostility, whether it was playing to an unflatteringly vague trope, or it was upending and breaking the trope, it was “misogynistic white men” again. You couldn’t color inside the lines, that was wrong. Deviating outside of them, they’d call you out as just being the same evil creature trying to “lure unsuspecting women in by false change.” The absence of women in higher positions of writers or CEOs was all the proof they needed that western comics and media was misogynistic garbage, and they would not hear ANY word of the opposite.

But then something magical happened.

Japanese media. Where many mangakas were women, none of them were white, and as it was indigenous foreign media, you could not attribute that absolutely horrible sense that all misogyny and patriarchy they attributed to, “western society.” They could not aikido flip foreign comics because of their depictions of women, because, “that’s their culture.” They couldn’t patronize the story or source for just being inertia from judeo-christian western hegemony, because these were stories and arts explicitly from outside that trap. They couldn’t say Japan was “colonized,” and perpetuating western -isms and ignorance, because Japan objectively isn’t. Any objection they might have with Japanese culture, they’d have to raise as being purely criticisms of Japanese, and thus, Asian cultures. And they weren’t prepared to do that.

And then the icing on the cake; Japanese media’s depictions of femininity, the saccharine sweet, rainbows, crystals and girlish wands and big neotonous eyes, was eaten the fuck up like it was a vitamin that western women were deficient in. That nauseating Rainbow Briteness mixed with unrepentant Lisa Frank 3-Ring Binder style girlish femininity. Where if western comics did that, it was shit on as being patronizing and condescending to women, based on whom produced and created it.

Suddenly the rabblerousers that wanted to perch on media and hoot about capitalism and evil patriarchal white men objectifying women to iconically depict their bodies for profit and give them eating disorders and insecurity, and everything else rooted in cigar smoking Old Boys Clubs run by white men, had to do the unthinkable; White girls weren’t allowed to criticize foreign cultures, non-white people and especially not foreign cultures with indigenous populations and languages that they didn’t even know. They couldn’t speak from a rightously indignant and smarmy condescension about the cultural roots, because they opened themselves up to that aikido flipping and having their guts torn out around the water cooler, or at the swingset, by some other social clout jackal in a race to the bottom over whom could be the most progressive and conscientous and protective of oppressed minorities and their good name in the face of ignorance, that’d get on a soap box and point at her, make an effigy of, “her kind”- speak broadly about, “those kinds of western white people that just disregard foreign culture because it’s not English speaking, white or done by men,” and it didn’t matter the ACTUAL gripe of the person, the nodding group would collectively decide calling out a cultural supremacist white person was what was taking place here, that’s how they were going to perceive it, that’s how they were going to remember it, and at this point the person complaining about Japanese misogyny could do one of two things: 1.) Keep talking, insist they were right, try to explain themselves as in the right, and doubledown while everybody around them just saw them proving harder and harder that they just, “hated foreign cultures and non-whites,” and considered them inferior 2.) Stop talking, possibly talk about how they were going to see the error of their ways and, “be better” from now on.

The rabblerousers that would shit on and stigmatize western comics, were at a loss on how to shit on Japanese media, its often sophmoric and infantilizing depictions of female characters and femininity, and not seem like hypocrites in doing so. Plus, a lot of the stuff was so cute and pretty.

The voices quieted by the stigma of whites not being allowed to even comment on the prejudices and insensitivities of non-white foreign cultures because they weren’t European or necessarily patriarchal, and an entire population of folks that liked Japanese media in the west, flourished. They still retained the right to party poop on Marvel and DC and demand unless more women got to be western comic writers and artists and hammer at the industry from the inside for their values, but they could do absolutely nothing about the bottom shelf accessible, dime store hyperviolence, sexy Japanese manga and anime that any pre-teen could reach and enjoy under the noses of their parents.

Well that’s a big mouthful, but where do the Kuei-Jin fit in?

I’m getting to that.

So Sailor Moon and Magic Knight Rayearth and a bunch of anime made it cool and acceptable, even in the niche cartoon loving community, to like foreign media. First among the sort of hip and with it kids that could just watch foreign media because of close proximity to it, and then when some of them got the bright idea to slowly introduce it to primetime American broadcasting. First with things like Sci-Fi’s Saturday Anime, and then with Cartoon Network’s Toonami and Adult Swim.

So you had a culture where suddenly the sexual ratio of female roleplayers and writers got much larger and more fun. Anime was by nature more cavalier with how you could safely depict female bodies and sexuality- and by nature, it could get away with a HELL of a lot more things than western culture was allowed to do- socially. Not legally, in the tolerances and sentiments of the readership and audience. Norms in manga and Japanese comics and why it was okay in one thing, were different than norms from western ones, where a more, “critical lens” (wink wink) would be used, and conscience would scrutinize the legitimacy. The same kind of “boobs pop out” joke that was funny and cute and harmless and innocent in a Japanese comic book, might reap a frown and a casting down if it was so cavalierly done in a general audience western comic.

It was an unspoken atmosphere and a hypocrisy. Everybody knew it. Talking about it was not something that was going to be easy, or occur in any sort of centralized place, since many didn’t even want to acknowledge that there was a double standard and different tolerances and expectations. Because that’d admit racism was taking place here, where everything west was wrong and evil and because of “corporations and business and greed,” to be avoided, but anything Eastern was wholesome and valid and made with the best of intentions.

Enter: The Rationalizer. Powered by white guilt and a love of naked nipples in their cartoons, “very cultural” despite the fact the only other culture they care about is Japanese, they try to maintain that western feminism was right and appease them and their theories and their broadbrush generalizations of patriarchal cultures, while also stanning and steelmanning Japanese media, hard. By talking about how just so much better and more honest and more valid it was. Boob jokes in the west? Degrading, sexually objectifying, misogynistic trash poopoo immature yucky. Boob jokes in Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi Muyo? FUNNIEST SHIT I EVER SAW.

And they were just like that about everything and wanted you to know it. Sorta superfan that’d take up doing tai chi in a public park just to be watched and witnessed and asked about what they’re doing, so they can talk with authority about tai chi in the park. Because y’know, they’re so worldly. And in some cases, picking up Buddhism, Taoism or Shintoism, because they’re just, so spiritual.

Enter the whole, “superior Japanese culture,” meme, and using the katana as an example of the artisanship and romantic combination of world and spirit that was their manufacturing process. “Superior Nippon steel, folded a million times! They could cleave armor to pieces, not like crude European steels that weren’t folded at all and took no care in their creation!”

Yeah. An entire generation of young people went through this Cringy Culture Obsessor fan stage. Together. Superfans of Studio Ghibli, Shonen Jump and more.

Year of the Lotus was World of Darkness’ foray into this mental space when they tried to make like D&D and put Oriental Adventures into their otherwise urban fantasy modern roleplaying game. Where they took a million different names from a million different Asian cultures, languages and communities and made these Frankenstein’s Monsters of the Kindred of the East.

Kuei-Jin are not Cainites, per se. They’re not descended from Caine. Instead, Kuei-Jin in World of Darkness are more like Wraiths in form and function than western Vampires, but they’re also eaters of flesh, blood and soul, like vampires. Zombies and ghosts and why they exist and how they operate are very different from ones derived from European folklore and mainstream religious interpretations, in countries largely rooted in majority headspaces of Buddhism, Shinto and Taoism.

So Kuei-Jin have elements of the Hopping Dead, hungry ghosts and similar, simultaneously being different creatures from different folklore. They can spend the energy gained from drinking blood, like western vampires, but more painly can shift between Yin and Yang with time and experience to be more alive or more dead and reap the benefits of such. They can’t ghoul mortals (far as I know?) and they aren’t Embraced the way western vampires are. Rather, a mortal has to die to come back as a Kuei-Jin, and go to hell. Their own personal hell. Where their soul bisects itself into a self-destructive shadow, and the humanity. They claw their way back to the material world, inhabit their old body, and then hunt for flesh for the vital energies of the human living. Where other Kuei-Jin retrieve them and civilize them.

They aren’t like western vampires, at all, and they aren’t like Cainites in World of Darkness games.

Their powers are just so much more elegant. Unlike western vampires, they can harmonize with nature and the supernatural world around them. They don’t go from the hierarchy of how close they are to Caine for their ultimate power, they go from another kind of ladder entirely. The concept of their own personal enlightenment; their Dharma. And it functions like a Mage’s Arete.

A Kuei-Jin gaining a level of Dharma is like Pyotr, lowering his generation through Diablerie. Their chi pool gets bigger, how much they can burn in a turn gets bigger, the ceiling of mastery for their Disciplines gets larger (so rather than being limited to a 5 in a discipline, they can hit 6. Or higher, depending) and in all ways, a Kuei-Jin as depicted, is capable of more harmony, enlightenment and general spiritual goodness than any evil western poopoo Cainite foreign gaijin vampire..

And that’s kind of why people didn’t like them much. They overachieved making them so different that, quite simply, they made Asian lands dominated by a different set of supernatural rules. They made Asian Vampires and Asian Hungry Dead (wraiths) and Asian Changing Beasts (Hengeyokai) so much better than the evil, barbaric and stupid European counterparts. Talked about how Western Vampires were like that partially because the Consensus of Reality, made up of different cultural majorities and time giving regions their own cultural spheres, were limited and stifled and stagnant because of how oppressive and dogmatic and wrong Judeo-Christianity is compared to how spiritual and pure and wonderful cultures that practiced Buddhism and Taoism and Shintoism, how more Asian cultures were easier on the enviornment and the spirit world- and it was only western modernity, industry and “western style pollution” that was ruining Asia.

So after the Year of the Lotus, after the fans kind of played for a while, worked through the self-hate they were being fed from the high muckedy mucks in the counterculture (whom are, ultimately, no different from the mainstream muckedy mucks and their Disneyfication of social matters, they’re just indie and hipster about it and opposed to capitalism, durrdurrdurr) folks started complaining about how they couldn’t really mix the splats of Asia with the non-Asian ones, because when you mixed the fantasy spheres, the Asian ones always look like they have sunshine flying out of their assholes and are just more spiritually pure compared to the gothic horror and fuckups of everywhere else.

White-Wolf kind of walked back from Year of the Lotus material and made the creative decision to be agnostic about mixing the splats again, but they couldn’t totally walk back from what they made, so they just sort of marginalized the Eastern material and do what they could with it.

Now, having said that..

Yes, Year of the Lotus was an entire generation of pulp readers and gothic urban fantasy/horror readers cringy Weeaboo Phase, written by Alpha Weebs and consumed by westerners. Today we regard it as very culturally insensitive tripe, written and produced by privileged assholes that had no idea how terrible they were being by using the names for religious and spiritual concepts and characters without having been born in and raised by that culture or being part of it.

But many of the names and titles in it are NOT like plucking up names from Native American Mythology. You can’t gatekeep “evil westerners” from depicting, say, Makai and traditional Japanese ghosts, because the Japanese depict those in their media. And similarly, many Easterners that are part of a religion like Buddhism and Taoism would not object to comic books depicting their mythology, be they whimsical folklore ghosts or tales from their religious texts, would not say doing so is bad purely because the foreigners doing it are not of their religion, or aren’t Asian, making it bad.

Kuei-Jin could use a rethinking, I quite agree. While Hunter: the Parenting has chosen to completely eliminate them from their depiction of the franchise (as is their right to do as creators of their own story, using elements of World of Darkness lore as the basis) that’s quite a large step.

And ironically, this is one of those 90s things that happened through overcompensation and, attempts at representation, if you can believe it. Because ghosts and walking dead across Asia, with their historically dominant folklore and belief systems and magic, are most definitely different from classic European concepts of death, life and unlife. When Kindred of the East were first conceived of, they weren’t Kuei-Jin. They were Cainites, the same as any others.

However, they didn’t like the very Eurocentrist idea that all vampires should have to be descended from Caine, as their initial concept depicted. That would mean Vampires could be no older in mythology than Hebrew myths, which themselves were only a few thousand years old, compared to many Asian civilizations, which were comparatively older and had their own cultural myths of genesis and originators and founders. And instead, tried to make the Hopping Dead of Asian myths their own distinct creature, not bound by the ideas of western irredeemable sinners and unlife. More Buddhism, more Shintoism, more Taoism in the functions of how they functions.

In short, they wanted to do what they did with Christianity for Vampires and elevate Eastern religions to as important to the meta story and the metaphysics, as Judeo-Christian ones operating with V:tM. Believe it or not, this was an attempt to humble and marginalize the very Eurocentrist, Judeo-Christian perspective on being undead and supernatural, with the Eastern religions’ views on redemption and the difference between life from the supernatural.

And the mishmashing of names? Western ignorance, but with the intention of applying the same consolidation ignorance and insensitivity to Asian folklore and culture, that they did to European ones. The vampire clans of V:tM are all different cultures’ different and distinct depictions of vampires and blood drinking supernatural creatures, blended into one animal they decided would arbitrarily be descended from the first vampire, Caine.

We recognize what was done to Asian cultural diversity and myths and religion as a travesty, making salad out of so many different peoples folklore and naming conventions and merging things that shouldn’t be made the same creature. And yet a great many of you fuckers that say Europe has no culture and that whites themselves have no culture, would not say the same thing about combining a German Nosferatu with an Eastern European/Slavic Strigoii into the same creature, making them just variations with differing mechanics of the same kind of creature. A vampire.

You cannot reconcile the two. Either what was done to European myths of the walking dead was insensitive exploitation of culture, or what they did to different Asian myths wasn’t. If one is acceptable, so is the other. And at the end of the day, just because something is culture, does not make it untouchable or beyond criticism. Especially not if you say, “Well, white people don’t get to criticize Asian culture/mythology.”

So it’s okay to dislike the Kuei-Jin/Kindred of the East. Absolutely. They mix thematically with the rest of the World of Darkness like putting X-men in the same toybox you’d find Goku and Guyver, and to similar and predictable results of trying to play with them together in the land of make believe. The conflicting way they operate is just irreconcilably different.

But please keep some idea in mind exactly what your issue and problem is with the Kuei-Jin/Oriental Adventure type stuff. If your issue with Kuei-Jin is that they weren’t created or balanced in the meta with the rest of the World of Darkness, and seem more like some bridge towards the Exalted tabletop game that’s hinted to be related to World of Darkness spiritually, okay.

If your complaint is that white people shouldn’t be allowed to put Umbrella Ghosts from Japanese mytholgoy in their games or stories, or depict elements of Yokai or Makai or any religious figures from Buddhism, Taoism or Shintoism, kindly be quiet, the adults are talking. Your race and your culture should not be able to stop you from putting fictional creatures in your fictional work. Some dude in Japan shouldn’t need Europe’s or any sort of European group council’s permission to add a Slavic or Medditeranian monster like a vampire into their videogame or manga, any more than Fred from Ohio should need Japan’s official Ninja school’s permission to have Ninjas in his dime store comic book. And the fact some of those characters and mythological creatures play into real life religion’s figures means nothing; European style mythology and folklore about the Fey shouldn’t mean we refuse to make fiction about the Fey, and the reason that’s okay for us is NOT because, “well we’re colonizers and we colonized the world so that’s their culture anyway. So they can write stories about the Sidhe but we can’t write about Rakshasa.” I reject that nonsense. Unless you also think non-Christians shouldn’t be able to make demons in the vein of European mythological demons (animal horns, hooves, red skin), kindly walk back this terrible point of view.

Anglophone fans of World of Darkness that live in and descend from Asian cultures and populations, living in Asia, would be especially helpful to reimagine Kuei-Jin so they can retain the thematic folkloric elements and the blending of cultural and religious spirituality, without losing anything. It’s kind of what they’re doing with their reimagining of the Assamites into the Banu Haqim from the less than flattering interpretation of Arabian assassin vampires, and the very problematic Ravnos- previously described as “Gypsies” and now tied tentatively to Romani and India.

At their core, they’re just humans that died, went to a horrible netherworld and afterlife, and came back from the dead by splitting their soul into a self-destructive part and their own humanity. At the game’s core, Kuei-Jin are just supposed to be affected by the religion and culture of where they came from and what surrounds them- which is what shape regional depictions of supernatural creatures native to a region in the first place!

And at the end of the day, all of these depictions of folkloric monsters are rooted in ethnographic culture anyway. A Greek vampire will not be the same as a German vampire. And similarly, a Laotian Kuei-Jin may not be the same as a Viet Namese Kuei-Jin. How they’re named and the funny mechanics and nuances of how they work will change, but in spirit, they’ll be the same creature.

To be honest, I think the choice might be interesting. For those that think they’d rather Cainites just be the standard kind of vampire in the World of Darkness. Whether they play normal Cainites, or whatever name that will be chosen in place of Kuei-Jin that’s more culturally relevant and sensitive. Some people may prefer that no such creatures as what the Kuei-Jin are, exist, and everything just be more compatibly V:tM, but set in Asia. Others may like the idea of the vampire as depicted as a returned from the dead creature with a more Buddhist or Taoist point of view. Some people would just like to be included and not have the baggage of Asia just being obligatory Kuei-Jin territory.

Whatever the solution, we kind of need more game fans internationally. People that know their own homeland and language and geography and regional folklore and what sort of metaphysics and mythology it’s based on, and if they’d prefer the conventional antediluvian vampire clans, or the Hungry Ghost types.

To date, the reason why V:tM avoided even talking about Cainites even going further into Asia is because of the stigmas associated with Westerners writing fiction in Asia- to do so opens the author up to all sorts of criticism, real or knee-jerk, that they’re just doing it wrong. Sometimes by actually doing it wrong, sometimes it’s considered wrong on the basis of it being a white person doing it, whether educated and culturally sensitive, or not.

Whether you prefer Kuei-Jin or some more modern, cleaned up, less Weeaboo version of them as they are, or you’d like to see more Cainite style vampires making history in the World of Darkness across Asia, and supernatural night life across Asia, we could definitely use more Asian player and gamers input on this. The vast majority of the writers and staff for this western game will, unavoidably, be white and derived from Europeans. Just by virtue of the majority population where they live, and whom are already fans of WoD. But this just means fans internationally are needed now, more than ever. If only to put your input into it, and if you like it, rubber stamp the initiative. The loudest voices that will decry a thing will be doing it largely because it’s a western depiction of anything Asian in culture, and reason it can’t be done properly, only exploitatively and abusively, based purely on that fact.

That’s kind of the problem the game faces right now, and it’s one I think we, in the era of social media and multinational tabletop gamers, fiction and pulp readers and appreciators from a plethora of backgrounds, can work out.

But that’s the issue the Kuei-Jin face in modern WoD, and kind of what worked up to why they didn’t function with the rest of it. It can’t all just be attributed to insensitive white westerners. Some of it was just being swept up in a trend, some of it was well meaning respect towards native folklore to not justmake it Eurocentrism elsewhere, some of it was limitation of experiences.

Hope this helps. It’s by no means definitive and I encourage further research on your own about the subject.

#Kuei-Jin #World of Darkness #Vampire: the Masquerade #90s #old games made modern

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