Tumgik
#anon i'm sorry your heritage isn't represented more!!
not-poignant · 1 year
Note
hearing you do research into singaporean culture for m&m makes me so excited! i have heritage there and almost never see southeast asia represented in things i read/watch
Hi anon!
I've been to Singapore! It's a beautiful country, and one of the best places to celebrate Lunar New Year :D I don't know if I'll ever be able to travel like that again with Covid, but if I can, Singapore is actually really high on the list of places we have to get back to soon.
Perth, Western Australia is actually closer to Bali, Indonesia than it is to Sydney, Australia (and it's about the same distance to Singapore as it is to Sydney), and as a result, we actually have a huge proportion of SE Asian folk who live here, and a lot of SE cuisine and culture we can access that folks have brought over with them. So the foods that Kadek mentions in Falling Falling Stars are all foods I'm familiar with. Likewise, it's very common for many Perth folk to fly to Bali and nearby regions for holidays and work, because it's a closer flight than, well, other places in our own country. I have a friend who's working in Singapore right now, and I'm not sure if he's coming back! He loves it too much. (Though not the driving, so much dsalkjfsa).
Due to a combination of having some great friends who have SE Asian heritage and being able to share dinner with their families and hobbies and stay over as a kid etc, and just finding other places and foods interesting, and enjoying learning new things, it's been fun to include more of that in my writing in ways that are hopefully respectful. It also just feels natural in the sense that... for me, in my part of the world, we have more to do with say, Southeast Asia than we do many other cultures, and it's annoying that when people represent, god, 'eastern cultures' in fantasy, it's always like... idk, samey, if it's done by white authors. I'm hoping to avoid that, and not do it terribly. I'm definitely more focusing on Indonesia, and then aspects of Singapore as well, including how cosmopolitan and multicultural it is, while still having a strong sense of identity and place.
Fun fact, I share a timezone with Singapore, but I don't share a timezone with any other state in Australia.
Australia is big and weird.
17 notes · View notes
literalite · 2 years
Note
tldr: i apologise, i'd like you to understand why i went 👀 over something many view as progressive / inconsequential, i understand why you do it and i wanted to know that you didn't subtly hate (i only saw one of your works).
hi i'm that "don't racebend characters" anon from before. i'd like to apologise for speaking rudely and making you and your fans feel that way because it was insensitive of me, especially towards your community.
if it helps at all, i'm an asian living in a country as the majority race at almost 80% of the total population. i've never been discriminated against / oppressed by ANYONE before so please excuse me. i only came across your blog just 24 hours ago while scrolling through my "stuff for you" thing. after seeing your reactions i ran around reddit, dominated by people from usa which has history rich with racial discrimination who have perspectives closer to yours (the only thing i know important to the country lol), reading opinions about making originally japanese characters another race / mixing their heritage. and now i think it's absolutely fine to do anything with art if it isn't made with conscious or subconscious offensive thoughts ("AAA is better than BBB so i'll make this BBB thing AAA / give this BBB thing AAA origins so it makes them less bad"). now, i just want to confirm that you're racebending without any discriminatory idea against any race.
as someone living where i am, i don't care personally about usa, but get what's going on in the east. lemme point out that 1. japan doesn't have huge communities that actively hate on minorities in their own country unlike usa 2. ~90% of people there are the exact same race so nobody cares because there's almost nothing to represent other than themselves + indigenous peoples? there are only two (2) extremely minor non-japanese characters in jjks. that's why your art made me 👀 it seemed pointless to make a character with canonically full majority lineage (gojou) part minority, but i'd understand if you created it for yourself since it makes you happy. i'm sorry for not understanding this in usa's context before (my own country's media had blackface backlash from the public (most majority went "that's just wrong" while the minorities had a more vigorous reaction) but the gov very powerful here. they got gagged within a week then gov mommy fixed everything)
it's so long because i wanted to give you culture shock like what the people four years ago on reddit did to me hehheh
because this is such a long ask i'm going to respond at length under the cut so i'm not inconveniencing anyone
hi! after reading this through like a handful of times to make sure i'd understood it correctly, i'm going to preface this by correcting some assumptions i think you may have made in error about me. i think you think that i'm black and american, of which i'm neither- i'm fully asian like you but unlike you i've been living in australia which (like the usa) is a majority white country my entire life. there is where our experiences differ. i have experienced racial discrimination, both on a personal and on a systemic level, and i have watched racial discrimination been inflicted of differing levels upon both complete strangers and the people i love alike. i've had to dismantle my own socially implanted racial biases against myself and other people- it's still an ongoing process and i suspect it will take a very long time. i am not perfect but i am at least trying to be self aware enough to address issues within myself that i can solve. i'm capable of antiblackness, i'm capable of xenophobia and i'm capable of internalised racism. however i can tell you pretty confidently i didn't make gojo black out of some bias against japan/japanese people. that would be incredibly backhanded of me considering my country of origin is basically a little south west of japan and i have a lot of respect for the country and the culture, from what i've learned through my school(s) and my japanese friends. so to answer you, no this was not done out of hate, subtly or otherwise.
what i've done with gojo is not out of a desire to (and i'm gonna quote from your ask so i know i'm addressing this correctly) "create(d) it for yourself since it makes (me) happy." i don't see myself in gojo, whether canon or my own headcanon. i made gojo black and japanese because thats my own personal interpretation of his character influenced to edits and art i've seen of him in the past that were done by black people who had seen themselves in him. i've absorbed their vision of that character and found myself agreeing with it because simply i think it's cool. i don't think gojo is better or worse for being (in canon) a nonblack character- that would be counterproductive to myself. i don't consider what i've done here blackface, i've just reworked a character to match the version of him that i have in my head, something i've actually done quite a few times before. if we were talking about my vietnamese albedo, yeah i did do that just purely to make me happy- i do see myself in him, and i disregarded his (probably?) white ethnicity with explicit intent to erase and replace that part of him with something i preferred more. this isn't what i've done with gojo- i've maintained his japanese ethnicity. the edit is at an angle and it's a bit hard to see his face in its entirely but i assure u i made that man blasian lmao. there's no intent of erasure, just addition that neither negates nor lessens the canonical content.
i appreciate your efforts to educate yourself through reddit, but i think you've missed the point a bit. people of minorities like myself and the black people who gave me the inspiration for blasian gojo edit the source material to see ourselves in it. we don't get a lot of representation otherwise- and when it is done it usually is created by people who are more concerned with enforcing outdated and prejudiced ideals about us than making well rounded and nuanced characters, a privilege that people who aren't minorities often take for granted. we don't get a selection of characters who look like us and are well developed enough to be more than caricature. we literally just don't. so what we do is alter source material in our favour, and for characters who are already poc (like a lot of anime characters) it rarely comes to the point where we remove their original ethnicity entirely. i did not strip gojo of being japanese - he still is. i'm racebending but at no one's expense.
16 notes · View notes