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capricornsicle · 1 year

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So here's a comment I received on this post (I shared the promo picture of Amy Workman as Hikari Zhang for the Teen Wolf movie, as well as a behind-the-scenes of her that was posted on her official Instagram page).

(Image: Comment from Tumblr user @thyfggfy. It reads, "I don't see a problem as long as she looks the part. I mean isn't that the whole idea of acting? Pretending to be someone you are not. Should we also be mad that Stiles wasn't portrayed by a half Polish actor?")

My tags on this post, which thyfggfy responds to, are basically "hope they don't send her to the desert" and "there's a joke here about Hollywood assuming all East Asians are the same".

To take things one at a time, the first statement. I am assuming none of this is meant in malice, and is genuine, as I see no reason to assume otherwise.

"She looks the part." But does she? Amy Workman is a Chinese-American actor. Hikari Zhang is a Chinese-Japanese character. There's a similar situation with Arden Cho (Korean-American) as a Korean-Japanese character. Can you hire any East Asian to play another, or to play a mixed East Asian character when they are not mixed?

Well, yes. You can hire anyone to play anyone. But is it good? No. Because saying a Chinese actor looks enough like Japanese to play the character is like to say a Russian is basically Serbian or Bulgarian or Polish or Swedish. It's not the same, and people will get offended if you assume it is. Especially when there is race involved, because it's so common in the US (where the show/movie is made) to hear "all Asians look the same" or "all brown people look the same" or "all poc look the same", or so on. A close Chinese friend of mine is often asked to translate something from Japanese or Korean. I am often called Mexican (I am mixed Native American/Cree and Arab/Syrian). It's rude, and it's racism.

Not to mention, you can circumvent this problem easily. Either send a casting call for a Chinese-Japanese character, if one is needed, or change the character to be just Chinese when you hire a Chinese actor. I like the second, as Amy Workman is fantastic and I'm excited to see her in the movie. It's not like kitsune is specific to Japan. In Japan there's きつね/kitsune, in China there's 狐狸精/huili jing, in Korea there's 구미호/kumiho or gumiho, in Vietnamese there's 狐狸精/hồ ly tinh. All are fox spirits. So why keep the character mixed Japanese? I think because, to Hollywood, and especially to the Teen Wolf writers, it's close enough, right? But it's really not.

Next, "acting is pretending". You're right, it is. In grade school productions, I pretended to be Brutus in Julius Caesar, a forest fairy in Midsummer Night's Dream, a man with a broken hip in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and, in other plays, variously dead, grieving, injured, drunk, old, young, rich, poor, a traitor, a villain, a hero, a martyr, and so on. But I was pretending to be a kind of person having a certain experience. I wasn't pretending to be another race. Because that is a bad thing.

Lastly, "should we therefore insist Stiles is half Polish?". Well, first of all, he's not. What we know about Stiles' ancestry is this: he is named after his mother's father, his grandfather, who is Mieczysław, a Polish name. That's all we know. We don't know if his maternal grandfather is Polish or he was a first- or second- or x-generation immigrant or anything else. We don't even know if this person was Polish, or if it was another Slavic country. We certainly can't say that Stiles is half-Polish. We don't know that his maternal grandmother is, we don't know that his mother is. But it's fair to assume that Stiles is around 1/4 Polish and his grandfather is a first- or second-generation immigrant.

And because literally all we know about Stiles and being Polish is a name, we can't say that the character himself would identify as Polish, would speak the language, would practice Polish culture. We simply don't know. Fandom likes to assert that fanon and headcanon is basically canon, but headcanon does not make absolute truth, and it doesn't serve in place of canon. We can't assume a level of Polish heritage is absolute fact that may or may not exist.

That's not to say that you can't headcanon Stiles as being thoroughly Polish, because you can do whatever you want, and that's why there are such excellent fanworks as this one by KuriKuri (a fantastic Sciles fic that heavily involves Polish language, food, and overbearing grandmothers -- go read it!). I enjoy anything that expands upon the world characters live in.

But another important thing here is that Polish is not a race. It's a nationality. You can cast one white American guy to play another white American guy no problem, because you can't visually tell one white American from another. The only real differences are language -- there are dialects and accents in English that are harder to imitate and, depending on what kind of story you're telling, might have benefited from a different actor or a change to the character.

And if casting for a character who is European-American, you can often benefit from an actor who is the same, especially if the story involves them speaking the language a lot, but it doesn't necessarily mean you need an actor of the same heritage. For example, while Crystal Reed is a great actor, she did not make a very convincing French woman in 5x18 Maid of Gevaudan, and as a native French speaker I would have preferred if they had taken some measures to alleviate listening to a fake French accent that wasn't very good -- an American accent would have done less to take me out of the story, or if her lines had been dubbed over by a French speaker, or whatever. But it's not hurting anyone to have someone do an unconvincing French accent, because French is not a race which is often discriminated against and subject to racism. The same does not apply for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean actors and characters, because racism is always hurting people.

In fanwork, though, you can do whatever you want. Let me not be maliciously misquoted as saying anything but. You can write characters with how much or how little heritage you like, because you're not tracking ancestry, you're telling a story, through writing, through art, through audio, through any medium. But it is vitally important to recognize fanwork as just that. Fan-made work that appreciates some part of the source material, and fills in a gap that the source doesn't go into depth on -- or tears it down and rebuilds it, for fix-its and AUs and the like. Fanwork isn't canon, and you cannot treat it like canon. Everyone's interpretation of the source is valid and acceptable, because it is an individual, personal interpretation they have chosen to share. Biased? Often. Prejudiced? Unfortunately, also often. But acceptable? Always.

Though when it comes to Teen Wolf, well... A lot of the time people who headcanon Stiles as more Polish than he appears to be on the show also refuse to believe that Scott is Latino. His mother's maiden name is Delgado, both his parents are Latino, the actor is Mexican. And yet so often fandom will, on the one hand, call Stiles Polish and talk about his heritage and culture, refer to Derek's "Native American cheekbones" (I wish this was fake. I wish I did not read the post that talked about this. Sometimes I hate it here.) and assume based on a later-retracted tweet by Hoechlin that he was learning more about his ancestry and believed there was something Native American there (and I have a lot of posts about dubious Native American "ancestry") that Derek is therefore Native American (I love fanwork as much as the next person, but No.), or blah blah blah, and insist that Scott cannot be Latino.

And of course there is a lot of racism there, because there is a lot of racism in this fandom. I don't think the vast majority of people are doing it on purpose (although I can think of a few people who have all the resources to know better and remain obstinate about being a tool), but it's impossible not to notice when you look for it.

If fans want to talk about characters having interesting heritage to connect with, how about the Hispanic/Latino heritage of Scott McCall/his family (actor/mentioned in canon), Erica Reyes (by surname), Nolan Holloway (actor is Latino/Caxcan), Gabe Valet (actor is Brazilian), Josh Diaz (surname/actor is Brazilian), Theo Raeken (actor is Penobscot tribe -- like, actually a member), Tracy Stewart (actor is Chinese -- and while there's a lot to dislike about Kelsey Asbille her character remains interesting), Danny Mahealani (actor/character is Hawaiian), Corinne/The Desert Wolf (actor is Latina), Nathan Pierce (actor is Singaporean), the Calaveras (all Mexican), Hayden Romero (surname/actor is Latina), Jiang (actor is Chinese), Satomi Ito (Japanese), the Yukimuras (Korean and Japanese).

The reason no one seems to want to write about these characters, and Stiles is always the center of attention, even in posts like these where he was never even implied? Well, to paraphrase @princeescaluswords, I'm sure it has nothing to do with race.

#this deleted my entire post the first time. hate it here btw #hellsite moment #to clarify: this post is for educational purposes NOT hate/shame/etc. do not be a dick on my behalf #and in general. a hard concept for some of this fandom #teen wolf #fandom problems #fandom racism #teen wolf fandom problems #feel free to reblog/comment/send asks/message me (in good faith) about any of this!#I love to talk to other fans in a positive and constructive way #also if anyone has recs for work exploring the heritage/culture of the aforementioned characters please let me know! love to see stuff #new post bc I don't want this to clog a nice post about a new character

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