#sorry its kind of confusing but yknow what so is the source material so

[tai-janai]

vague idea of what happens when you reach the end

[hedorah]

What's wrong with orientalism in TMNT? || It's actually more probable that the creative team of most media don't go through fans' content, to avoid fans claiming plagiarism if the content does something a fan has also done. I'm not saying all creative teams stay away from their fans' content, just it's more likely they avoid it. Unless you have significant proof? || Your blog's cursor animation is cool.

1. not to say that tmnt is "irredeemable" or anything like that, but orientalism and anti-asian stereotyping has been a bit of a recurring problem throughout the franchise history ('87 especially... some of the lotus blossom episodes were hard to watch). for the last ronin lost years issues in particular, now that mike is going through parts of asia (japan, korea, china, mongolia so far), it really kind of becomes evident when taking into consideration how each country is depicted. more under cut cuz this got looooong

the second and third issues that partially took place in korea especially bothered me, since i'm ethnically korean with a family history on both sides of the border. unified korea is either portrayed like one of those neon, oversaturated, exoticizing pictures of east asian cities (see issue 2's cover) or dirty and full of violence, corruption, and criminal activity, depending on which side of the border mikey's on at the moment. the orientalism here is in this portrayal of koreans as a dirty, violent other for the turtles to judge and beat up. hell, donnie even calls them uncivilized:

what the hell man, i thought you were cool. also, the writers saw fit to... turn all of what was china into a nuclear wasteland after a 9.6 earthquake in beijing? despite china being massive??? this is a confusing decision and i can only wonder why it was made

the parts of the comic that take place in japan and mongolia feature characters that seemingly exist only to help mikey on his journey and train him. i fucked up here and accidentally deleted a huge chunk of this paragraph, and i'm neither japanese nor mongolian, so i can't and will not get into the specifics because i really don't want to put my foot in my mouth talking about the specifics of cultures and ethnic groups that i'm not a part of

either way, asians in the last ronin: lost years are portrayed as an "other", a contrast to our american (mike explicitly refers to himself as "american" in issue 2) protagonists. they're either violent goons for action scenes or wise, hospitable mentors for mikey to learn from, but so far we haven't seen many asian characters outside of these two roles

unfortunately i think orientalism is something thats kind of hard to avoid in a franchise like this, where its primarily non-asian, american creatives writing stories that feature asian (japanese) characters and cultures for almost 40 years running (i checked, and i think there's only one asian american working on tlr:ly as an associate editor). ideally creatives would avoid orientalism and instead treat asian characters like actual people instead of "the other", but...well. yknow. to clarify, it's perfectly fine to like tmnt, hell i'm a MASSIVE fan with a decent collection of comics on my shelf. but i think its something that we as fans should be mindful of when engaging with the source material and fan works. sorry if my explanation is a little scattered, i need to go get dinner rn haha ^^"

2. at the very least, one of the artists scrolls through the lost ronin hashtag, he liked and rted my picture of lost years issue #1 and my ronin figures' boxes. i didn't really mean like fanfic or anything like that, just casual social media stuff, and so i didn't really want to bother the actual creators because lord knows how the twitter algorithm works. shit's dark magic to me and if i got pqrted id cry and wail because twt confuses me [exaggeration]

3. ty! i'm surprised it still works after all these years haha, i think i got it from this site