Wait, what?
I'm feeling a little confused right now... also irritated.
See, Marvel comics is bringing the Monkey King into their pantheon. THIS IS CONFUSING. It's also leaving a really bad taste in my mouth, since, as shown on scans_daily, his appearance just screams "stereotypical Chinese!" (And good lord, what happened to comic book art? When did it all turn into bad photoshoppery?)
Anyway. I'm conflicted. Can we have any nod to the original character besides the nyoi-bo? (Monkey without his nyoi-bo would be like Thor without Mjolnir: just wrong.) On the one hand, where's the dude's crown? Tiger skin? Cloud? General monkeyness? He's not human, people! He's the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, the Monkey King, born from a rock on a mountain. He's not human. On the other hand, I can imagine the PR nightmare that would result from making a Chinese superhero resemble a monkey.
The thing that's really irritating me, though, is the queue. The queue to indicate Chineseness is getting really old. Queues are a Manchu hairstyle, forced on Han Chinese as a sign of Manch dominance during the Qing dynasty [to their credit, the Manchu were generally decent rulers, liked writing things down (much to the delight of later historians) and really did try to eradicate the persistent practice of footbinding.] The character could maybe have a queue if he was supposed to be a character from some alternate-reality Qing dynasty timeline, but I think he's supposed to fit in with the modern Marvel storyline, which doesn't take place between the 1640s and 1912. Journey to the West was written in the Ming dynasty, the last Han Chinese dynasty, and men sure didn't have queues then, and no one in China has a queue now (if any had survived past the Communist takeover, I'm sure the campaign to eradicate the Four Olds would have done away with them in a rather gruesome manner) so Marvel giving their Monkey King a queue is just plain lazyness.
I have no idea why I'm complaining, really. It's not like Thor's costume looks anything like Viking clothing. Then again, there isn't a history of anti-Viking prejudice in the US, following their mass immigration to our shores in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (...what? You've never heard of San Francisco's Vikingtown, built during the gold rush in an unpleasant little swamp on the edge of the city? It's worth a visit. You can take the cable car up to the iconic gate, and admire the longhouse-inspired architecture...)
Entry originally posted at annoyedwabbit on Dreamwidth.org
See, Marvel comics is bringing the Monkey King into their pantheon. THIS IS CONFUSING. It's also leaving a really bad taste in my mouth, since, as shown on scans_daily, his appearance just screams "stereotypical Chinese!" (And good lord, what happened to comic book art? When did it all turn into bad photoshoppery?)
Anyway. I'm conflicted. Can we have any nod to the original character besides the nyoi-bo? (Monkey without his nyoi-bo would be like Thor without Mjolnir: just wrong.) On the one hand, where's the dude's crown? Tiger skin? Cloud? General monkeyness? He's not human, people! He's the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, the Monkey King, born from a rock on a mountain. He's not human. On the other hand, I can imagine the PR nightmare that would result from making a Chinese superhero resemble a monkey.
The thing that's really irritating me, though, is the queue. The queue to indicate Chineseness is getting really old. Queues are a Manchu hairstyle, forced on Han Chinese as a sign of Manch dominance during the Qing dynasty [to their credit, the Manchu were generally decent rulers, liked writing things down (much to the delight of later historians) and really did try to eradicate the persistent practice of footbinding.] The character could maybe have a queue if he was supposed to be a character from some alternate-reality Qing dynasty timeline, but I think he's supposed to fit in with the modern Marvel storyline, which doesn't take place between the 1640s and 1912. Journey to the West was written in the Ming dynasty, the last Han Chinese dynasty, and men sure didn't have queues then, and no one in China has a queue now (if any had survived past the Communist takeover, I'm sure the campaign to eradicate the Four Olds would have done away with them in a rather gruesome manner) so Marvel giving their Monkey King a queue is just plain lazyness.
I have no idea why I'm complaining, really. It's not like Thor's costume looks anything like Viking clothing. Then again, there isn't a history of anti-Viking prejudice in the US, following their mass immigration to our shores in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (...what? You've never heard of San Francisco's Vikingtown, built during the gold rush in an unpleasant little swamp on the edge of the city? It's worth a visit. You can take the cable car up to the iconic gate, and admire the longhouse-inspired architecture...)
Entry originally posted at annoyedwabbit on Dreamwidth.org