Fear of a Black (Fantasy) Planet

[tablesaw]

No time for a list of things just yet.

The casting for the live-action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender has been announced. See if you can spot a problem:

Comments

[tahnan]

Let me throw an idea out there, not because I believe it necessarily but just to see if it floats.

Japanese animators aren't trying to make their characters look Japanese, any more than American animators are trying to make their characters look Caucasian. Japanese animators are trying to make their characters look neutral, which they (and their immediate audience) read as "Japanese". Therefore, an American looking at anime will see neutral-looking characters, characters intended to look neutral, and will therefore read them as "Caucasian", i.e. their own personal default. There's nothing per se wrong with that: in fact, to read the characters as "other/foreign" would be to add something to them that their creators didn't intend.

Now, there are flaws in this argument. I think the biggest is the acceptance of the assumption that Americans should see neutral as "Caucasian". And one might wonder why Shama Shmal Shayma M. Night wouldn't see "neutral" as "Indian

[rikchik]

I think this is exactly right - as an anime/manga fan, I've learned some of the signifiers for "this is actually a Caucasian character" (blue eyes, larger eyes etc. - yellow or (in b&w manga) un-inked hair often just means bleached or brown hair).

That said, IIUC Avatar is an American production and, to me, these characters are definitely drawn to be non-WASPs.

[tahnan]

OK, so the fact that this is an American production company puts a twist on it that...um, I actually get lost in a Hofstadter-like strange-loop feedback. If they're drawn to be non-WASPs, but they're created by Americans and, perhaps even more relevantly, voiced by the likes of Tyler, Baker, Whitman, De Sena, Mark Hamill...

Again, I get dizzy. Also, I've never seen the show, so I'm not really in a position to judge.

[tsubaki_ny]

They did have an astounding number of Asian-American and black voice actors on the show, though. Mako, Dante Basco (and one of his brothers), Daniel Dae Kiim, Phil LaMarr, George Takei, Jennie Kwan, Serena Williams (!), Sab Shimono, Takayo Fischer, George Chung, Kevin Michael Richardson... some others

[bossymarmalade]

The argument doesn't hold because by and large, it does not work reciprocally. "Neutral" usually translates to "white"; this is why casting sheets will specify "all races" for some characters and make no racialized distinction on others, because those are understood as the "default" of white. Whereas actors of colour, even when auditioning for parts that are *meant* to be ethnically diverse, are often dismissed as looking "too ethnic".

And one might wonder why Shama Shmal Shayma M. Night wouldn't see "neutral" as "Indian".Because he lives in the Western world, and the message that we get every day is that Indian is NOT the default. (Also, your thing with not knowing how to spell his name is really uncalled for and really kind of horribly ironic in a post about how neutral=/=white

[tahnan]

To clarify:

And one might wonder why Shama Shmal Shayma M. Night wouldn't see "neutral" as "Indian".

Because he lives in the Western world, and the message that we get every day is that Indian is NOT the default. (Also, your thing with not knowing how to spell his name is really uncalled for and really kind of horribly ironic in a post about how neutral=/=white.)

The question I asked alludes, in part, to Oujochan's post in which she asked: "Dear M. Night Shyamalan: When you wake up in the morning do you hate yourself for being brown?"-another way, I think, of asking the same question as "Why doesn't he see 'neutral' as 'Indian'?" I didn't say that the question didn't have an obvious answer; merely that the argument I offered above raises that question. And it's a particularly relevant question here.

Also: with the name, I was being deliberately ironic. (Note, for instance, that the post a few comments above calls him "M. Night". I should have gone ahead and mentioned that the SciFi channel also passed, for similar too-sci-fi-ish

[tablesaw]

Beyond the "white is the default" problem in America, your argument forgets cases where the Japanese artists intend for the audience to read their characters as both neutral/non-othered and Japanese. Neither is more important than the other. (Also, Thorn is directly responding to a perspective that not only interprets manga/anime characters as Western and White, but believes that the Japanese artists are drawing characters with the intention of having them perceived as Western and White, often as a launching pad to psychologically evaluate Japanese artists or Japanese culture at large

[kar3ning]

I <3 the Earthsea stories, and was so pissed off about the SciFi Channel movie. I don't remember there being any overt racial issues, but I always thought it was interesting that LeGuin flip-flopped the usual fantasy-novel-race-relations: the civilized people in the Inner Lands are some shade of brown (I always pictured Ged looking sort of Native-American), and the white people are the scary barbarians.

[trishalynn]

I felt the same way you did when I was reading Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, and I had to constantly remind myself that Anansi, Fat Charlie, and Spider were all three of them black. Because to me, they were British first, and to me British has almost always meant "white."

(Wow... I feel so weird coming across as being racist or too much of a damn "banana.")

[tablesaw]

Being honest and aware of what's happening in your own head is an important part of changing it, or at least mitigating its damage.

[radiotelescope]

I don't know if I buy a parallel between the Earthsea and Avatar situations. Ged was dark-skinned, but there was none of the cultural association with any particular non-white culture we know, *nor* any association with the position of nonwhites (compared to white-dominated culture

[tablesaw]

I know these threads are getting difficult to handle, but I think I address your issue in these responses above. This is not merely an aspect of to what extent you accept changes to a work in an adaptation. It's a much larger issue

[radiotelescope]

I grant that there's a big issue and I'm not addressing all of it. (Which, okay, maybe I should step back and read more threads.)

(Harry Potter is a British character in our Britain -- fictional, but via secret history, which implies that it *looks* the same. I was trying to comment specifically about secondary-world fiction as opposed to forms of this world.) (The Doctor... is too many layers of unthinking assumption for me to easily pick apart.)

[tablesaw]

(Harry Potter is a British character in our Britain -- fictional, but via secret history, which implies that it *looks* the same. I was trying to comment specifically about secondary-world fiction as opposed to forms of this world.)
While the Potter Britain may "look" the same, that is different from how it could or should be "shown" in film; but that's an issue equally applicable to any real real location. But how "Britain" should look is very different from how the protagonists should look. (This may be a slight shift in the argument you were expecting, since I'm going to focus on main characters (like the ones cast above) not the worls as a whole.) Even if you argue that the population of Hogwarts (as portrayed by extras) should mirror the demographics of the UK, that doesn't apply to how the protagonist should be portrayed. The story (and the camera) focused on Harry, his two best friends, his schoolhouse enemy, his headmaster, his favorite teacher, his least favorite teacher, and his mortal enemy. How these particular actors are

[delux_vivens]

Therefore, an American looking at anime will see neutral-looking characters, characters intended to look neutral, and will therefore read them as "Caucasian", i.e. their own personal default.

Um, neutral? Really? Because all americans see caucasian as their own personal default? Really?

[tahnan]

Crud! I utterly misspoke there. What I really meant to say was
Therefore, a Caucasian looking at anime will see neutral-looking characters...and will therefore read them as "Caucasian", i.e. their own personal default. [...] Now, there are flaws in this argument. I think the biggest is the acceptance of the assumption that Americans American Caucasians should see neutral as "Caucasian".
I was trying to give a fairly broad argument, and very much got that wrong. I certainly didn't mean to suggest "Caucasian is the default American"-in fact, the point of the flaw I suggested above is that even Caucasian Americans should know better than to think of Caucasian as a default. But I screwed up the rhetorical point, and as a result, that's exactly what I did say. My apologies.

(I fear that what happened was that I was reading the various essays on how Japanese people, being Japanese, will view anime characters, and how this differs from foreigner viewing-and as a result, I mentally did do exactly what I shouldn't have done, namely