A crazy handful of...something, anyway.

[lady_ganesh]

International Blog Against Racism week is July 27 through August 2. oyceter is especially looking for writers outside the US and non-English speakers, because "International" is the first word! She's also looking for volunteers to find and tag links.

Verb Noire is raising funds to go to WorldCon.

I am considering writing a Anime and Manga: Not what you

Comments

[lady_ganesh]

All the characters in anime with non-black hair are white!

How could I have forgotten that one?

[smillaraaq]

And even the dark-haired characters are mostly white too if their hair isn't poker-straight, or their eyes are big and round, or they're not wearing Obviously Ethnic Clothes! *headdesk*

Stuff I've heard other than that obvious fail: It's all porn. It's all particularly disgusting, violent, and/or kinky porn. It's deeply sexist. It's too violent. It's nothing but sparkly big-eyed girls being perky and musclebound dudes beating each other up, or monsters and giant robots. It's just stupid kiddy stuff and the only adults who like it are perverts or hopelessly immature and shallow. A lot of it's the same sort of stereotypes you tend to hear about Western comics and animation, basically, only amplified by an additional layer of "Japanese culture is so silly/kinky/sexist/unspeakably weird"

[rachelmanija]

In the Avatar movie, they are white even if their hair is straight, their eyes are not big and round, and they are wearing Obviously Ethnic Clothes. GRRRRR...

[jaina]

Totally write this.

[lady_ganesh]

I believe I shall.

[fuzipenguin]

The most common stereotype about anime/manga I run across is that it's for kids.

Second most common is that if it's not for kids, it's for males - because anime/manga is all about fighting or robots, or something "masculine". (Whatever! I'm about the biggest Yu Yu Hakusho fan there is. And it's not for the 10 seconds of Yusuke-Keiko screen time. This is obviously the one I run across and disagree with the most; can you tell?)

Thirdly, it's cartoon porn.

[lady_ganesh]

I know that not all the people you're complaining about are the same but I do like how often the 'kids' and 'cartoon porn' run together at times. It's all really juvenile cartoon porn!

[gryphonsegg]

I've heard all the ones that you and the first five commenters mentioned. One specific subtype of the sexist complain I haven't seen mentioned yet is that all female characters in anime are stupid, helpless, infantilized ditzes. Another is that it's all not just sexist but violently misogynist and female characters are there so that viewers can enjoy watching a "worthless" girl get tortured. Also, there's a stereotype that tentacle rape hentai makes up the majority of anime.

[lady_ganesh]

Tentacle rape hentai will definitely figure in this somewhere.

[gryphonsegg]

Back when I used to follow US comics blogs more than I do now, I kept seeing posts about whether US companies should adopt manga-like conventions for their comics to attract more young readers and female readers. And the people who were most ardently against this idea or who mocked it the most mercilessly usually made it obvious that they had absolutely no idea what the conventions of manga were beyond "big eyes," "schoolgirls," and "tentacles." Some of them went on and on about "shoju" manga, which I came to realize was probably a misspelling of "shoujo," by which they meant any manga that had a young female character in a prominent role. They seriously did not differentiate girls as identification figures in actual shoujo, girls as age-appropriate crush objects in shounen, girls as kid sister figures in manga aimed at adults, girls as age-inappropriate objects of desire in suggestive titles for men, and girls as fetishized sex objects in porn. All got lumped into the category of "shoujo," "shojo," or "shoju" manga. And all of

[lady_ganesh]

Although doing that would probably help sales more than the strategy they've got now!

[daegaer]

I haven't heard too many stereotypes about anime and manga other than a general and not very vocal perception that all animation and graphic novels are for kids and therefore adult readers are childish. There seems to be defensiveness against this perception that leads to readers pointing out that manga exist for all ages in Japan, even if the subject is only tangential. (My students will let me know such manga exist, very earnestly. I nod, in a similarly earnest way ;-) This "childish" perception is definitely not held by book shop workers, who seem to identify me straight off as someone who needs to be chatted to about manga :-)

[lady_ganesh]

I love the bookstore people who 'know.' :D