In defense of Young Super Team and ignoring cultural archetypes.
A few days ago majingojira posted here about DC’s Super Young Team characters and why they rub people the wrong way. In the post he distills the problem down to these two points:
1) The deluge of Anime and Manga in the American market has shown the audience how Japan views its own heroic characters.
2) How Japan actually functions militarily.
There are other complaints, and I will try to address them after handling these. I don’t want to mix them with majingojira's essay post for order’s sake.
Now, let’s begin. I believe the first point is more important and it’s the reason why I’m writing this, but let’s deal with the second point first.
2) How Japan actually functions militarily.
This was explained like this:
What does this mean? It means that in the advent of Super-humans, the Japanese Police and the JSDF would be getting them registered almost as soon as they appeared. Because of their desire for cultural conformity, they would accept it quite easily in all probability.
In fact, many early heroes in both film, literature and manga worked this into their story. Super Giant--the first Japanese hero put to celluloid, worked with the police almost exclusively. So did Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy), and Gigantor/Tetsujin-28's controller often worked for the UN. Ultramen (though often keeping a secret identity) worked for an agency (always changing its gorram name) that fought the monsters and aliens that appeared on earth--which Ultraman was sent to help with.
Many heroes, however, were also rebellious people fighting secret wars--if only for a time. And there are a fair share of "Evil Bureaucracies" that heroes find themselves entangled in as well.
First of all, I do not think all of Japan should be painted with a broad brush. In all fairness, there are probably a number of Japanese people against cultural conformity. Japan has its share of individualistic people, crazies and anarchists just like every other nation.
And second, vigilantes are also illegal in America and nobody complains that superheroes operate alone and openly in comic books. I don’t see why we should have different standards of realism for the fictional Japan of the DCU.
But that is all academic, because anybody who actually read the first issue of Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance! would have noticed that Super Young Team works for the Japanese government. They don’t know they do, but the comic shows that Japan in the DCU keeps a close eye on all of its superheroes and controls them directly and indirectly.
But this is the point I wanted to talk about:
1) The deluge of Anime and Manga in the American market has shown the audience how Japan views its own heroic characters.
This one is the one that worries me because I think there is something odd going on when people want the foreigner characters to be completely recognizable as foreign. I know this sounds strange at first, but bear with me.
Let me tell you about the two things that put me in this train of thought:
Or as majingojira put it here:
"The Super Young Team contains NONE of these established archetypes. That's probably why people are complaining so much about them. We know what heroes from Japan look like since the mass introduction of many of these characters into the comic-reader's literally consciousness. It creates a preconceived notion of what they're "supposed" to be. And things that deviate from expectations and 'normalcy" are rarely met well by fans. We aren’t the nicest bunch when it comes to change, afterall. "
Personally, I think this is not a good thing.
I think these people have good intentions, and they want to protect foreign, minority and ethnic from being represented wrongly in comics, but in doing so, some times, they stop treating them as people and begin thinking of them as something else, as other. They forget they are individuals and not part of a cultural hive-mind where everybody acts and thinks alike. Wanting foreign and ethnic characters to always represent their culture is a form of treating, writing and reading foreign characters as OTHERS rather than as people. No American asks for American characters to represent America. Why ask this for foreign characters?
A good example of this can be found in Jack Kirby’s classic and dumb Green Arrow story where he introduces the Green Arrows from around the world. There is a Japanese Green Arrow who shoot Judo Arrows (those are kind of awesome,) an English Green Arrow who has a Big Ben Arrow, a Pacific Islander Green Arrow (poor guy doesn’t even get a defined country of origin) who shoots lava arrows, and so on and on. All the foreign Green Arrows are representatives of their cultures and geographic regions. On the other hand, good old American Green Arrow doesn’t shoot Apple Pie arrows, or Jefferson Memorial arrows or anything silly like that. The reason is very simple, because he is written like a normal person (or as normal as Green Arrows can be) and not as a representative of the United States of America.
Of course, these were all stupid stereotypes and cultural references for dummies, but it does demonstrate how differently a writer writes a character he considers normal vs. a character he considers other. Normal gets to be normal, but foreign character have to make very, very obvious that they are foreign and where they come from.
This is not limited just to racial stereotypes but also to fictitious stereotypes and archetypes. Notice how American superheroes get their power from radioactive meteors and lab experiments, but foreigners get powers from finding the magical rock of the noble and ancient tribe of whatever dead guys used to live before in their country. Notice how American superheroes can call themselves whatever they want, but foreign superheroes must call themselves something specific to their place of origin. Like poor Banshee who just happens to have a superpower that makes him kind of like a Banshee. Or notice how American superheroes can be what they want to be but foreign superheroes must sort of look like an heroic archetype of that country or a famous character from that country. Batman just saw a bat crash through his window and became Batman and America be damned, but look at the Batmen of many nations: Knight, Gaucho, Gladiator and Musketeer. How many English characters we have seen who just happen to be thinly veiled versions of James bond or Sherlock Holmes?
It is not that there is anything wrong per se about these characters, but what it is wrong is that we don’t allow foreign characters to be anything else very often.
Of course this is not limited just to foreign characters, look at how some white writers write black characters and how black writers do it.
Black Lighting: Born in Metropolis’ Suicide Slum, became a teacher in a bad school like Sidney Poitier in “To sir, with love.” Has BLACK right there in the name.
Luke Cage Power Man: Comes from Harlem, went to prison and talks in jive.
When writing a black characters they feel the need to differentiate it from the white characters and go overboard, because they have to make obvious they are black even if that means putting every stereotype, bad and not so bad, they can get away with. They are from the streets, they are from black neighborhoods, they speak like whites think black people speak, and they tackle the problems of the black community. If they were any blacker they’d be black holes.
On the other hand, look at McDuffie’s Static Shock, who is an honor roll’s kid from the suburbs. McDuffie writes Static as a person, not as a collection of stereotypes, archetypes or cultural references.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with a character that somehow represents part of his/her culture if done respectfully; it would just be silly to throw away all their culture all the time and only make culturally neutral characters. But, I believe there is something wrong with complaining that some character does not fit your idea of what foreigners should be like, as if they can’t be whatever they want to be. Like in this case complaining that Super Young Team is not made of Japanese heroic archetypes.
This goes twice for the members of Super Young Team who have a very good reason not to look like any archetype, and it’s because they strive to differentiate completely from the older generation of Japanese heroes.
So what if Shy Crazy Lolita is not a Magical Girl or a Giant Robot? Why should she be? Nobody complains that you are not a cowboy or a quarterback.
Mind you, this does not mean that writers and artists get carte blanche when it comes to creating foreign or ethnic characters. If someone creates an African Tutsi superhero who is white and blond then you can call him on his bullshit. There are no white and blonde Tutsis or even white Tutsis, right?
Also, there is this line from the essay:
"If he doesn't get a hero's adversary and misses something huge within Japanese culture, is it any wonder that there's a hollow sound to the creations for that nation he puts forth? "
I think you are inferring too much just from a line in a sketchbook. You seem to assume that all adversaries in Japanese fiction are alike. Also, you are trying to use Morrison’s lack of understanding of Godzilla as proof of something else. That’s some “It didn’t rain today, so it won’t rain tomorrow” type of logic. Just because someone is unfamiliar with one genre (giant monsters) doesn’t mean that person is unfamiliar with all genres.
Well, that finishes my counter-essay. There is another complaint I read a lot back when Super Young Team was introduced in the sketchbook. The complaint was that the team was not heroic at all. I don’t know how many of you keep thinking the same but Super Young Team’s actions and thought both during Final Crisis and the first issue of their miniseries proves they are heroic.
In Final Crisis, out of their own volition they accompanied Sonny Sumo and Mister Miracle and protected the dimensional doorway from Darkseid’s forces.
In the first issue of their miniseries Superbat begins to think that maybe they should help more than they do instead of partying like celebrities. He gets visited by the ghost of Ultimon (Big Action Team’s version of Ultraman) who sets Superbat in the path of discovering some big conspiracy.
I suggest to read before judging always.
That's my opinion, so feel free to comment, suggest things and ask questions. You can also insult me and call me a big privileged white idiot who doesn't know anything about anime, but I won't hear you because I got Mein Kampf 2 on tape and I'm listening to it while getting a swastika tattooed on my shaved head. Also a unicorn, a really racist unicorn who hates unicorns of other colors because illegal aliens stole his job at the unicorn racism factory.
1) The deluge of Anime and Manga in the American market has shown the audience how Japan views its own heroic characters.
2) How Japan actually functions militarily.
There are other complaints, and I will try to address them after handling these. I don’t want to mix them with majingojira's essay post for order’s sake.
Now, let’s begin. I believe the first point is more important and it’s the reason why I’m writing this, but let’s deal with the second point first.
2) How Japan actually functions militarily.
This was explained like this:
What does this mean? It means that in the advent of Super-humans, the Japanese Police and the JSDF would be getting them registered almost as soon as they appeared. Because of their desire for cultural conformity, they would accept it quite easily in all probability.
In fact, many early heroes in both film, literature and manga worked this into their story. Super Giant--the first Japanese hero put to celluloid, worked with the police almost exclusively. So did Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy), and Gigantor/Tetsujin-28's controller often worked for the UN. Ultramen (though often keeping a secret identity) worked for an agency (always changing its gorram name) that fought the monsters and aliens that appeared on earth--which Ultraman was sent to help with.
Many heroes, however, were also rebellious people fighting secret wars--if only for a time. And there are a fair share of "Evil Bureaucracies" that heroes find themselves entangled in as well.
First of all, I do not think all of Japan should be painted with a broad brush. In all fairness, there are probably a number of Japanese people against cultural conformity. Japan has its share of individualistic people, crazies and anarchists just like every other nation.
And second, vigilantes are also illegal in America and nobody complains that superheroes operate alone and openly in comic books. I don’t see why we should have different standards of realism for the fictional Japan of the DCU.
But that is all academic, because anybody who actually read the first issue of Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance! would have noticed that Super Young Team works for the Japanese government. They don’t know they do, but the comic shows that Japan in the DCU keeps a close eye on all of its superheroes and controls them directly and indirectly.
But this is the point I wanted to talk about:
1) The deluge of Anime and Manga in the American market has shown the audience how Japan views its own heroic characters.
This one is the one that worries me because I think there is something odd going on when people want the foreigner characters to be completely recognizable as foreign. I know this sounds strange at first, but bear with me.
Let me tell you about the two things that put me in this train of thought:
- I often hear a complaint about the character and series Aztek; that the main character of that series did not look Hispanic because he was white and blond. These complaints, of course, come from a combination of good intentions and complete ignorance. Not all people south of the border have a brown complexion or dark hair; some of them are black and some of them are white as white can be. Europeans from the entire continent didn’t only immigrate to the U.S. and Spaniards are not all that racially different from the other Europeans, they are also white. There are real blond Hispanics, but the idea of Hispanics in Americans’ minds is ‘brown,’ and they complained that Aztek did not fit into their idea of what a Hispanic person should look like.
- Another incident happened a short while ago when someone posted some pages of Final Crisis Aftermath Dance at Scans_Daily where we see Superbat using twitter. Somebody mentioned, as a side note, that he/she had read that Twitter is not very popular in Japan for some reason or other. Even though they probably had no idea how popular or unpopular Twitter is in Japan until they read that comment, some people began to complain about the twitter scenes because they did not fit with their new idea of what Japanese people were like. As if absolutely nobody in Japan uses twitter. As if a Japanese person or character can’t swim against the tide and be different from his countrymen. Nobody would bat an eye if an American character is seen using Mac instead of a PC, despite that only less than 10% of computer users have Macs. But Superbat uses twitter and poor Joe Casey, the writer, gets called an ignorant racist who does not understand Japanese culture at all. It is more than probable Joe Casey didn’t know Twitter is not popular in Japan either, but this was received as if he had just written Mein Kampf part 2: Kampf harder.
Or as majingojira put it here:
"The Super Young Team contains NONE of these established archetypes. That's probably why people are complaining so much about them. We know what heroes from Japan look like since the mass introduction of many of these characters into the comic-reader's literally consciousness. It creates a preconceived notion of what they're "supposed" to be. And things that deviate from expectations and 'normalcy" are rarely met well by fans. We aren’t the nicest bunch when it comes to change, afterall. "
Personally, I think this is not a good thing.
I think these people have good intentions, and they want to protect foreign, minority and ethnic from being represented wrongly in comics, but in doing so, some times, they stop treating them as people and begin thinking of them as something else, as other. They forget they are individuals and not part of a cultural hive-mind where everybody acts and thinks alike. Wanting foreign and ethnic characters to always represent their culture is a form of treating, writing and reading foreign characters as OTHERS rather than as people. No American asks for American characters to represent America. Why ask this for foreign characters?
A good example of this can be found in Jack Kirby’s classic and dumb Green Arrow story where he introduces the Green Arrows from around the world. There is a Japanese Green Arrow who shoot Judo Arrows (those are kind of awesome,) an English Green Arrow who has a Big Ben Arrow, a Pacific Islander Green Arrow (poor guy doesn’t even get a defined country of origin) who shoots lava arrows, and so on and on. All the foreign Green Arrows are representatives of their cultures and geographic regions. On the other hand, good old American Green Arrow doesn’t shoot Apple Pie arrows, or Jefferson Memorial arrows or anything silly like that. The reason is very simple, because he is written like a normal person (or as normal as Green Arrows can be) and not as a representative of the United States of America.
Of course, these were all stupid stereotypes and cultural references for dummies, but it does demonstrate how differently a writer writes a character he considers normal vs. a character he considers other. Normal gets to be normal, but foreign character have to make very, very obvious that they are foreign and where they come from.
This is not limited just to racial stereotypes but also to fictitious stereotypes and archetypes. Notice how American superheroes get their power from radioactive meteors and lab experiments, but foreigners get powers from finding the magical rock of the noble and ancient tribe of whatever dead guys used to live before in their country. Notice how American superheroes can call themselves whatever they want, but foreign superheroes must call themselves something specific to their place of origin. Like poor Banshee who just happens to have a superpower that makes him kind of like a Banshee. Or notice how American superheroes can be what they want to be but foreign superheroes must sort of look like an heroic archetype of that country or a famous character from that country. Batman just saw a bat crash through his window and became Batman and America be damned, but look at the Batmen of many nations: Knight, Gaucho, Gladiator and Musketeer. How many English characters we have seen who just happen to be thinly veiled versions of James bond or Sherlock Holmes?
It is not that there is anything wrong per se about these characters, but what it is wrong is that we don’t allow foreign characters to be anything else very often.
Of course this is not limited just to foreign characters, look at how some white writers write black characters and how black writers do it.
Black Lighting: Born in Metropolis’ Suicide Slum, became a teacher in a bad school like Sidney Poitier in “To sir, with love.” Has BLACK right there in the name.
Luke Cage Power Man: Comes from Harlem, went to prison and talks in jive.
When writing a black characters they feel the need to differentiate it from the white characters and go overboard, because they have to make obvious they are black even if that means putting every stereotype, bad and not so bad, they can get away with. They are from the streets, they are from black neighborhoods, they speak like whites think black people speak, and they tackle the problems of the black community. If they were any blacker they’d be black holes.
On the other hand, look at McDuffie’s Static Shock, who is an honor roll’s kid from the suburbs. McDuffie writes Static as a person, not as a collection of stereotypes, archetypes or cultural references.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with a character that somehow represents part of his/her culture if done respectfully; it would just be silly to throw away all their culture all the time and only make culturally neutral characters. But, I believe there is something wrong with complaining that some character does not fit your idea of what foreigners should be like, as if they can’t be whatever they want to be. Like in this case complaining that Super Young Team is not made of Japanese heroic archetypes.
This goes twice for the members of Super Young Team who have a very good reason not to look like any archetype, and it’s because they strive to differentiate completely from the older generation of Japanese heroes.
So what if Shy Crazy Lolita is not a Magical Girl or a Giant Robot? Why should she be? Nobody complains that you are not a cowboy or a quarterback.
Mind you, this does not mean that writers and artists get carte blanche when it comes to creating foreign or ethnic characters. If someone creates an African Tutsi superhero who is white and blond then you can call him on his bullshit. There are no white and blonde Tutsis or even white Tutsis, right?
Also, there is this line from the essay:
"If he doesn't get a hero's adversary and misses something huge within Japanese culture, is it any wonder that there's a hollow sound to the creations for that nation he puts forth? "
I think you are inferring too much just from a line in a sketchbook. You seem to assume that all adversaries in Japanese fiction are alike. Also, you are trying to use Morrison’s lack of understanding of Godzilla as proof of something else. That’s some “It didn’t rain today, so it won’t rain tomorrow” type of logic. Just because someone is unfamiliar with one genre (giant monsters) doesn’t mean that person is unfamiliar with all genres.
Well, that finishes my counter-essay. There is another complaint I read a lot back when Super Young Team was introduced in the sketchbook. The complaint was that the team was not heroic at all. I don’t know how many of you keep thinking the same but Super Young Team’s actions and thought both during Final Crisis and the first issue of their miniseries proves they are heroic.
In Final Crisis, out of their own volition they accompanied Sonny Sumo and Mister Miracle and protected the dimensional doorway from Darkseid’s forces.
In the first issue of their miniseries Superbat begins to think that maybe they should help more than they do instead of partying like celebrities. He gets visited by the ghost of Ultimon (Big Action Team’s version of Ultraman) who sets Superbat in the path of discovering some big conspiracy.
I suggest to read before judging always.
That's my opinion, so feel free to comment, suggest things and ask questions. You can also insult me and call me a big privileged white idiot who doesn't know anything about anime, but I won't hear you because I got Mein Kampf 2 on tape and I'm listening to it while getting a swastika tattooed on my shaved head. Also a unicorn, a really racist unicorn who hates unicorns of other colors because illegal aliens stole his job at the unicorn racism factory.