Not what I need after my plane ride back from the glorious City of Wind.

[seiberwing]

Oh, for god's sake. I love the PW kink meme, I really do, but by law of averages it can bring some very dramatic fail.

Yes, but Japan is perfectly capable of drawing people who look Japanese. They chose to portray "themselves" as un-Asian. Where do I even begin with these two sentences? It's rather notable in the wake of the racebending scandal

Comments

[valentinite]

People want to have their wank and eat it too -- except that metaphor is going nowhere good, fast. The number of times I've seen ~OMG Ace Attorney has no black people except possibly Lotta~ as an opener to a tirade on how the games are racist set alongside this, sigh. (They did do a beautiful job, IMHO, of localizing some heavily-Japanese games. Sure, the legal system comes across as just whacked instead of satire, but the rest works, spirit mediums and all.)

[seiberwing]

Given the Japanese cartoon/video game record with black people I'm not sure we want any. As it stands we've got Diego Armando and Juan Corrida out of the localization.

[alanahikarichan]

Augh, sorry I wasn't on aim, was suddenly called out to have awesomefuntimes with friends that managed to last, like, seven hours, because we are dweebs, and I only just got in. *snuggles!*

MAY I GUESS YOU WERE GOING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT THIS

BECAUSE THIS IS A GOOD THING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT <3

[asondeiru]

We already had a truncated version of this conversation over AIM, but I'm going to throw my agreement in here. Don't forget the various run-ins with the Yakuza mob and Ernest Armano! They're extremely Japanese, too. Honestly, my comment about the AA games has always been how incredibly Asian they remain despite the localization, but that's just me...

Icon irrelevant, but it makes me smile. :)

[seiberwing]

I'm still trying to figure out what Ernest Amano's deal was. I'm sure his attire is some Japanese reference but to me he just looks weird.

[seiberwing]

That's why I keep thinking of it as an odd alternate universe (possibly where the Japanese took over California before the Europeans got there). It's such a wild smash of the familiar and the exotic by American standards.

(I know that's an oddly-specific trope, but it turns out I like it).

Me too, and I'm trying to think of more examples of it.

[silverfyshxin]

This essay, forever. I also really, really hate the argument that anime characters must be Western because they have weird hair colours. The very concept of hair dye is entirely nonexistent in Asia, of course.

[seiberwing]

Because white people tend to have blue or bone-white hair.

I think someone linked that over on my fandom_rant crosspost, it's very interesting, particularly as regards the identifiers used in Japanese art. I'd be pretty interested in seeing examples of Japan or other countries portraying Americans, besides the localization here the only thing I can really think of is Leon of Pet Shop of Horrors.

[silverfyshxin]

To be fair, Eyeshield 21 has the Devilbats captain shooting at his team to buck them up. It's a fairly cracky series. It's been ages since I've read it, admittedly, but their American team does have a black American football player as a foil for the protagonist.

Baccano! features a cast that is almost entirely American and is not entirely white (though none of the PoC are main characters). (I highly recommend this series.) The characters that cameo in DRRR, which I haven't watched, are the zany comic relief characters, which informs their actions too, I think. (My icon is a photo the FBI have of them, because they're thieves who have never been caught. The photo was taken by a bystander who thought they were putting on a show when in fact they had huge sacks of cash slung over their shoulders.)

But for the most part, I agree.