omg happy 5 year anniversary to me eating shit in disney world and getting a free ambulance ride to the nearest hospital. had to get 3 stitches, a taxi back to the hotel (also covered by disney) and then me and my mom went to disney springs to get chicken tenders. i could barely eat them because my jaw was still busted and chewing hurt too badly. a few days later my mom took my stitches out herself in the hotel room before going to some fancy disney world restaurant for breakfast. i still have a scar on my chin. ahhh, memories
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"A few weeks," she said again, willing it to be true.
(AU HEADCANON DUMP UNDERNEATH...)
I gotta read more of Protectors sdfhkdjhgfk. I got to their farewell scene and then SLEPT ‘cause I ZOOOOOMED through The Eternal Tide hahaha. I guess I’d say that my CURRENT™ idea is that she finds out she’s [WHOOPSIES] the night before she leaves the fleet to return to Earth. (If it matters, there’s apparently like a three week interval between The Eternal Tide and Protectors where Chakotay and Janeway are essentially INSEPARABLE and sleep with each other every night haha. So perhaps somewhat unrealistically she’d be finding out VERY EARLY, but in the context of AU she’d have been inconveniently broaching her heat cycle around this time. And, despite taking every foreseeable precaution, suppressant, contraceptive, etc. prior to being intimate while on it, has the sneaking suspicion that none of these remedies effectively prevented her cycle from doing its job.) In the book it almost seems like she’s being evasive with Chakotay (If she isn’t just ride the AU interpretation high with me besties hahaha), they don’t sleep together, she catches up with Neelix and his wife in addition to chatting with Tom who ironically is ALSO expecting with B’Elanna, though I doubt either party would disclose this information to each other, likely it’ll get addressed later in the book hehe. I also find it funny that Chakotay takes note of the fact that he wakes up in bed alone and sweetly confronts her on it, but she kinda evades reasoning by listing all these excuses like being too busy visiting with Tom and Neelix. (I like to think she’d maybe have had some early onset morning sickness and THAT would set off the alarms and sneaking suspicions in her head hehe, but also inevitably the reason why she wasn’t in bed when he woke up.) But yes hohoho Kathryn and Chakotay say their goodbyes to one another, Chakotay mentions that if she’s in need of anything to then by all means contact him/the fleet, Kathryn defiantly says it’ll only be a few weeks til she returns, internally disputing any other alternative. She would choose not to tell him on their last day together, it’s cute too to take note of their goodbye kiss and how she lingers in it longer than Chakotay expects her to, I can twist that into her feeling like it’s the beginning of an end of something that only she knows about. :~)
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So, now with the series 4 bios out, Lila Yamamoto is confirmed to be mixed Japanese and Chinese.
And this is good, of course, because the least they can do to explain her outfits is to have her be mixed heritage. Because there was a lot of reasonable concern over the cultural mishmashing going on with her fashions, as others have explained. And I’ve seen some people express relief because now we can put those concerns to rest!
...But as much as I, someone also Asian and mixed, would like to believe MGA planned for Lila to be mixed Japanese and Chinese from the start...
“Her dad is Japanese, and her mom is Chinese.”
That is the easiest sentence to insert into a paragraph as an afterthought. Just change “rich cultural roots” to “rich multicultural roots” and bada boom, she’s mixed now.
“Loves incorporating her family’s diverse culture with street style fashion” should really say “cultures” though, plural, so they forgot to fix that 🤔 But hey, that could easily be a simple typo, right?
Except the bio only mentioning Lila being a “streetstyle icon in Tokyo” also seems odd. She has a Japanese last name, lives in Tokyo, and reads rare manga, all referencing her Japanese heritage, but the bio makes no references to her Chinese heritage aside from her mom. If she “loves incorporating her family’s diverse culture(s)” with her fashion so much, why not a brief mention about what inspired her to incorporate Chinese elements? Like visiting her mom’s family in China (naming another specific city like Tokyo), or her mom introducing her to Chinese arts or fashions as she grew, in contrast to the Japanese culture surrounding them. Or being inspired by her parents’ respect for each others’ traditions and the way they incorporated them together while raising her. Lily Cheng’s bio talks about her growing up with “the best of both worlds,” so there’s already precedent for that similar experience. And there’s other students with longer bios that talk more about their families or backgrounds (see Krystal’s and Stella’s for instance), so it’s not like there wasn’t enough space or it’d be out of place for Lila’s bio to have a short reference to her Chinese cultural influences. Saying only, “Her dad is Japanese, and her mom is Chinese,” sounds bland and impersonal. And to me, seems like a hasty inclusion to hand-wave away the inconsistencies in Lila’s outfits. Because even with her mixed heritage, there are better, more respectful ways to incorporate Chinese and Japanese culture “with street style fashion” than the muddled hodgepodge they designed for her doll, if they only did more research.
You could say I’m being cynical and nitpicking, and you’d be right! But I also love Rainbow High and want better from it. Good representation is important (especially in properties directed at younger demographics), and it’s important to critique big corporations when they drop the ball, or at least question their actions. Because this issue isn’t new, isn’t even surprising, even just looking at Rainbow High’s history of diversity and representation. On the plus side, as fans have pushed for them to do better, they have started doing better! On the other hand, it’s frustrating to have to keep pushing for it, instead of the paid professional teams at MGA putting in the work and awareness to be better before anyone has to point it out to them.
I’m glad, relieved even, to have written confirmation of Lila as mixed race (I was worried they wouldn’t have any justification for her outfits at all). But planned or not, it doesn’t absolve the cultural carelessness issues going on with her clothes. As our first canonical multicultural representation in Rainbow High, I sorely wish she was better. Lila deserved better. We deserved better. But now, keeping that in mind, all we can do is speak out, and push for MGA to do better in the future.
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