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writingwithcolor · 4 years

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Japanese Mom and Son, Wise Master/Student Dynamic - Should I make them white instead?

@gwynn-ap-nads asked:

hi there i’m planning a superhero story where the protagonist’s day job is teaching Aiki-ken at his mum’s Dojo/gym in a mall before he finds Excalibur, but i don’t know if i should make him and his mum Japanese. I don’t want to do the whole iron fist thing where a white man does martial arts better than the people who invented it, but i do want his mum to be a wise mentor figure because the sword has the ghost of an Arthurian knight who would be very stuck in his ways, highly educated, proud, and chivalrous though not actually that clever and those two characters would be foils for each other.

having a wise Japanese woman who runs a dojo/gym feels worryingly close to a stereotype even if i’m imagining her wisdom as coming from being a working class single mother not from spirituality or anything. So should i make them Japanese Australian, and if so are there how do i make sure i don’t stumble into dangerous stereotypes?

Great question! The problem with “wise dojo master” tropes tends to be that the dojo master in question (think Mr. Miyagi types) mentors a non-Asian protagonist at the expense of his own character development. However, in your case, you’re working with a Japanese protag (even if he’s mixed, he’s still Japanese—I know you called him a ‘white man’ but keep this in mind, please) and his Japanese mother.

For the protag, let him be connected to his Japanese heritage! He’s not coming into the discipline of Aiki-ken as an outsider, so there is no unbalanced cultural/racial takeover taking place when he improves on his skills, even if he surpasses his mother. Rather than have him come into the martial art from scratch, show that he’s been learning from his mom all his life.

For the mother, give her her own motivations: she probably wants her son to grow in to his powers, but she also probably wants to protect him—this is a classic character arc for a parent of a super-protag.

What other goals does she have in life?

Is she balancing family with keeping her dojo up and running?

You already have an advantage by having the dojo owner be a younger woman rather than an old man with no family and no other goal in life. Let her be her own character worth paying attention to, and you’ll avoid making her a Miyagi type.

With regards to the source of her wisdom, your intuition is right about avoiding the spirituality thing, but you also don’t want to glorify or overemphasize the “struggles of single motherhood,” so to speak, unless you have a single mother yourself and can speak on the experience. In fact, rather than focusing on her wisdom, you might even want to focus on her practicality and willingness to problem-solve to create a better contrast with the stubborn Arthurian ghost.

Make her the opposite of seeming enlightened! Let her admit that she doesn’t know everything, and that she’s human, too.

~Mod Rina

#Japanese #Japanese women #Japanese men #stereotypes #tropes #Wise Asian #Wise Asian Mentor #Wise Asian Master #magical asian #Japanese stereotypes #Japanese tropes #East Asian tropes

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whichchick · 6 years

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So fall effort with Dressage Lady Barb (hereafter, as always, DLB). How’d that go?

You know how it went. It went the same way it always goes. Fucking ends in tears, snot running down my face because I am totally 100% that middle-aged female adult ammie at the dressage clinic. I’m also fat. And on an inappropriate pony. Here I am, the absolute stereotype of dressaging.

I go in and demonstrate my homework from last time. She says my homework looks good. Wonderful, terrific, great. “I can tell you really worked on this.” I look “so much better” and have “much better control” of my body. I am “not interfering” and “being supportive” and blah blah blah.

Now, my horse has been off for five weeks (abscess, making hay, torrential downpours) and he’s not fit. But we did, since our last visit with DLB, put tape on the damn reins and work on having an elastic, consistent contact at the walk with a steady and unchanging rein length. We worked on it a lot. It was the only homework she gave me because I am apparently too stupid to have more than one homework. Despite my limitations, I worked the shit out of the homework she gave me.

Honestly, the only consistent thing here is that I work on the DLB homeworks. I whine and bitch and moan about the DLB clinics and then I go do the thing, over and over, in spite of the fact that I do not particularly understand what I’m going for. I am frequently cargo-culting it along in my little and lame dressage journey.

So today we did canters. She’s like “Tell me some things that were good about this canter effort.” (I hate this. I seriously hate this. It is one of my LEAST FAVORITE THINGS EVER, the “TELL ME GOOD THINGS ABOUT THIS SHITTY EFFORT” drill.) This canter effort is on a 20 meter circle and horse is getting tired, so self-carriage is not really there and he’s trying to phone it in a little and he falls out of it about halfway around the circle. It’s not a particularly stellar canter effort. It’s an OK canter effort given that he’s not falling on his face and he’s not counterbent or frantic or whatever, but it’s not like a good effort.

I know clinician is trying to teach me to look for the good things and to be happy about all the wonderful progress we’ve made on our dressage journey (round and round in stupid little circles at a very slow jog, basically going nowhere fast slowly) but I hate having to find “good” things in what is overall a relatively lukewarm effort. GDI, I do not need a participation trophy. I am not here for my self esteem.

We also did trot. Apparently I need a quicker, lighter trot. She was all “choppy pony trot” which is not the sort of thing I expect to be told to generate in a dressage clinic so I was like... “I do not understand.” So she was all “Just do the thing. I’ll explain later.” Later happened and she was “I use the phrase choppy pony trot” because most people understand that to mean the feet spend less time on the ground in trot with quicker, lighter steps.” Okay. Or, since I’m not eight, you could just say “quicker, lighter steps.”

We did “I can see you want to argue with me.” I didn’t say anything. Nary a peep. I pointed out that I didn’t say anything. “But you want to.” WTF? I can’t even. I am not able to make myself have agreeable-looking body language. I can keep my fucking mouth shut and I can do the riding you tell me to do but I will never in a million years be able to make my body look like I am compliantly in agreement with you.

We did “I’m going to compliment you again and you’re going to have to sit there and take it even though you don’t believe me.” (This is excruciatingly uncomfortable for me. I am not sure why she does it and I really wish she wouldn’t. And honestly, that there is a straight up quote from DLB. I am not exaggerating for comedic effect.) I am paying for riding instruction. I am not paying to be made massively uncomfortable on an emotional front that is unrelated to riding instruction.

This reminds me of when I was in junior high and my English (favorite subject, always) teacher was all talking to me about why was I unhappy and my feelings and blah blah and finally I was like, “Look. I’m here for school and I’m not ALLOWED to leave. I have to be here BY LAW but I am not your private pet project. Teach me the damn subject and leave my unhappiness alone. It’s my concern, not yours.” She didn’t stop. A few weeks after that, I went to the principal’s office and told him that if Mrs. T. didn’t leave me the fuck alone and stick to the subject matter that she was paid to teach that I was going to lodge a formal complaint about her.

Apparently, what I did in junior high was VERY WRONG (said my mom) and NOT OK and I REALLY HURT MRS. T’s FEELINGS and she REALLY CARED ABOUT ME A LOT. Mmm-hmm. Maybe she did, but damn she had fuck-all of a clue how to display her caring to me. Not at all. Maybe that shit she did works with most kids but it was like I was a slug and she just kept pouring salt on me. (In fairness my parents were getting divorced and things at home were... not good. I probably looked a hell of a mess, but her caring was poking every single sore spot I had until they all bled. Daily. It was UNREASONABLE AS HELL to expect me to put up with that shit to spare Mrs. T’s feelings and I’m still kinda mad about my mom for telling me I was in the wrong there. I should not have to suffer so that other people can feel good about their attempts to “help” me.)

Emotionally this is about where I am with DLB. She’s helpful on the horse front, honestly she is. I learn things. The homework is annoying and frustrating and feels cargo-cult-ish but that’s because I have an insufficient understanding of it at the front end. DLB is not great at using her words to explain what the homework is FOR or what it’s supposed to accomplish because I guess she does more with how it feels and how it rides and figures I can get it from “There, right there like that! Do That.” And that sort of intuitive kinesthetic stuff is super awesome and it’d be SO HELPFUL if I were made to understand that stuff, but I am not. So my insufficient understanding and my frustration that I can’t make my body do what I want... it is not leading to joyous smiles of instant understanding. That said, with sufficient reps and substantial effort on my part in the quiet of my own head, the homework does eventually make sense.

Like remedial jogging, which I did for about two years. At the outset (see link) it made no sense. It made no sense for a while and I bitched about it a lot. But it turns out that if you do like three million jog circles, your horse’s head eventually comes down. He eventually becomes rhythmic and steady. You can start having something like contact on the reins, light and fluttery because neither of you really understand it, but something like contact. He will get better and better at picking up The Jog on demand and immediately going into it instead of getting there after half a circle of flail first. He will become, from endless practice, better at coming down to walk from trot instead of throwing his head up and flailing on that transition too. He will start to be able to listen to cues to bend on the turns because he’s not so busy flailing. Because the work is simple and repetitive, even newbie floppy riders likely can’t fuck it up. Floppy rider, because of all the practice at remedial jogging, gets really good at feeling the horse start to trot, finish trotting, feel like he’s going to fall out of trot, yadda yadda yadda. Floppy rider becomes less floppy because “floppy” makes it harder for the horse to remedial jog correctly. This improves rider position. So yeah, remedial jogging. Now it makes sense but in the beginning, I had no idea why I was doing it.

I am, swear to FSM, making headway under her tutelage, such as it is. It could be faster if it were more explain-y with words instead of this mystical Miyagi shit, but if she (and EVERYONE ELSE ON THE PLANET, APPARENTLY) can perceive the mystical Miyagi shit and I’m the only one who can’t... yeah, the adaptive effort has to be on my part because she has no idea what I can or can’t perceive.

But fuck it all, I cannot keep going to these things when she has me fucking bawling in the goddamn ring because she can’t leave my emotional state alone. She wants me to be “happier” about my progress. She wants me to be more “appreciative” of our improvement. She wants me to give myself and my horse credit for all of our hard work, to be thrilled about the growth of our partnership... honestly I’m over here doing my slug cringe just typing this shit.

I know that DLB means well but she completely fails to realize that I have done approximately six projects IN MY WHOLE ENTIRE GODDAMN LIFE that I have been happy with for more than five seconds. I am unhappy with almost everything I have ever done, even stuff that other people think is pretty darned decent. DLB is not going to be able to “fix” this about me and her TRYING to do it is what makes me bawl in the ring like a frustrated toddler.

DLB: I am NOT FUCKING BROKEN. I AM FINE. IF YOU WOULD JUST LEAVE ME ALONE TO GET ON WITH IT AND STICK TO PROVIDING INSTRUCTION ON THE THINGS I CAN LEARN TO DO ACCEPTABLY INSTEAD OF FOCUSING ON THE THINGS I WILL NEVER, EVER BE ABLE TO FAKE WELL ENOUGH TO APPEASE ONE OF THE FLESH PEOPLE, WE WOULD BOTH BE A LOT HAPPIER.

This inability to be happy with my projects is not the handicap to me that DLB seems to think it is. I wish like hell she’d get over the “whichchick is not happy enough about her progress” thing and just do the riding instruction part because this shit is like salt in open wounds. (Yes, I have tried Being A Grown-Up and Using My Words. No joy on that front. I do not typically lack clarity, so not sure what the hell the problem is, there. My mother’s super-helpful advice: “Tell her you’re autistic. Apologize for having absolutely no inherent talent for riding. I can’t understand why you persist in doing things you TOTALLY SUCK AT, but if you’re having that much trouble with this and still want to do it (MOTHER OF GOD WHY ARE YOU SO PERSISTENT AT SOMETHING SO EXPENSIVE THAT YOU TOTALLY SUCK AT? YOU KNOW, THERE ARE MANY THINGS YOU CAN DO QUITE ACCEPTABLY. IS THERE SOME REASON YOU CAN’T DO ONE OF THE THINGS THAT YOU DON’T SUCK AT? ARE YOU TRYING TO BE UNHAPPY?), ask her to dumb it down further for your broken and incompetent brain. If you can’t do that, then obviously you don’t want to do the thing hard enough anyway.” Thanks, mom. I’ll get right on that. Also, you are a pillar of support.)

So at the end of the clinic’ing, with tears and snot running down my face, I’m like “You usually give me homework for next time. What is the homework?” -- This represents pretty good personal growth for me. I didn’t want to ask. I wanted to slink out of the ring and take my useless stupid self and my idiotic and inappropriate horse home. But I asked, even though it was hard.

DLB: “Experiment.”

The fuck?!? No. No. NO. That is not useful. That is lacking in direction and clarity. That is not at all helpful. I don’t even want to try to do something with that because anything I do is going to be wrong. Anything I do is going to suck.

Anything I put forth is going to be “Awww, look at you, back again to play dressage with your sweaty fistful of money! It’s so cute that you keep trying at this thing which you are fundamentally unable to do. When last we met, I told you to EXPERIMENT. Such fun! I’m really looking forward to seeing what you spent your entire winter working on. So, show me your work. *beat* Did oo twy weally hawd? You did? That’s adorable! You’re such a Hard Worker! If only you appreciated your own efforts in a way that I could perceive... but you don’t, so I’m going to call you out for not liking your horse or yourself. ...And now you’re crying at me. God, have you no self-respect? Grow a pair. Also, what you have brought me, you do know it’s shit, right? ‘Cause this is shit. Shit does not stop being shit because you work really hard. Can’t polish a turd, dumbass.”

Four years ago, I brought you a four year old horse and you were all “What can he do?” and I was enthusiastic about what all he could do and you were “LOLNope.” and you sent me home to jog in fucking circles, extremely slowly, for two years. At this juncture, I am not at all going to put myself out there again because clearly I can’t teach a horse how to do anything at all. You don’t have to kick me in the teeth twice for me to get it. You say “Experiment” like I’m supposed to run right out and ... what?

Put a tie down on him? Leverage bit? Sidereins? No, of course you don’t mean that shit and you’d be pissed if I suggested any of those things. So you DO have an aim or objective in mind. Care to share it? That’s what my eighty dollars was paying for, y’know. If I wanted to fumble around in the dark, with no particular idea of what I was doing, I would be eighty dollars richer today.

Maybe I should be buying more feed and fewer dressage clinics.

Maybe I’m just not cut out for dressage.

#dressage lady barb #bird #project horse #dressage

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