Tumgik
#racial fetishization cw
puissantveil · 5 months
Note
I remember seeing a yt vid of compilation of raiden and and sindel intros, in which op is believing that sindel approves and raitana would be an endgame. It was a bit of a reach but it's still a fun video yk? However, what rubs me the wrong way is that the OP (a white man) said "kitana is asian/southeast asian, she likes raiden too but she's playing hard to get. I know because my wife is southeast asian and she was like that." with his whole chest. I'm southeast asian born & raised, so you could guess the stank face I made reading that comment could rival sindel's upon seeing shang tsung's lab. This man tried spreading the raitana agenda, but if anything, his passport-bro self had succesfully turning me away from this barely budding ship.
(My apologies if you see this ask in another blog, I have trouble remembering if i already hit the ask button)
I think I remember seeing that. Just looked up passport bro, and I have definitely seen that kind of mentality on the internet. What a bunch of creeps. Unfortunately, it's not the first time I've seen dudes get weird about Kitana being East Asian (and more recently SEA) coded.
Kitana has a lot of suggestive intros with Johnny Cage, many of them in which she rebuffs his advances. The ones that start with her do kinda sound like she's playing hard to get, or at least baiting him because it's funny to see how far he can shove his throat into his mouth. She sounds much less amused when Johnny leads. He must've crossed a line at some point, because Kitana's final answer is no, expressed as a slap on the face.
She doesn't seem to even see Raiden as a potential partner. Though she admires his virtues as a person, she calls his crush "sweet but unwelcome" like he's a cherubic younger neighbor entirely naive to matters of the heart.
So far, the only canon ship for Kitana is Kitana x Singleness x Loving it.
3 notes · View notes
void-star · 2 years
Text
Weird, creepy, and racist to describe Taika Waititi as "having the eyes of a seductress" in a very non-sexual scene where his character is emotionally overwhelmed, literally paralyzed and speechless, by an intimate gesture of affection.
1 note · View note
olderthannetfic · 7 months
Note
CW: rant about "racist fetishizing" and "exotification" as a white person, etc.
One thing that particularly drives me bonkers is when antis take issue with things that are either not obviously negative or are inextricable from things that are neutral or even positive. For example, are there situations where AAVE really is "appropriated" and used in a way that takes advantage of black culture while keeping a comfortable distance to actual black people? Sure! But my gents. 1) A random Tumblr user having absorbed a ton of AAVE into their speech patterns and saying "y'all" a lot is not it, 2) absorbing language patterns from those you socialize with is an unavoidable side effect of socialization, and I don't know how to tell this to terminally online people but it is in fact a good thing. It is a good thing that African-American people are so present and their content engaged with enough that people are passively absorbing AAVE! No, it doesn't mean racism is solved or that people who say "y'all" can't be racist, but absorbing AAVE in and of itself is a good sign!
I have a similar complaint with most accusations of "fetishization" (beside the meaningless vagueness of the term), because what it comes down to is "you find people who look like this sexy and that's BAD". Even "exotification" is not in and of itself a bad thing, when removed from the context of imperialism and colonialism, because looking at someone and thinking they're sexy because they look so different to what you're used to, i.e. "exotic", is not actually inherently a bad thing! We have some amount of sexual draw to what's different - I mean, people with blue eyes apparently all have a single common ancestor who really got around, for crying out loud.
Where this attraction becomes problematic is when due to the outside material conditions (whether on the societal scale or the single person scale), the exotified person is both desirable and lacking in power, but the exact same thing is true whatever the ethnicity of the person! (A good deal of what feminism views as "predatory" behavior in men is only really predatory against the background of economic desperation in women wherein there is some material disadvantage to turning down unwanted advances, and would be considerably more harmless in a setting where everyone is equal and living comfortably, which I daresay should be the end goal of any equality and empowerment movement).
As someone with straight hair, I think curls are sexy. As someone with brown hair, I think redheads and blond people and people with black hair are sexy. As a white person, I would probably date one of my cute Chinese co-workers if I weren't so damn ace, because something about that combination of same tone or darker skin + completely black smooth hair + the general facial features (including the monolid some people get so insecure about because Western poisoning sigh) is just gorgeous to me and I'm not afraid to say it. Saying something like this should not be taboo. People of any ethnicity deserve to have people of other ethnicities gushing about what makes them look distinct and unique! I mean, shit, people gush about white skin and blond hair and blue eyes enough.
(Disclaimer: I am once again not saying that there aren't contexts where calling out racial fetishization is appropriate, or where people desire someone for their physical differences but still consider them to be subhuman. There are many such cases, I know. I would even say that, based on observations of the heterosexual world, wanting to fuck someone and thinking they have equal value as a person can be completely and utterly uncoupled from each other. But this doesn't mean that all expressions of attraction because of the physical differences are automatically suspect, and it's no wonder that so much of pushback against "fetishizing X ethnicity" reads like a pamphlet in support of racial segregation!)
Tl;dr: Thinking someone of X ethnicity is hot and being racist towards that ethnicity can co-occur but have little to do with each other. People try to fix the latter problem by attacking instances of the former, and that's stupid, and just ends up looking like "you're not allowed to thirst outside of your own race".
--
It still boggles my mind that y'all is the thing people have chosen to take as appropriation from AAVE.
101 notes · View notes
dark-nimbus · 5 months
Text
My Opinions on Anime and Manga in Western Countries
CW: fetishization, oversexualization, racial stereotyping, as always lmk if I’m missing anything
Everytime I tell someone I'm not an avid fan of anime or manga, the usual response is shock and confusion, paired with "how?? But you're Asian!"
What hasn't occurred to them, I assume, is that those kinds of stereotypes are part of why I'm not a huge fan
Do I hate all anime and manga? No, not at all. In fact I do have a few books and shows that I enjoy, my favorite manga of all time being Arslan Senki (go check it out, the series is criminally underrated). However, I'm very picky about which ones I read and watch, and for very good reason. To be more specific, I'm not a fan of anime and manga as it's been generally received by Western countries
For the record: if you're from the Americas and like manga and anime, this is not me dogging on you. Everyone has the right to enjoy what they do, as long as they aren't harming anyone or their integrity
Now unfortunately, in my experience I've had to deal with the not harmless enjoyers more often than not
Take the first sentence of this post as an example. People always expect me to be largely enthusiastic about East Asian-originating media, despite knowing I've spent the vast majority of my life living in the middle of the US and was raised by people who are the furthest thing from Asian. I know next to nothing about my heritage or my culture and have grown up completely in American society, but even with this knowledge I'll still be met with shocked expressions when I say I've never watched whatever show or how anime isn't my favorite thing in the world. All because I look a certain way
That stereotyping attachment of race to media is just one of the many reasons I don't like anime or manga, and it unfortunately goes deeper than that
Japan already has an issue of oversexualizing women in their media, and you can see it in the skimpy outfits, big boobs, giant eyes, petite forms, and overall simping mannerisms they have towards male characters. This is by no means found in every show or book, but it's present in most. Even Arslan Senki, my favorite manga, favors putting Farangis, a priestess, in a sexualizing outfit over living up to the rest of the story's historical authenticity. With anime and manga growing more popular in the West, the impact of how women are portrayed is reflected in how people interact more and more
I can't tell you how many times I've had to hear about how people, from first dates to classmates to random strangers have fetishized Asian women because they wanted someone to live out their weird anime fantasies with. Hell, I have some stories of my own too. I've known Asian content creators who've been left creepy comments from viewers, some of which asking for them to talk in a high-pitched whiney "anime girl" voice and say a sexualized line using Japanese honorifics in a fetishizing manner. Asian cosplayers will constantly get demands to dress up in a maid outfit or cosplay certain anime characters for them to "simp" over
Even other cosplayers aren't safe from fetishizers. Other PoC cosplayers, black cosplayers especially, are consistently put on blast for cosplaying anime characters because those characters "aren't black." If it's not an Asian cosplayer, the creeps' fetishizing fantasies can't be lived up to, so they give black cosplayers shit instead. But gods forbid they do the same to white cosplayers, since being white is always the default to them apparently. How dare anyone try to give a white cosplayer shit for cosplaying a Japanese character when all anime characters are Japanese, that's unfair to them, right? But it's okay to have a double standard because the characters look white enough, right?
There was even a Japanese boxer from a few months ago that people latched onto, because apparently any East Asian guy with messy blond hair looks like Bakugo. MHA fangirls, many of which being minors, went crazy on him, making comments that are far from appropriate for that kind of interaction and fully reimagining this completely real human being as a fictional character for their own fetishizing purposes
If we're not stereotyped, we're being sexualized. The spreading influence of fetishizing Asian people only grows with the popularity of anime and manga in countries further west. It's been used to thirst, hit on, even threaten East Asian people, women especially. Our safety and comfort has been royally screwed by anime "simps" and it only continues to worsen, even more so for Asian Americans and content creators
One of the worst things about being Asian and growing up in America is how anime was the closest thing to connecting to my culture, and what did anime tell little me about being Asian? That my skin had to be pale, my eyes wide, I had to be short and curvy, and I had to sound ultra-feminine. Those were the values that the world expected out of me. Cassandra Cain was there to be my saving grace, thankfully, but the impression anime girls have on others will never be a positive or realistic one unless Japan re-evaluates its media as a whole and non-Asian viewers can find the maturity to not implement the same things on other people
49 notes · View notes
the-aila-test · 2 months
Note
CW: MMIW, Racism, NSFW, Racial fetishization
I wanted to give a warning that there’s an increase of accounts on this site that exists to post graphic pictures that objectify and fetishize indigenous women, check through tags such as “#native women” for example, please stay safe and report them immediately.
Thank you.
9 notes · View notes
shu-of-the-wind · 2 years
Text
do not have the fucking energy for ryan mnrphy stans anymore so here we go:
ryan murphy is making a movie about jeffrey dahmer. setting aside the fact that we shouldn't be sensationalizing stories about serial killers, ryan murphy, specifically, should get the fuck away from the jeffrey dahmer story, and how this fucking film is going to just be performative torture porn that dehumanizes victims.
for those of you who don't know about jeffrey dahmer, here are links to what he did. PLEASE be extremely cautious with yourselves. there are extremely explicit descriptions of torture, necrophilia, sexual assault, murder, dismemberment, and cannibalism.
cw for explicit description of one of the murders under the cut:
before i saw that ryan murphy was the writer/director i had some vague hopes for this film. i don't agree with any serial killer movie just on the basis of the fact that i truly and deeply believe that we should not be giving these people the hollywood treatment, but i was SLIGHTLY optimistic because it looked like there were black characters who weren't just there to be murdered by dahmer! but then i saw murphy's name, and actually watched the trailer, and oh boy i have not seen such dehumanizing shit in a while.
the thing about this that's pissing me off so much, beyond the fetishization of YET ANOTHER serial killer, is you cannot fairly and accurately discuss the murders committed by jeffrey dahmer without discussing race and racial conflicts in milwaukee in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. jeffrey dahmer was able to kill so many people (SEVENTEEN. SEVENTEEN.) because he was a white man and his victims were, predominantly, men and boys of color. they were queer. they were sex workers. they were fucking children. you cannot and should not and should NEVER present the story of the people who were murdered by jeffrey dahmer without focusing on that point. you can't discuss how jeffrey dahmer got away with it for years--from 1978 to fucking 1991--without acknowledging that he was white.
the story that breaks my heart is the story of konerak sinthasomphone, a FOURTEEN YEAR OLD LAOTIAN REFUGEE who was the younger brother of one of dahmer's sexual assault victims. dahmer injected acid into his skull. konerak got away, and asked two passing black women for help, but cops those women called BROUGHT HIM BACK TO DAHMER because dahmer claimed that konerak was a) drunk, b) 19, and c) his boyfriend. this in 1991.
you cannot separate the horror of dahmer's predation and killings without an intimate and thorough examination of racism and queerphobia, not just in dahmer but in milwaukee, in wisconsin, and in law enforcement as a whole. i do not fucking trust ryan murphy to do that. i barely trust him to own a pet.
jeffrey dahmer murdered 17 people. half of them were black men. only three were white. this story could not and should not be told by a white man, especially a white cis gay man who thinks his shit doesn't stink while simultaneously pulling off some of the most egregiously racist torture porn that i've seen in DECADES.
fuck this movie. fuck this movie. fuck ryan murphy and fuck netflix for enabling him.
54 notes · View notes
self-indulgenator · 8 months
Text
Pinned Post
🌼 She/he nonbinary lesbian (girlboygirl dyke)
🏵️ High femme/stone bottom
🌼 Fight free zone but for the record I'm nasty and I don't care how other people label themselves.
🏵️ Expect erratic tagging for potentially triggering fetishes, don't follow if this will upset you.
🌼 Trans positive + designer HRT hopeful
🏵️ Open to dms + asks, I'll be blunt but not mad if you make me uncomfortable. If you continue after being warned, that's a block.
DNI:
Cishets, age regression players, racialized kink enjoyers, detrans kinksters, ect; Don't be weird about innate features of people. Or kids.
Avoid me if you dislike:
cnc/somno/drug play, '''penetration fetishizers''', size queen stuff, free use, blood/knife/needle play, robot + monster fucking, the general fetishization of the concept of violence
🏵️ 🌼 Tags, attempted 🌼 🏵️
Shoot me an ask if a post is missing one or you want a specific thing tagged. These will (sometimes) come with generic cw tags, formatted as "*** cw"
🍹 play ~ drug/alcohol posts
🖤 play ~ somno/cnc posts
💔&🔪 play ~ violence and emotional distress as a kink (single tag)
🐇 girl ~ free use/positive objectification
Be respectful, I'm someone else's dolly and she'll be sad if you make me sad 😢 that's, like, 2x the sad. You can call me Dollie btw.
3 notes · View notes
wordofgodcast · 11 months
Text
Episode 74: 8.1 "We Need to Talk About Kevin" and 8.2 "What's Up, Tiger Mommy"
New season, new showrunner... Let's get into it!
Previous | First | New episodes go up on Wednesdays
This week’s episode is available on Podbean HERE!
Check out our listen page or go to our pinned post to find a list of platforms you can listen on – don’t forget to follow, rate, and review if you can!
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Sources for references made this episode:
the post that sparked Sam/Kermit memes, by @nonagesimus with additions from @cryptidmax (CW: minor spoiler for later s8)
war crimes anime girl gif
article about the naked Mona Lisa
Content warnings for this episode can be found here, under the cut, and at the start of the episode:
Animal injury
Trauma
Public masturbation mention
Show-typical weirdness about sex work
Death of family
Racial fetishism
Burns
Possession/stolen identity
Anti-Asian racism
3 notes · View notes
Note
cw: internalized(?) racism, possible misuse of labels/racial terms (I don't....usually participate in these kinds of conversations, so I don't really know what these labels mean.)
I'm a demiguy / non-binary man (I use those labels interchangeably for myself) and my racial/ethnic background is... complicated. I've never thought about it much before because 1) I'm half Caucasian/half east asian and from the U.S.A., so I am fairly at risk for internalizing racism; I'm hardly ever treated differently for my skin color so I do experience the full effect of white privilege and all that, and racial issues just kind of recede to the back of my mind. I try my best to be respectful and I would never be actively prejudiced on purpose towards someone of different ethnicity or culture from me, but I worry sometimes. And then there's 2) the fact that because my background is so complicated, I've never had that moment where you look at other people or characters in media and go "hey, that's like me!" with regards to what I look like or my culture. I spent a lot of my childhood growing up in a South American (hispanic?) country. As a result, my first language is English but I also speak Spanish at like, a child-like fluency (I tested into a fairly low-level Spanish class because I didn't know words like "razor," "beard," or "taxes"). I stayed in contact with my old U.S. American friends via online communication like email, Skype, and chat websites, so I still pretty much lived in U.S. American culture, and conceptualized myself as white. Except the parent that isn't Caucasian is actually a first generation immigrant from an east Asian country; but they also grew up away from their birth country! They grew up in Iran and Paraguay mostly, before moving to the U.S. for college. So while I'm technically half Asian, the culture I grew up with was mostly a mix of various South American cultures, and other cultures my parents grew up with (my Caucasian parent lived for a long time in central Africa, so they aren't exactly your typical white person either).
I guess the point is... I always feel like I look wrong, because I don't deal with racism in my day to day and am treated as white, but when I look at white trans representation, they don't Look Like Me. and simultaneously, I feel like I can't fit in with east asian cultures, because most of my culture that I grew up with is Hispanic(?) and bits and pieces of places my parents grew up. So if I turned to Asian representation, it would feel like I'm fetishizing them, because I just don't have that connection to their culture. But I don't really look Hispanic and I don't really look white, so I'm just in this sort of....weird, ignorant, and unrepresented limbo. I kind of just wish that there were more representation for people whose genetics don't align with their culture. Everything mainstream I've seen for that so far comes off like cultural appropriation or like tokenizing.
i just...i want to start actually delving into caring about race and culture, partially because I think it will give me better expectations for my body, but it feels so overwhelming and daunting when there isn't really much mention of people with this degree of separation between the two.
i guess if anyone who bothered to read this wants to recommend a culture-is blog or other online community to follow for this, it would be really appreciated. i have notifications on for this blog, so if this confession is posted, i'll probably see any replies.
11 notes · View notes
Text
Okay, so, apparently, we need a fucking crash-course.
TW, or trigger-warning, and CW, or content-warning, tags are often used by people who want to AVOID that content. It means that the post above might mention or include something that might be triggering.
For example, if I am posting something about a racist stereotype in Star Wars, I'll tag it #TW: racism and #TW: racial stereotypes.
These #TW and #CW tags are most often used by people discussing these issues. So, it might be attached to a news post discussing systemic racism or a reblog responding to a post that was problematic.
It is usually not used by someone who is, say, being racist. Because they don't see what they're saying or doing as a problem worthy of warning people.
In fandom spaces, we often warn for something like #TW: MCD or #TW: tragedy in our fan-work. But we often pair that with a seemingly redundant tag that serves a completely different function. It's the tag some may use for filtering, but it is often one used for finding content. Looking for a piece with a Major Character Death? You search up #MCD. Looking to avoid pieces with a Major Character Death? You filter #TW: MCD and #MCD
In the Star Wars fandom, kinder people will use #TW: clonecest or #TW: master/padawan to warn people that these things are in or mentioned in a post. If they're creating something for the fans of clonecest, they will pair this with #clonecest.
Someone who wants to avoid clonecest fan-works may block #clonecest. However, they may not block #TW: clonecest because then they miss posts discussing something like fetishization of MOC in the SW fandom. Or maybe because they use the tag in their essays discussing these issues.
When the person making a post mentions clonecest in their essay on fetishization and tags it #TW: clonecest and #TW: clonecest mention, they have tagged this correctly.
SO WHEN YOU COME INTO THEIR COMMENTS AND START RAILING ON THEM FOR PUTTING THEIR "ANTI-SHIPPING BULLSHIT" IN THEIR TAGS, KNOW THAT YOU ARE LOOKING IN THE WRONG-FUCKING TAG.
6 notes · View notes
the-cloud-whisperer · 3 years
Text
Dear Tumblr,
Look, I know it’s annoying and tiring, what with our xenophobic, racist, capitalist, and ableist world and its nonstop injustices and grievances. But as a Chinese-American woman who’s experienced my fair share of verbal harassment for my race and gender, I’d really appreciate it if you would take a moment to read and reflect about the anti-AAPI hate crimes taking place not just recently, but since before the beginning of the pandemic. It’s too easy to sweep these things under the rug in the interest of attending to more urgent crises and social justice movements, but the AAPI community shouldn’t be an afterthought in the big picture of things, especially marginalized groups within this group, including working class, sex workers, those who don’t fit into so-called “model minority”. Credits to Dear Asian Youth on IG. I haven’t seen it shared on Tumblr yet, but maybe it has already; either way, it would be nice if you could reblog it as well. If you’d rather not read, feel free to keep scrolling but unfollow me first. Image ID at the end.
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Image ID:
Image 1: On March 16th, a gunman murdered 8 people at several Asian-run massage spas in Atlanta. Six of the victims were Asian women. CW: violence, mass shooting, racism, death
Image 2: What happened: At 4:50 PM, the first shooting occurred at Young’s Asian Massage in Acworth, where four people were murdered. Around 5:47 PM, Atlanta police responded to another shooting that occurred at Gold Spa, where they found three women shot. While at the scene, police received a report of shots fired at Aromatherapy Spa, where the body of another woman was found.
The police later arrested the shooter in Crisp County at approximately 8:00 PM, who later told law enforcement that he has a “sexual addiction.”
Image 3: Fetishization: Cherokee County sheriff Jay Baker reduced the shooting to the perpetrator having a “really bad day” because he wanted to “eliminate” a “temptation” from his “sexual addiction.”
This justification stems from “yellow fever”, an outdated and racist ideology that objectifies and fetishizes Asian women and contributes to the dehumanization of sex workers. Yellow fever promotes the belief that Asian women are exotic, submissive, and docile.
Comments like “love you long time” and “happy ending” continue to stigmatize, fetishize, and downplay violence against Asian women.
Image 4: Despite evidence of racial bias, many publicized attacks during the pandemic have not been treated as hate crimes, leaving many in the AAPI community to believe that anti-Asian violence is not being taken seriously. These crimes are rooted in racism and hatred towards Asian communities. CALL IT A HATE CRIME.
Image 5: RISE IN ANTI-ASIAN HATE CRIMES: Stop AAPI Hate recently released its latest national report, which shows that 3,795 anti-Asian hate incidents have been recorded from March 2020 to February 2021. A majority of these incidents (68%) were reported by women.
The increase in anti-Asian sentiment can be partially attributed to the widespread use of terms such as “Kung Flu,” “Chinese Virus,” and “Wuhan Virus” by high-profile officials such as former U.S. President Donald Trump. Many continue to use these terms, despite how it has instigated harassment and violence toward the Asian community.
Image 6: A GLOBAL ISSUE: The rise in anti-Asian hate crimes is not a uniquely American issue. In countries with significant Asian populations such as Canada and the United Kingdom, hate crimes against Asians are also increasing.
Canada: In Vancouver, hate crimes against Asian Canadians rose by 717%. Hate crimes in Ottawa increased by 57%, with most of the victims being of East or Southeast Asian descent. Montreal reported a spike of 30 hate crimes and racist acts specifically targeting Asians.
UK: The UK has seen a 300% increase in hate crimes targeting East and Southeast Asians since the start of the pandemic. Anti-Asian hate crimes have increased after every lockdown period, rising from 261 to 395 per month between April and June 2020.
Image 7: WHAT CAN YOU DO? Check the tagged accounts! Share this post to raise awareness. Share resources and informative posts on social media:
·        Safety Tips from Stop AAPI Hate
·        Stay Safe from Hate booklet by the Asian American Federation
Donate to the cause
·        National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, Georgia Chapter
·        Asian American Advocacy Fund (AASF)
·        Butterfly, an Asian and migrant sex workers network
Check in and support your Asian friends. Use your voice to uplift and amplify the AAPI community.
Image 8: Attend Bystander Intervention Training from Hollaback! & AAJC and call out microaggressions and racist jokes.
Follow Asian news and activists
Support working class Asian families by supporting their businesses
Mental Health Resources
·        CalHOPE emotional support hotline: 833-317-HOPE
·        National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA) (nqapia.org)
·        Asian Mental Health Collective (asianmhc.org)
We demand more than solidarity. We want solutions.
Image 9: SOURCES
·        NPR: 8 People, Many of Them Asian, Shot Dead At Atlanta-Area Massage Parlors; Man Arrested
·        AP News: Georgia massage parlor shootings leave 8 dead; man captured
·        Huffington Post: In 2021, Asian Canadians Document Hate Crimes To Be Believed
·        NBC News: Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150% in 2020, mostly in NY and LA, new report says
·        STOP AAPI HATE NATIONAL REPORT
End Image ID. 
9K notes · View notes
i-did · 3 years
Note
Do you know when the racism and ableism accusations against Nora started? Because back when I was active in 2016/2017 and don't think they were a thing, or were very low-key. Was it something she said or are people just basing it off the things she wrote in the books?
From what I remember, the first time I heard the blanket statement of “Nora is racist/fetishizes gay men” blanket statement was early fall 2019 (which is so ironic for the fandom to say on so many levels lmao). There wasn’t a catalyst or anything, just she went offline 2016 and no new content was coming out and the aftg fandom is such an echo chamber that… an accidental smear campaign happened.
 Before then, I would see occasional “Nora used ableist slur” which… is funny (not that ableism isn’t serious) to me people care more about that than Seth saying the f-slur. IMO this is because with Seth, it clearly shows the character thinking it and not the author who is writing about what will be an end game mlm relationship. 
But anyways! Long story short, it's the fact that she’s an ace/aro woman who wrote a mlm book, and based off of the events in canon. There is no “Nora called me/someone else a slur” it’s “Nora wrote a book where slur(s) are used” and “the Moriyama’s are Japanese.”
Below I put my own opinion on these claims and go into more detail:
CW for discussions of: racism, ableism, mlm fetishization
Fetishization: (and mentions of sexism at the end)
To one question in the EC about her inspo for aftg she jokingly responded how she wanted to write about gay athletes. On other parts of your blog you could see she was a hockey fan and an overall sports fan (anime or otherwise) but I've seen this statement taken out of context and framed as “she's one of those BOYXBOY” shippers. Considering how… well-developed both Andrew and Neil’s relationship is, and it takes them until like the 3rd book and there is a whole complex ass plot going on around, you can see how that's just. Not really true. And considering the fandom is like… 85% women (queer women but still women) and I've gotten into a discussion with someone who is a woman and called Nora a fetishizer and was ignoring my opinions as a mlm, and I really just wanted to say “well what does that make you?” it's a very ironic high horse. She didn’t write 3 all 3 books to put Neil in lingerie pwp or crop-top fem-fatal fashion show, fandom did. 
Also, I talked to an ace/aro friend about this, and she talked to me about how AFTG spoke to her very much so as an ace/aro story. Neil is demisexual, Nora didn’t know of the word at the time of reading it, but she did get an anon asking if Neil was demi after, and she said “had to look it up, and yep, but he doesn't really think about it” (paraphrased). Obviously it would have been cool if andreil were canonly written as wlw by Nora instead, (which would have increased the amount of wlw rep and demi rep) but tbh I don’t think tumblr would have cared about it nearly as much and everyone would just call Neil a cold bitch–like people do with Nora’s other published book with a main character who's a woman. Plus they're her OC’s, not mine. 
The fact is that 50% of all LGBT+ rep in literature is mlm, mostly white mlm, and not written by mlm. I’m not going to hold her to a higher standard than everyone else, she already broke a shit ton of barriers in topics she discusses that otherwise get ignored. I’m grateful to these books for existing even if it's a mlm story written by a woman. I still will prioritize reading mlm written by mlm–and vice versa with wlw– in the way I prioritize reading stories about POC written by POC. But credit where credit is due, this is a very good story, and a very good demi story. 
Ableism:
To me, AFTG is a story about ableism and how we perceive some trauma survivors more worthy than others. Neil and the foxes using ableist language shows how people actually talk. Neil thinks shitty things about Andrew, like the others do too, and thinks he's “psycho”. The story ultimately deconstructs this idea and these perceptions of people. Wymack, someone who says the r-slur (which is still not known by the general population as a slur even in 2021 much less the early 2000s when the book was beginning to be written and what the timeline is based off of) is a character who understands Andrew better than most of the others do, and gives him the most sympathy and understanding despite using words like the m-slur and r-slur. Using these words isn't good, but it is how people talk, and this character talks. Wymack is a playful “name caller” especially when he’s mad, the foxes think Andrew is “crazy” and incapable of humanity and love because of it. They call his meds “antipsychotics” as an assumption and insult in a derogatory way, when really antipsychotics are a very helpful drug for some people who need them. Even Neil thinks these things about Andrew until he learns to care about him. All the foxes are hypocritical to am extent, as people in real life tend to be. Nora herself doesn’t use these or tweet them or something, her characters do to show aspects of their personality and opinions and how they change over time.
Racism:
As for the racism, I've seen people talk about how racial minorities being antagonists is inherently bad, which I think lacks nuance but overall isn't a harmful statement or belief. However, Nora herself said she wrote in the yakuza instead of another gang or mob because she was inspired for AFTG by sports anime, (which often queer-bait for a variety of reasons). I haven’t seen a textual analysis acknowledging the racist undertones surrounding the Moriyama’s as the few characters of color who are also major antagonists, but instead just “Nora is racist”. Wymack having shitty flame tribal tattoo’s is just… a huge 90’s thing and a part of his character design. Her having a character with bad taste in tattoo trends doesn’t mean she's racist. There is the whole how Nicky is handled thing, but that's a whole thing on it’s own. The fandom… really will write Nicky being all “ai ai muy spicy, jaja imma hit on my white–not annoying like me–boyfriend in Spanish. With my booty hole out and open for him ofc.” and as a Mexican mlm I’m like … damn alright. 
I think there is merit to the fact that she writes white as the default* and unless otherwise stated a POC a character was written with the intent to be white is another valid criticism, as well as the fact that the cast is largely white, but everything Nora is accused of I've seen the fandom do worse. That goes to the debate of, is actively writing stereotypes for POC more harmful than no representation at all? And personally I prefer the lack of established race line that lets me ignore Nora’s canon intent of characters to be white and come up with my own HC’s over the fandoms depictions of “zen monk Renee with dark past” “black best friend Matt who got over drugs but is a puppy dog” “ex stripper black Dan who dates Matt” vague tokenism. I HC many of the upperclassmen as POC and do my best to actively give thought behind it and have their own arcs that also avoids the fandom colorism spectrum of “darkest characters we HC go to the back and fandom favorites are in the front and are the lightest.” 
*I however won't criticize her harsher or more than… everyone else who still largely does this in fanfiction regarding AFTG as well as literature in general. This isn't a Nora thing, it's a societal thing, and considering the books came out in like 2014 I'm not gonna hold her to a higher standard than the rest of the world. She's just someone who wrote her personal OC’s and self-published expecting no following. I don’t know her race and I’m not gonna hold her to a higher standard than everyone else just because. 
The criticisms I've seen have always been… ironic IMO, and clearly I have a lot of thoughts on it. I think most people say those things about Nora because they heard them, and it's the woke thing to say and do and don’t critically analyze their actions or anything, but just accept them. 
193 notes · View notes
red-talisman · 3 years
Text
CW: recent violence in US against Asian folks and especially Asian women.
.
.
.
Yesterday (16 March 2021) in Atlanta, Georgia, a white man committed a mass shooting that left 8 people dead in various beauty salons, 6 of whom were Asian women. (The cops are saying it wasn't racially motivated, because, y'know, cops are exactly the kind of reliable source to make that judgment call.) There are additional complexities involved, such as Western attitudes towards Asian women including fetishization and dehumanization, which activists are commenting on through social media.
Anti-Asian violence has risen dramatically in the US since the start of the pandemic. Many of the victims are women or elderly. It is, however, only the most recent spike in America's long history of anti-Asian violence.
For some "oh shit how do I help":
A just-released report from Stop AAPI Hate breaking down some of the known statistics; you can also find this organization, founded in response to the violence during COVID, on Twitter
A recent video from Ask a Mortician that talks about the last time white Americans blamed Chinese folks for a plague
A surprisingly solid article from Rolling Stone published today (17 March 2021) on various ways non-Asian folks in the US can help fight back against the violence, with lots of links for further learning
And, as always: getting involved in your local mutual aid network is, overall, often going to be the best use of your time, labor, and resources in anti-racist, anti-fascist work.
79 notes · View notes