creatingstories asked:

I’m writing a fantasy book and one of the main characters is an half Japanese-coded character. But he is also a half elf too so he has some magical characteristic, like clear eyes, but just because elf has some specific characteristic ( to be clear elves are not coded to any existing ethnicity, they have just specific fantasy characteristic ).

I do not want it to seem offensive. In particular I read the article about the “green-eyes Asian” and the “colored hair asian”. I do not want to give him particular features to make them stand out to readers so that they’re marked as ‘special’ and not like the ‘other East Asians, as you said in the article. He is a major character and has an extremely complex arc.

Submission has been abridged for clarity.

Still green eyes in my book unless you can tell us how the clear eyes relates to magical characteristics and the magic systems of the story. It’s changing eye color for an Japanese-coded character to demarcate their uniqueness in some way. OP can either give up on Japanese coding, provide us with further info, or just give the character regular colored eyes that turn clear when using magic abilities to more explicitly link the magical ability to the ~ Special ~ eye coloring.

- Marika.

Announcement: Please consider this the final Ask on East Asian characters with light/green/blue/etc. eyes, as Marika has presented a clear workaround for this trope in the case of fantasy worldbuilding.

Hello. I searched your tags for awhile and didn’t see anything similar to my question so I thought I would ask. The story I’m writing right now is set in a fantasy world where the government is made up of people who are born with the gift to see possible futures, but are also born blind because of this gift they were given. One of my main characters if part of this government and is blind, and she is Korean coded. I was wondering if it was harmful for her to be blind, because I have heard people make incredibly rude jokes about Asian people being blind. I don’t want to portray anything negative in my character.

I decided she would be the one that was part of the government because she is mature and patient and it made the most sense because of her personality being compatible to how the government in this fantasy world is run. Everyone in the government in this world is blind, but I was wondering if maybe I should choose a different character to have this power and be part of the government to avoid inflicting a harmful stereotype onto a character I love. Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. 

I personally don’t see a problem with a blind character being Korean (other mods may have different takes, which should be taken into consideration–we aren’t a monolith!). However, I would be wary of falling into an ableist trope that happens a lot with blind people, where their sight is taken in exchange for superior senses or a psychic gift–this just ends up hammering in the belief that blindness is a defect that needs to be compensated for. I’m able-bodied, so I won’t speak too extensively on that topic, but I encourage you to do some research.

-Sophia

Please check out our reblog of Writing a Blind or Visually Impaired Character for additional information on writing blind characters. As for the comment about Asian eyes, I’m personally comfortable with this mostly because the Korean character isn’t the only blind character in the story. I would definitely recommend having more Korean or at least other Asian characters who aren’t blind to reinforce that Asian character =/= blind character.

-Rune

@xdesecratorx asked:

Hello! My story is set in a fantasy universe, and the population of the country that receives the most focus is Japanese-coded. This includes most of the cast and the central family, a noble house that practises a banned religion and (like pretty much all of my characters) deals heavily in intrigue.

One family member is the protagonist’s aunt by marriage, who comes from a lower-class background and schemed her way into taking the identity of a noblewoman. She is one of the more ruthless, dangerous members of the family, and after browsing your “dragon lady” tag I was wondering if she might qualify as that stereotype. She is openly sexual, but only with her husband—they have a sort of Gomez/Morticia thing going, and are strictly monogamous—and fairly subtle even when she has cause to intimidate someone, but she’s definitely not someone to trust. 

She’s mysterious because her entire background is fabricated, too, and she’s a mother of four with a definite matriarchal thing going, although she genuinely cares for her children in her own way. I love characters who work primarily through espionage and deception, but I want to make sure I’m not ruining her by writing her offensively. Do you think what I have for her so far is problematic? Is there anything with her you would specifically advise avoiding?

Clarification on the Dragon Lady Trope

I don’t know how I’ve become the “talks about Old Hollywood” person on this blog, but I’ll reiterate as much as I need to. Tropes like the dragon lady are situated in a specific context of 20th century orientalism and xenophobia, and requires the checking of a few boxes to qualify. 

First, the dragon lady is (was, really) most typically a token Asian woman, and her “exotic” nature was her main appeal. If the main cast is also Japanese-coded, then she wouldn’t be presented as an Other.* The dragon lady is created by her relationship to the rest of the cast, and to the audience. 

Second, I like Asian women who narratively have control over their sexuality, so your character is great in that respect. The dragon lady is the opposite of that; even though she’s a sexually domineering archetype, she is one that was designed for Western male consumption. Everything about the dragon lady’s screen presence is a fantasy, she exists for the white guy to want her to step on him, etc. Someone like your character/Morticia Addams is not being sexually dominant for the Gaze, she’s expressing it in a way that isn’t designed to be appealing to the audience, because she’s doing it for herself and her husband only. That’s good. 

With respect to her mysteriousness or her matriarchal streak, it’s unclear from your ask on how these traits manifest specifically, so it’s hard to say. I find that when someone in fiction has a secret identity that they’re fibbing their way into, they tend to come across as less mysterious in a cool way and more mysterious in a suspicious or confusing way, which is an angle you could go for. It would also make her more well-rounded by making her not entirely competently ruthless/sneaky in the process—makes her a bit more human. 

~Mod Rina

*Or, at least, shouldn’t be, but it happens—a lot of animated movies have fallen into the trap of taking a cast with a shared ethnicity and exoticizing one member of the cast (eg. non-standard English accent, racialized physical features) while the rest is significantly less “ethnic” (think 1998 Mulan, love that movie tho). So that’s really the only thing to watch out for, especially if you’re working in visual media; make your character the same “amount” of stereotypically Asian as everyone else in the Japanese-coded cast.

@theoldgodsarealiveandbitching submitted:

Hey there, I’m working on a fantasy story where one of the girls who forms the starting cast is a Japanese-Canadian girl, and she’s a third-generation Canadian. I know it’s more common for second and third-generation immigrants to have Western first names, but I’d love to use the name Tomoko Sato for her as the meaning really suits. In terms of justification, her primary caretaker is her grandmother, who is a fashion designer that built a business off a fashion house that incorporates traditional Japanese fashion elements into their designs. I think it would make a lot of sense for her to push back against the pressure to assimilate.

As well, I’m worried about her falling into the Smart Asian trope, as she isn’t particularly great at school (her ADHD makes classroom learning hard), but she likes accruing knowledge and has a super broad knowledge base from cycling through hyper-fixations. She’s excellent at thinking at her feet and has a few moments throughout the story where she invents unique solutions or puts together things before the rest of the cast. She and her Nigerian-Canadian friend and love interest work together on a journal of their experiences throughout as well, with her providing the writing and him doing illustrations, though that plot line can easily be scrapped if the urge on her part to observe and document seems unnatural or forced. 

Lastly, she regularly colours her hair a platinum blonde colour. It doesn’t have a huge significance behind it besides her liking the aesthetic and enjoying it as a form of self-expression. Do you think it runs the risk of encroaching on the “Asian girl with coloured hair” trope? Thanks in advance!

WWC Commentary on Asians with Hair Streaks 

~ Mod Rina

The protagonist’s name is a little generic and old-fashioned (Think Jane Smith). There is nothing wrong with her name, but it might be nice to think about why she has the name that she does. I know my share of Nikkei acquaintances who are named for older relatives and thus have names that are more common in previous eras. 

I wouldn’t worry too much about the Smart Asian trope. You have concisely stated many characteristics of people with ADHD who manage to succeed in academic settings despite their limitations simply because coping skills and hyperfixation make up the difference (Also known as How Marika Got a 5 in AP US History Without Studying). Remember: tropes and stereotypes are tools. They aren’t meant to be avoided part and parcel, but rather used in moderation when they can result in more compelling narratives.

- Marika

@marnz said:

Hi there! I love your blog and I have spent so much time on it and learned a lot! I am writing a fantasy in a world inspired by the PNW. In my book racism doesn’t exist but xenophobia does. Before the events of the book take place, there was a horrible war that ended in a draw. Two Houses were disgraced due to this war. One of the disgraced Houses is white and one is Japanese. They are disgraced for different reasons and basically neither of these reasons are their fault (but ppl don’t know that). I want to make sure I am not othering the disgraced Japanese House. The reason they are disgraced is because they had a feud with a (white) family in a different country and this led to war, but no one knows who started the feud. 

They are blamed for the war by the government because the government is trying to avoid responsibility/accountability, and holding the government accountable is part of the plot of the series. This House is not the only Japanese House in my story (I don’t want to other or tokenize them) and one of the main characters, Miwa, is from this House. Her book 1 arc is about redeeming her house, accomplishing her career goals (she is a weaver who weaves a very rare magic cloth), and falling in love with the son of the family her House feuded with—kind of like Romeo & Juliet. She spends a lot of time power brokering due to her House’s disgrace / trying to protect her family and adoptive daughter. She is very smart and strong physically and emotionally, but she’s also loving, loyal, and proud. Her main emotional struggle is with anger and shame, and trying to move on from the feud that started the war. She is angry because of how people treat her House, but I think this anger is reasonable and justified and I want to be careful to not invoke the dragon lady trope. Are there any other tropes or stereotypes I should be aware of? Thank you so much 🙏🏻 

“Inspired by” = Geographical/ Climate Features

My assumption for this ask is that when you use the word “inspired”, you are referring solely to things like ecosystems, wildlife, geography and so on (I know people sometimes pull from the geography of real world places to avoid having to draw their own maps). I similarly assume that when you say “Japanese” and “white”, you mean “Japanese-coded” and “white-coded.” However, given those assumptions, I know too little about your world-building to give you helpful advice. If I am correct, I urge you to resubmit. I particularly want to know the following:

• How many races in this setting? 
• What are other houses doing while these two houses fight?
• What was the cause of the war?
• Why are the houses divided up by both race and ethnicity as opposed to culture? Remember, in a world where only xenophobia exists, race doesn’t yet exist in the sense that we comprehend it. Colorism, sure, but not race.
• Thus, what does “white” mean? How does whiteness exist in a world where white people don’t yet exist? Do you simply mean people with pale skin coded as being from Western cultures? (Ex. American white v. European white v. Medieval European White; which culture and era?)?
• What does “Japanese” mean (Which era?)

Your end goal remains the same assuming the above: Put enough distance between your fantasy world and our world so that using the environment of the PNW as a physical location so your story isn’t link our current socio-political reality in your reader’s mind. One work you might consider (in terms of notes on this kind of world-building) is Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, which, despite using the environment and map of Eastern Australia as an inspiration, is a cyberpunk dystopia set in a mega-city governed by a late-stage capitalist dictatorship. The story has a multiracial, multicultural-coded cast as well as “houses” that represent family-owned corporations, yet it is highly removed from our own reality.

Rina has given you an excellent response below taking you more at your word. I urge you to pay particular attention to her notes on the definition of the trope for “Dragon Lady”. A woman of color being angry does not automatically fall into stereotype. To make that assumption assumes that non-white women can’t be angry without being stereotypical, and that is a very problematic assumption. -

- Marika.

“Inspired by” = Sociopolitical Features

As Marika said, I’ll be working with different definitions, far more at face value. When it comes to that aforementioned socio-political reality, here’s what I, a Japanese-Canadian-American living in the Pacific Northwest, see. Assumptions:

1. Re: “Inspired”—I assume at its bare minimum it denotes a certain kind of geography, possibly coded landmarks, but in its use will be enough to evoke an image of the region in your readers.
2. Re: “white” and “Japanese”—I’m interpreting that IRL nationalities and racial categories exist in this world. 

Essentially, you’ve placed two major settler demographics in the region at the forefront of your PNW story. Ask yourself these questions. Where are indigenous people in this equation? Why do white people live in this PNW-like region and hold positions of power? Why/how have your Japanese people immigrated to this region? Regardless of your answer, you may be perpetuating politicized images of what people think of when they think “PNW resident.” 

By positioning these demographics where they are, you’ve left an afterimage of colonialism in your fantasy world. And as soon as colonialism comes into the picture, xenophobia is no longer just xenophobia; it’s xenophobia plus racism. Pre-war immigration of Issei or 1st-gen Japanese was encouraged by the Meiji-era Japanese government under the pressure to Westernize (source), and the xenophobia the immigrants faced was racialized and centred on their Asianness. The colonization of the Americas, well, if you don’t know its basis in white supremacy then you need to get to reading.

This is not me saying that you should make this a racial suffering story (no no no), or even that you need to write racist experiences into the story at all! Rather, your assertion that racism “doesn’t exist” in this world says a lot about your assumptions going into this story. And those assumptions need to be checked.

For example, consider the optics of the disgraced-Japanese-house-plot. The focus is on a group of Japanese American people blamed and ostracized by The Government™ for supposedly being agitators in A War™, and the stage is set in the Pacific Northwest. Where have I heard that one before? 

Sounds a bit to me like anti-Japanese xenophobia during WWII. 

Potential Solutions

This isn’t to say that this premise doesn’t work, because I believe that there are enough degrees of separation that it’s not 1:1 (for one, there’s no internment. I hope). Rather, if you place the narrative emphasis on the protagonist’s Japanese House in the way you’ve described, some Nikkei readers (me) may not be thrilled about the “being distrusted by the govt over a War” aspect. Here are some strategies to address this:

1. You have other Japanese Houses who are not disgraced, but the implications will not go away unless those Houses are also in the same country (and not, for example, in mainland Japan). So make sure they show up in the region.
2. Consider putting the blame on the two disgraced Houses (white and Japanese) for the same reason. Maybe both Houses were feuding with the overseas house at the same time, so both were useful scapegoats for the government. Maybe the government didn’t know which to blame, so they went with both. That way, no regional ethic group is singled out. 
3. Is it possible for the blaming and shaming to come from the media and not the government? Or possibly, a separate politically powerful House? Whatever you choose, point #2 applies. 
4. Try giving the spotlight (however briefly) to the disgraced white House to show that Miwa’s House isn’t the only one affected.

Notes on the “Dragon Lady Trope:

Also: “Dragon Lady” does not quite mean what you think it means. An Asian woman being angry does not count. It has more to do with the fear-mongering and fetishization that informs the exoticization of Asian women, particularly in 20th c. media. Despite your self-professed time spent on the blog, I feel as though you have not read the Dragon Lady tag. Just start with this extremely basic checklist of what, exactly, a Dragon Lady is. Does your character check any of these boxes except for “Asian?” Methinks she doesn’t. Please, please read this essay on the sexualization of Asian women in Old Hollywood, which covers the origin of the Dragon Lady in its historical context. 

Again, my response to your plot depends very highly on your worldbuilding assumptions. If your world is diverse with new fictional cultures, free of racial categories, and distanced enough from the PNW as we know it such that all you’re really taking away is the gloomy weather and evergreens, you won’t be saddled with historical connotations. But overall, you seem to be rather blind to the history of the intersection of xenophobia and racism in the West Coast, particularly with respect to how it targeted Japanese Americans and Canadians. My suggestion? Take a step back and do some research. 

~Mod Rina

@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. 

1. What other goals does she have in life?
2. 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

My question is about a girl that’s a main character. Her name is Margot Lee who is of Chinese descant and she comes from a wealthy family of powerful abilities (Superhuman basically) but her father is disgusted because Margot is the only person in her family without them. Her mother takes off, taking her son with her. I don’t have anything else for her backstory but her personality is all over the place to me. Margo is one of the popular girls in her boarding school and she’s academically smart. However, she just doesn’t apply herself thus getting bad grades. I want to know if I’m being a bit forceful with the whole “Asian-are-supposed-to-be-smart”? 

For the stereotype to be invoked, they’d also have to be getting good grades and taking studying seriously, because the stereotype is that Asian families do not tolerate failure (and I could also apply some experiences from my personal life and among my fellow Asian friends, where Bs and sometimes A-s were met with disappointment and fear–there’s a joke that an A- is an Asian F.) 

–mod Jess

Hi, I have two main Asian characters who are both pretty smart and I’m worried about falling into the Smart Asian stereotype. The Indian one is very developed and the ‘reason’ for his intelligence is his curiosity + skill with detail. The other character, who is Chinese, is practically a genius when it comes to engineering but due to his only relative dying, depression and his adhd he had to drop out of school at 17, his dream now being to become a mechanic while he currently works as a stripper

Smart Asian Tropes

I am more or less thinking you are overthinking things, OP, when it comes to the smart Asian stereotype–the stereotype doesn’t mean no Asian scientists/researchers/engineers ever, it means you shouldn’t just make book smarts the be-all end-all of their personality. 

Write smart Asians as well-rounded humans, not as people wholly defined by their intelligence and field of work.

–Mod Jess

Writing Male Stripper of Color

Your narrative for depression and ADHD leading to stripping is a pretty good instinct. I would please treat it as just a job, and take a look at things like Deadpool. Read Tits and Sass, and read things they recommend. Generally really see stripping as work that has its own pitfalls and triumphs.

As for details, male stripping is a slightly different realm from female stripping. It’s a little bit harder to get a job in the male stripping world, because most strip clubs cater to straight men. So you’ll have to keep in mind the location to see if male stripping is even a thing. Aesthetic is very important for male strippers, moreso than female. You can play up race fetish or not, depending on your thing.

Stripper basics: you find a club, pay them various fees (house, dj, it’s recommended you tip the bouncer/door guy), and dance there according to their requirements. Usually, this is a thong, but some male strippers might have more elaborate requirements. You tend to make most of your money doing lap dances, despite the mainstream image of strippers doing stage. Make it rain culture does happen and you can make literal boxes of cash on stage, but it’s not the norm in every single club. 

Most of the life of a stripper is chatting up customers to get them to get a lap dance, which is $10-$20 per. There’s a suggestion to only do $100 worth of dances before getting paid, because better to lose $100 than lose $500. Some clubs have VIP and Champaign rooms that cost literal thousands for 30-60 minutes.

The main place race plays a part is your hustle. This is how you get people to buy a lap dance (or ten)/VIP time. Race fetishes are, sadly, huge in strip club culture. You are dealing with every single “preference” out there when it comes to race, both on the “I’m not attracted to [ethnicity]” and the fetishization. You can either use this to your advantage, or not. But it will affect your money in one way or another. Figure out how he’s built up a persona and how he integrates race into his sales pitch. Does he try to overcompensate and assimilate? Play to whatever fetish the client seems to want? Somewhere in between?

Clubs can run on either a dance-count fee, a percentage of earnings fee, or a flat fee and you keep everything. VIP/Champaign can work on you have to pay the bottle and keep the rest, or the club takes a quarter/ third/ half of the total cost and you keep the rest.

The majority of male strippers will have men as clients. Female clients are a noticeable part of it, but men are the norm. Sometimes clubs will say they’re for women, sometimes clubs will flamboyantly reference they’re catering to gay men. Do the research you have to and see what type of club he’ll be at. He could also do private parties, but the money for them isn’t very good and is more for extra cash.

People will either be aware of the male clientele (and either make homophobic remarks, insinuate the stripper is gay, or know it’s just part and parcel of the job), or they’ll be under the impression male strippers do full service sex work for women (aka, asking if they get laid every night/think the guy is sleeping with pretty girls all the time). As a result, it can be a little riskier for guys to talk about being strippers. 

Out of the female customers he does get, well, female customers tend not to know “the rules” about stripping because they aren’t club regulars (like don’t grope the dancers), so they’ll more likely to be handsy. Exception: if they are regulars at strip clubs, and/or are very familiar with the rules of sex work. The guy will have Customer Stories (which female strippers also do, don’t get me wrong), but because there are so many double standards around male strippers, they’ll take on a slightly different flavour. 

The thing about strip club culture is the dancers are in a lot of control. Depending on the money in the club, dancers can be super friendly with each other and watch out for each other, or they can be very closed off and territorial because they’re guarding their money. Letting other strippers know about really bad customers tends to be a thing that happens, but depending on the club itself you’re looking at different cultures.

All that said stripping is a pretty good choice for somebody trying to survive when they have a lot of requirements. The hours often receive huge payback, there’s tons of freedom, and if you can stand the grabby customers (who you can train, especially if you’re at a good club— dancers have a million tricks for sexily pushing customers back to their place), it’s got tons of reward. Tons of risk, too, between police raids, grabby customers, and plain old not making money (you have to pay the club to work there, and if you don’t make back house, it comes out of your pocket).

Hope this acts as a good primer for how to write strippers!

~Mod Lesya

 I’m very interested in music. It is incredibly important to me and as thus I often ascribe musical abilities to my characters. I have a story with an Asian protagonist at the moment though and I know there is this big stereotype and/or social expectation about Asians and music. I’m really afraid that if I let this character play musical instruments at a high level that it looks like I just chose this because of the trope. (Then again I think music is something wonderful and it also feels bad to take this away from all Asian characters entirely because of this trope.)

The character is very into music because he has (clinical) social anxiety disorder and “replaces” social interactions with music. He doesn’t lack interest in humans but he is so afraid of them that he mostly avoids them which a) causes him sadness and b) leads to the fact that he fills his spare time resulting from this lack of interaction with music as a mechanism of escapism. I chose this story to reflect my own social anxiety but I am afraid again that this might step into a stereotype I’m not aware of (shy or reclusive Asians? I’m not sure if these tropes are a thing).

What it boils down to is that I want to depict a fleshed out story about someone with fears of social interactions and as a consequence uses music as escapism from his problems and I wonder if it is possible to overcome given tropes or if this is just too much of a problematic mine field.

Mod Jess: Your worry about tropes seems to imply that he’s East Asian (v. South or Southeast Asian), so I’ll answer from that angle, which is basically, I don’t think it’s a problem at all. I played violin while I was in school, and the other East Asian kids did either that or piano, so maybe that’s where your worry stems from.

Here are some questions for you to think about, that might help you flesh this guy out: what instrument(s) does he like to play? What kind of music does he like playing, and why? How is he afraid of interacting with other people? What happens when he tries?

As far as I know, shy and reclusive East Asians aren’t necessarily a stereotype—I think you may be thinking of reserved personalities, which aren’t quite the same! However, if there are any Asian followers with social anxiety, please feel free to comment? (Please do not comment if you fall in neither category.)

Mod Shira: The East Asian = musician trope tends to assume all East Asian classical musicians play a string instrument, especially violin, and that I bet East Asian classical musicians from other parts of the orchestra, like my Japanese-American colleague who heads our percussion section, would love to be represented.