roughly 30 transwoman trying to live her best life
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in reply to @renkotsuban's post:

the third to last paragraph here points out a huge problem in leftist white spaces (platform-agnostic; these patterns repeat themselves everywhere i've seen), which is the idea that bigotry is something that you do or something that you live, and not something that is so deeply permeated in our white supremacist society that you can't even see it without someone pointing it out to you.

but many white leftists are consumed by a level of white guilt that causes them to perform insane backflips to prove that they're somehow different than everyone else in society, which causes them to continue to repeat the same mistakes that have been getting repeated for years and years and years because people can't handle the idea of their feelings getting hurt because they accidentally said or did something sus. they are so convinced that they're For The Cause and that they're a Good Ally To Leftism that they talk down the people that they're supposed to be supporting, because they feel like they're so for the cause that they can see society even better than you, the marginalized individual of color.

and especially white queer spaces, where white queer leftists are thoroughly convinced that they are the most in-danger compared to everyone else because, finally, they have something that they can say they're marginalized for, (because we all know they can't call themselves marginalized for being white) so they'll be even more aggressive about showing you how much more they know than you, or how much more politically intelligent they are, and how much they couldn't be doing any wrongdoing like everyone else in society.

i think there is also something to be said about the victim/intelligence complex in these groups and how it's so severe that we even feel like we have to handle these kinds of issues with kid gloves and type paragraphs upon paragraphs to explain something that is actually very fucking simple to understand if you aren't a white person.

There's a conversation I've been trying to figure out how to have for a while now, just circling and circling and trying to find an approach. Its about how for a certain generation, or I guess multiple generations now, of Western people (and I use that term specifically, its not just the US) a lot of Japanese cultural exports, especially anime and video games, were really large parts of their process of identity formation in adolescence or young adulthood and in the process seemingly internalize a lot of the idiosyncrasies of those culture industries from whatever period that is (and you can trace this over time. What anime studios produce today is different but contiguous with what they were producing in 2014 which is different but contiguous with what they were producing in 2004. The fact that we don't talk about this as an industrial strategy outside of "There sure are a lot of isekai's now" is part of what drives me kind of nuts).

The result seems to be a lot of people with an apathy or even hostility towards examining these things on any level above the purely personal. They may also enjoy some technical appreciation of the work, digging into the difficulty or the labor required to produce an impressive piece of animation or an ambitious game, but the artist or the studio are themselves regarded almost in a vacuum, as a sort of conduit of "Japanese-ness" that starts at themselves and ends with the Western viewer/player.

There are times when I'm kind of shocked by how a lot of tropes and imagery (usually around women, but sometimes around men as well) are just uncritically replicated under a sort of implicit excuse of "Well Japan does it", oblivious to how their understanding of "Japan", "it", and even "does" are all distorted. And I'm no Japanese cultural expert! But I know just enough to know that its a really big culture with a lot of different things going on because, you know, its a nation full of like 120 million people. And what the anime industry is doing in a given year is just as much a product of capitalism as it is any cultural values or interests. I don't think its actually that difficult, even with limited direct access to Japan as someone living in the US, to go "I'm pretty sure a lot of women have complicated feelings about all the moe high-schoolers in bikini armor", and ostensible leftists really should know slightly better.

I’m reminded in all this of the initial response to Anita Sarkeesian’s work, where a lot of those early videos were saying some very fundamental 101-level stuff and it was responded to in, well, the way it was. (I don’t mean 101-level in a derogatory sense.)

It’s really not even remotely An Egregious Claim that maybe there is something a bit weird about this R-Type: The Horny Visual Novel project. The backlash for pointing out the elephant in the room is not merited.

Re: being Good and being Bad, I wish folks would remember that Being A Good Person is, like perfection, like queerness, a horizon we are always striving to go further towards, but to conceptualize it as a thing we can achieve is to fail to understand the thing.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have Anki cards to study.

yeah you may not have learned this lesson but also this is a lesson that asian folks have been trying to teach the metaphorical old man over and over again for decades. it is funny sometimes to see a fallacy repeated in a white fandom space or a piece of art and then see a Said quote that encapsulated the thing you were trying to say in two sentences. I marked out so hard the one time that happened to me, in a convo over whether a scene in a book was colonialist or not.
so yeah like. long as it keeps happening there will be something to not shut up about

Really appreciate you pointing this kind of thing out. The dynamics surrounding pointing this kind of background context of racism that we live within is something Ive dealt with and come into conflict with white people about a lot, and its really frustrating to deal with.

it seems obvious to me that a lot of Orientalism (and racism as a whole, as far as it is produced/reproduced in predominantly white spaces) is just subtle. the idea that you can do it accidentally, unintentionally, or even with good intentions is part of the problem, that it's easy to just not notice you're reproducing it.

i think it also speaks to the whiteness of spaces when the reaction to pointing it out is this black-and-white thinking -- either that you're Being A Cop and doing A Cancel Culture by pointing it out, or that the space is full of virulent racists perpetuating deliberate harm and that you must put distance between yourself and them, to prove you're a Good Person. but neither approach is actually engaging with the subject matter at hand, only reacting to optics.

(i would like to explicitly point out: for the back half of that black-and-white thinking thing, that's not an argument that people on the shit end of Orientalism or racism or what have you should "tough it out" and stick around in a space that's causing harm or just plain being annoying. it's moreso an argument for discomforted-but-not-directly-marginalized people to engage with the ideas critically rather than react in defensive posturing to give the image that they're still a Good Person.)

Thank you for talking about this. Insightful and on point as always, and I always really appreciate your perspective.

This is a wakeup call for me personally to reevaluate that comic, honestly. There's some things I encountered long enough ago that I just... don't think about it the same way I would as if I were encountering it for the first time now, and that's not healthy for me.

This post really was a cup of cold water over the head for me, as I had been nodding along the past few days in agreement with the criticism of Orientalism that had been discussed in various posts, and then you named something that I like and have reposted approvingly, haha (nervous laugh).

I've since been internally interrogating how I feel about the comic, and will probably continue to do so, but the one thing today that I've definitely realized I was overlooking was the "keikaku means plan" style of dialogue (where every fifth word is Japanese, written in romaji, and defined in the margins). It's arguably the primary generative source of comedy for the whole series, and it's presumably poking fun at the sort of anime fan that thinks anything's cooler if you say it in Japanese, the sort that says "nani the fuck?" like it's "pass the salt".

All it took me today was imagining a reader who's not "in on" that joke, especially one whose first language is Japanese, and "poking fun at weebs" looked more like "broken English is funny".

Anyway, as I've told you elsewhere, thanks for this post. And sorry I chickened out and wrote this in a reply instead of making a new post like I said I might.