Help me, Obi-Fan!

[rivkat]

Okay, so I am going to this conference, and Madhavi Sunder and Anupam Chander have a paper, The Right to Mary Sue (28 pages long, pdf), which will be published in a major law review.  They use Mary Sue as a shorthand for much fan fiction, and also they argue that self-insertion into copyrighted works is a good thing.  I am very sympathetic to their argument towards the rehabilitation of Mary Sue, though I have serious doubts about using her as the representative creation of fan fiction.  Part of this may well be the usual fear that fandom will be misrepresented or misunderstood by outsiders.  Chander & Sunder are very sympathetic – in fact, I think they overstate the liberatory potential of fan fiction – but there’s always that worry.

Anyway, I have an opportunity to offer comments, and I have plenty about Mary Sue as feminist heroine and slash as feminist liberation of the original text.  What I lack, shamefully, is a comparable ability to discuss race in fan fiction/media fandom.  Chander & Sunder argue that fan fiction allows marginalized groups to insert themselves in the text or reorganize the narrative around themselves, and couple that with discussion of the underrepresentation/misrepresentation of characters of color in TV/movies, but how often does that happen with race?  We have plenty of gender-swaps; does anyone know of a race-swap story?  Any good discussion of Teyla and Ronon as characters of color in SGA fanfic? 

Things I already know I want to show them: Mimisere’s Jesus Walks (found a copy on YouTube, by the way; that result came up before any LJ result).  Remember Us, the archive.  (No SGA section, interestingly.)  Coffeeandink from 2002.  Them Mean Ol’, Low-Down, Lando Calrissian Blues.  Blaise Zabini is black (oh darn, am I going to have to explain FandomWank to them?).

I have been reading cultural appropriation posts with interest, but I didn’t realize I’d need to try to do some outreach.  So if anyone has links to good discussions of race in fandom that could help explain us – the good and the bad – to some smart, capable people, I’d really appreciate it. 

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I have been wondering about this re: anime and manga in general and the popularity of AU settings for anime/manga fic. I know Americans tend to read a lot of manga/anime signifiers as "white", but I've been wondering if that's mistaking signifiers of "default" as signifiers of "white"; it seems to me that a lot of the racial markers read as "Japanese" if you're Japanese. (There are a lot of weasel words like "seems" and "wonder" and a marked overuse of the conjectural in that because I'm not convinced and because even my basic thoughts on race in anime may take up to 5000 words.)

And you, of course, are neither Japanese nor American. So: what's your take on Bleach? Do you see the characters as one way in canon and in another way in, say, Regency or Ancient Roman AUs?

(You are not required to answer just because I'm curious!)

Hitting it from another direction, and talking more to Rivka than Afrai: I know Elizabeth did a popslash AU set in Heian Japan -- how were the characters envisioned in that? How were they envisioned in *her* Regency AU?

During the POTC discussions, a lot of people said they didn't read Jack Sparrow as white. Is there discussion of that or any reflection of it in fic?

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I don't know that popslash AU -- do you remember the name?

I am also sadly ignorant of PoTC meta/fic, so I can't answer that question, but if we're going to extrapolate, signs point to no.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

No, sorry; author would have been amber, not Elizabeth. I heard of it rather than reading it, so the title wouldn't have stuck in my head anyway.

[bravecows.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'm thinking about this, and it's a little hard to explain because while I obviously don't think of the Bleach characters as Chinese Malaysian (like me) or white American (like most people in English-language fandom), I don't think of them as overtly Japanese either. But then again --

Right, when I read Bleach, they are just characters to me. And everybody will say that, yeah, but at the same time, I am aware all the time that they are Japanese; I assume that the default ethnicity/culture is Japanese; and I only say to myself, oh, right, a white/Chinese/non-Japanese character when the mangaka makes it very very obvious that that's what she's aiming for. (A name like Dorian Red, for example, is a good indicator; blond hair, as you know, is not.)

I do think someone like me'd be better than a Westerner at not automatically assuming that all characters are the same as them ethnically and culturally, if only because I'm used to reading/watching things in which all the characters were white and Western. So my default approach is to assume that the characters in something I'm watching/reading are different. And I don't assume that they're all white, either, unless the book or movie was obviously produced by white people, in which case it's generally a safe bet to assume everyone is white until you're proven wrong.

What a rubbish answer this is. Um! Anyway, when I write Ancient Roman Bleach AUs, I generally imagine Japanese people wandering around Ancient Rome but being right at home, which, yeah, don't think about it too hard or the set-up for pr0n breaks down. But I am conscious that the Bleach characters I write are not at all Japanese; they're not horribly true to canon, because I know less about Japanese culture than I do even about Western culture (a lifetime of reading books in English helps with the latter). I used to worry about this a great deal -- but they are not properly Japanese, oh no, OOCitude! -- but I suppose the best you can do is to think of them as people (albeit people under different pressures, who have been formed by different influences) and work from there.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I know Americans tend to read a lot of manga/anime signifiers as "white", but I've been wondering if that's mistaking signifiers of "default" as signifiers of "white"; it seems to me that a lot of the racial markers read as "Japanese" if you're Japanese.

Whahuh? Can I jump in an ask you to explain that? I read a ton of manga, but am not at all involved in English-language animanga fandoms (mainly because I read the source material in Japanese and thus the fic always seems just wrong, wrong, wrong by default), so I'm not sure what you mean by "read a lot of manga/anime signifiers as "white"".

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

American manga readers/anime watchers generally assume all or most of the characters in manga/anime are white, rather than Asian, and are deeply puzzled by this.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Okay... Maybe I just read the wrong manga (though you mentioned Bleach, which is one of my current favorites), but most stuff takes place in Japan and the characters have Japanese names. Is that not a clear enough sign? I am deeply puzzled by their deep puzzlement.

If their argument is that the characters all have big eyes, well, many American cartoons aren't drawn realistically either (hello, the Simpsons?). As for hair color, it's not realistic for whites, either, since many animanga hair colors do not occur in nature; it's simply a break from the monotony of drawing everyone with the same brown hair.