Forum - View topicThe List - 6 Awesome People of Color in Anime
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invalidname
Contributor
Posts: 2434 Location: Grand Rapids, MI |
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I always thought one of the great things about Robotech is that it was a low-profile thing in the afternoon kidvid ghetto that wasn't even on in a lot of cities so nobody was really paying attention to it, and that meant it could get all sorts of stuff past the cultural censors of the time, like Mirya accurately explaining to the Zentraedi where babies come from. |
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ANN_Lynzee
ANN Executive Editor
Posts: 2930 Location: Email for assistance only |
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But isn't Archer's identity actually spoiler[Shiro Emiya?]
I'm all fine with debating the choices we made, but I draw the line at assuming Sarah and I put no thought into this. We sat down with a much larger list and debated the merits of each one before coming to this conclusion. This was not some lazy "which skin tones are dark enough??" thing we put together and I do take issue with that suggestion. I also have no idea what you mean about "Japan-centric" backgrounds as a lot of the characters mentioned come from series that don't even take place in Japan.
Not a "hater" but the likelihood that I've sat through a shonen fighting series that lasts longer than 26 episodes is low. I made it through the first 40 of Bleach when it aired...and that's about it.
It's not a joke. Female fights are routinely "saved" as soon as the male protagonist shows up. They do it to Caska too, actually, when she's menstruating later in the series, spoiler[ and the sexual violence that goes down at the end] so it's still not a perfect example, but up until that point, it was refreshing for me. |
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Ulto
Posts: 25 |
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I feel like a few characters on this list are just well done sterotypes. Take Dutch: He's, quite intentionally, the big violent black man from American action movies. Black Lagoon is intentionally politically incorrect (Hell--they throw in Nazis too. IIRC there's a brief and appropriately hilarious conversation Dutch has with one of their leaders) and I hold no ill-will towards it, but I wouldn't put Dutch on a pedestal in context of race.
This happens with every widely adopted "politically correct" term. The fact of the matter--which most people don't seem to realize--is it isn't the terms that have problems: It's the people using them. I honestly think we should focus less on the words themselves and more on when it's appropriate to use them in the first place. |
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walw6pK4Alo
Posts: 9322 |
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Archer's just brown for the sake of being brown, like Urd from AMG, Aura from Isekai, Kuro from Illya (obviously taken cues from Archer) Musashi from KanColle, Pirotess from Lodoss; Ingrid, Nina, and Miria from Lilith Games, and so many others. You can't pick out an ethnicity from them, their brown skin is more or less a fetish/moe point, not a demonstration of being progressive and inclusive. |
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Agent355
Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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Huh? The only place on Earth where the *majority* of leaders are Ashkenazi Jews is Israel, but after reading all the racist and sexist claptrap in these comments, I'm not surprised.
Children are very much influenced and psychologically impacted by what they see in media, and whether they see themselves or their friends represented.
Who's stopping white people from having more babies? Are low white European birth rates "racism", too? |
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Fedora-san
Posts: 464 |
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I find diversity in anime more genuine because of that. Chances are no one at Shounen Jump told their writers to put black people in their series in order to be politically correct, they did on their own choice so we got some actual interesting black characters as a result. With our cartoons generally every cartoon will have a token black, Asian, maybe Hispanic, and if it's the 80s or 90s, disabled kid to meet some checklist quota. They all pretty much lack character and interesting traits as a result. I see a lot of diversity in anime. Lots of series will feature gaijin characters, especially if they go to other countries, and a lot of the time they'll even speak the native language, albeit terribly, with subtitles. Also it's not that uncommon to see series which actually star western characters either. I think Japan, despite their population being 99% Asian, show a lot more diversity than our own stuff does despite all the cultures and races that live here. |
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notrogersmith
Posts: 192 |
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Tony K.
Subscriber
Moderator Posts: 11265 Location: Frisco, TX |
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Deleted several posts for over-quoting.
Don't want your posts deleted? Then don't over-quote. |
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MagicalGirlJodi
Posts: 2 |
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Nice to see Caska getting more love this week!
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jppcouto
Posts: 103 |
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Scar from FMA is so awesome and an example of an anime character that suffers from racism. I can just accept that he isn't here because he was a serial killer and this post wants people with positive qualities.
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11306 |
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That's because none of those locations share a border with the US, so their immigrants aren't literally, and I mean literally, running in traffic to get across the border illegally. For the most part, the well-off from other continents come across the oceans legally, and their refugees are too poor to get here at all without backing. Likewise, Canada isn't dealing with widespread poverty, or fighting domestic guerrilla and drugs wars, so Canadians don't have much reason to try to run for their lives to the US. There is the occasional story about Asian immigrants who have been smuggled here as slave labor though. But the numbers are vanishingly small compared to immigrants from Latin America. |
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Shippoyasha
Posts: 459 |
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I don't get the gist of this list at all. At worst, it comes across as clickbait. At best, it vomes across as a tad mistaken in more ways than one.
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ChibiKangaroo
Posts: 2941 |
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Yes! This so much. I really find these types of analysis of darker skinned characters in Anime to be so interesting. To those who wonder why this is even a useful topic of discussion, well someone actually sort of answered that. i.e. Anime writers are really under no compulsion to put darker skinned characters in their stories. The population of Japan is overwhelmingly Japanese and the vast majority of their media shows Japanese people as "us" and Caucasian people as "them." Darker skinned people are a sort of anomaly when it comes to Japan. Yea, you see some African guys in random places in Roppongi but that's about it. The intended audiences of Anime are primarily Japanese people and secondarily Caucasian Westerners. As a result, the vast majority of Anime characters are Japanese, and there is often a smattering of Caucasian characters thrown in as the "gaijin." There are almost no Anime that are created with an imagined audience of dark skinned people, whether African American or Latino or any other group. So when anime writers/creators do include a dark skinned character, it is because they want to. They want to give us something different from the norm and perhaps expand our horizons a bit. Some do an amazing job with it, and we should celebrate that.
I do think there is a benefit of having dark skinned characters in addition to the flavor aspect. The world is becoming much more "globalized" as far as people traveling outside of their countries and dealing with different cultures and ethnic groups. Japan is still extremely insular and homogeneous, but that won't last. The Japanese youth will need to become more exposed to a variety of other ethnic groups if the country wants to stop shrinking and become more connected in the future. |
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Tenbyakugon
Posts: 788 Location: Ohio, United States |
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F.Y.I., giving support to "people of color" by giving empowerment to their skin color is just as racist as segregating a group of people based on skin color, if not more racist because the former is the passive of the two.
Supporting this whole diversity movement is just as problematic as supporting racial segregation because it tends to leave out at least one specific group of people based on their "race" (when actually it is just skin color and we are all a part of one single race). Want to support all "races?" Support the human race equally, from one skin color and ethnicity to another. |
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Garudyne
Posts: 20 Location: Scandinavia |
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Although there are some things about this list that angers me, I know the author wrote it with good intentions.
Last edited by Garudyne on Wed Nov 26, 2014 6:26 am; edited 1 time in total |
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