The grass is always yellower on the other side of the fence

[flemmings]

Reading nojojojo on how to convey that your characters are not default-white. This is when I have one of my Pharisaical moments of 'Lord I thank Thee that I am not as other writers, even as this original novelist here' and even more, 'Lord I thank Thee that Thou madest me a fan of a Japanese series.' I don't have to decribe my characters. People already know what they look like. I don't have to work to get them culturally 'right'. I need only continue as their creator began.

More or less.

Because I'm still a white westerner writing people from another culture in my own language. The unphysical stuff-- their reflex reactions, their motivations, to a very large extent the things I make them do-- will be what makes natural emotional sense to me. Much of what strikes me as significant or, well, striking, about these characters is stuff that a gaijin /would/ notice or value, and not necessarily what their author or same-language fans do. Even the writing shibboleths of In Character and OOC depend on a western interpetation of what these guys are all about, not a Japanese one. Arguably I've already interpreted the characters as westerners just by virtue of being a westerner reading them with my default and unnoticed cultural assumptions.

You need only look at some LotR or Harry Potter doujinshi to see the mindset working in the opposite direction. (Default Aragorn x Boromir? Wut?) (No, that's a joke. But still.) 'I don't think they quite get it'/ 'This is on crack' is a process that works both ways.

There's room for an argument that there's actually no need to get it, here in the fannish sandbox. The Japanese have fun with our movies, we have fun with their anime, no harm no foul. It may just be me who gets a little twitchy at the assertion 'I'm an American. I can only understand things as an American does' which was delivered to me a while back and that still makes me grimace years later. 'I can never truly see from inside the other culture' is a fact. 'I can only see from inside my own culture' may be the logical corollary. 'I have no need to *try* to see except through my preferred pair of cultural glasses' is what grates.

If only because 'American' is not a cultural monolith even in America. Much less in hyphenated Up Here where indeed you situate yourself in terms of where your family came from, even if family in this case is ancestors. It may have been a century since you arrived on these shores but that makes no difference. (It is a century since we arrived on these shores and it makes no difference. The fourth generation still goes back to visit its French cousins on a regular basis.) There are umpteen varieties of American and they live in quite different worlds than the Hollywood movie/ New York TV media default. You better be able to look outside your familiar cultural defaults or else you won't be able to talk to your neighbours.

Comments

[umadoshi.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to come back and comment all day, because this post made me thoughtful and is similar to some of my own feelings about writing fanfic--mine is all manga-based, and sometimes it makes me really sad/frustrated to know that on some level, I'm probably just plain Getting It Wrong because there's nuance and cultural knowledge I'm just missing.

...but I'm a little brain-numb today, so that's as far as I've gotten, and other than that I'll just say I enjoyed the post. ^^

[incandescens]

I'm sure I'm missing things. I'm sure that I'm missing things when I try to write Americans, even - or Canadians, or maybe even when I try to write men.

I think you're right, though. There's no excuse not to at least *try*. There's no *reason* not to at least try, even.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Maybe the cultural default is set to J in manga (not really to C unless the mangaka bends over backwards to get it right, and Minekura doesn't. Minekura is making stew, basically-- a bit of this, a bit of that, season to taste.) But the J we see when we read manga is our own notion/ definition of J, when it's not just our own notions of 'human'. Sometimes there's traces of cultural dizzyness, when the charas do things we wouldn't, or things we think they shouldn't (cf disparaging comments on the weepy uke.) But more often we assume the Japanese characters make western sense and either ignore, dismiss, or simply don't see the logic that a Japanese reader would find in their behaviour.

It's exactly like people assuming manga characters are white. They look white to the casual western glance, therefore they must be white. A natural reaction. And this guy looks like he's as gay as treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide when of course he's just an okama. Knowledge can help one see clearer but it can never remove the lenses of cultural perception entirely.

I'm glad though that young kids of colour are reading manga-- reading about Japanese people and not just 'those kewl guys who gave us ninjas and Nintendo.' When you see people through their own eyes and not through some (white) foreigner's interpretation of them, the world looks a whole lot bigger. (Even given the insurmountable translation problems, she mutters. The profound social nuances of Japanese are lost in a language that has only one word for I and one for you.)

Thank you for the props; I appreciate them. However, I'd like to clear up one point. My dragon kings aren't Chinese; not nohow at all. (Non-human if you like, and I'm glad you do, because they never seem properly strange to /me/.) Minekura's dragon king (singular) doesn't feel Chinese to me either, unless you want to read him back into his culture and see how well he fits there, a task I'm not at all qualified to try. The little I've found in English or Japanese about Chinese dragons presents them as quite different from the Minekuran stew. My kings are, in intent at least, a western and English attempt to write a doujinshi based on, and expanding, Minekura's Japanese remix of Wu Cheng'en's satiric redaction of a bunch of characters from folklore. Or to put it briefly, my guys are a long long way from home.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Half of me in fact wants to say that it's just for fun-- you're writing fanfic, not a thesis. 'Fic is real, fic is earnest' is not a good attitude to write fic with. Equally, when the Japanese get details wrong because they apply Japanese social defaults to western situations, the results are charming (those apron-wearing New York housewives in Banana Fish, say.) Much in the way of the Hong Kong subtitle factory's English. It's wrong, it's sooo wrong, but its wrongness has a transcendental splendour of its own.

But the smug refusal to even try just... rubs me the wrong way. It says that one needn't try to understand what a work is saying when it's at home, or what it was intended to say by its author, because that doesn't matter. All that matters is what this westerner gets from it, approaching it as if it were a western work.

And now I'm recalling a review of a film, I believe, in which a Japanese family slowly falls apart. The western critic remarked: "Their emptiness is reflected in the constant repetition of the hollow greetings when the family members come through the front door- 'I'm home.' 'Welcome back.'" Err- Tadaima and O-kaeri are automatic greetings when you come home, and no more hollow than the abstracted or casual 'thanks' you say when someone passes you the butter. The force of them is that they're said in the first place, not in their actual verbal content. But the reviewer was a westerner and didn't know that.

[i-am-zan.livejournal.com]

hmmm same as up there *points* I have been meaning to come back to this to put in my tuppeny's worth.

I must admit, to proabably having to apologise because I guess I have never really thought too deeply about 'thinking' to write J when writing Saiyuki fic. More me trying to write as Minekura sees her characters. I try to write D when I write Goujun one-shots because his is a unique and wonderful creation that never fails to "Wow!" me as it were. I do try harder with thinking in terms of J when I wrote GetBackers fic and also when writing for Samurai 7. More I guess to do with the setting. Also I do try for writing RPS for boyband fic well because they *ARE* Japanese
However due to upbringing and living for sometime abroad (in the UK) what comes out is a mish mash of influences and world view that might seem skewed. I aim for the 'in their shoes' kind of feeling. Whether I get it 'right' is something I try not to think about because I might just stop altogether and I don't really want to.

There was one original piece that 'tried' to be American that I feel failed miserably, and uh no it would never see the light of day except on my hard drive. However people have commented on how 'English' my letter writing is. So *shrugs* I dunno. The only thing I do try to aim for with the letter writing is getting the words right, so maybe that's what it is.


Although the writing thing has been quite difficult to carry on with of late. Aaah that enemy 'Time' - again. Seriously where does it all go.

And uhmm long comment is rambly and as usual probably pointless too. ^_^ Sorry.

But I do like this post and I wished I had something really intelligent to add to it, sadly I haven't. *bows out*