The article contains a guide
from Renae De Liz about drawing female bodies more realistically than
it’s usually done in comics. The guide was originally published on
Twitter:
AUCKLAND, New Zealand — The families lined up at the theater above a shopping mall here in New Zealand’s biggest city and filed past posters for Stephen King’s “It” and “Captain Underpants” for a film unlike any they had ever seen — the Disney hit “Moana,” translated into the indigenous language of New Zealand.
“Kei te pehea koe?” said the ticket taker, Jane Paul, greeting groups of children with a phrase meaning, “How are you?”
“Are you Maori too?” one girl asked.
About 125,000 of New Zealand’s 4.7 million people speak the Maori language, or “te reo Māori,” as it is widely rendered here. There are concerns that numbers are declining, putting it at risk of dying out. But with one in three Maori people in New Zealand younger than 15, experts said the chance for youth to see a wildly popular movie in their own words could turn the language’s fortunes around after more official efforts faltered.
“The language has got to be made cool and sexy and relevant to young people, and this movie is the perfect way to make that happen,” said Haami Piripi, a former head of the government body charged with promoting te reo Māori as a living language.
…
Taika Waititi, a New Zealand writer and director who worked on the original English-language version of “Moana,” also approached Disney early on about translating the film, and his sister, Tweedie Waititi, went on to produce the translated version.
The film was screened free at 30 theaters around New Zealand at the end of the annual Maori language week. It did not have English subtitles, but screenings were fully booked within 30 minutes, leading to plans in at least one town for additional showings.
Many of those attending in Manukau, in southern Auckland, said they had never seen a film at the theater entirely in their language before.
…Parents entering the theater said they relished the chance for their children to see themselves and their language reflected on the big screen, in a different kind of story that they hoped would instill pride in being Maori.
…
Most of the efforts to revitalize the language that have worked so far, he added, have been initiated by protest or court action. But Mr. Piripi said the film “Moana reo Māori” had given him hope there was another way: making the language “cool, relevant and useful” to young Maori.
“There’s no other film in the Maori language that would attract whanau and kids like that,” he said, using the word for families.
The entire process, including translation, recording the voices and mixing the sound, happened over three months.
Katarina Edmonds, a senior lecturer in Maori education at the University of Auckland, and one of three people who translated the film, said the team worked not only to find the exact equivalents of words in the Disney script, but also to remain true to the Maori language and tikanga, or cultural values.
Some moments of the film posed a challenge; Moana raging at the ocean, for example, contravened a Maori cultural rule to never curse or turn one’s back on the sea, so they turned it into a more humorous moment using careful wordplay.
At the same time, Ms. Edmonds said, the translation gave the film a uniquely Maori flavor of humor, while staying true to the spirit of the original script.
Rachel House, a New Zealand actor who voiced the character Gramma Tala in both the English and Maori versions of the film — and who was also the performance director of the Maori production — said she had been blown away by the response to the film, and the 30 theaters that screened it free.
“I’ve been on a very slow journey with the language for years, and now I feel like I can sit back and really enjoy the film, and experience the learning tool that it represents,” she said.
In Manukau, most families left the theater beaming. Many said they were eager to buy a DVD of the film, which is expected sometime in the next few months.
Desiree Tipene, 30, said that having grown up with immersion schooling, she was determined to give her children a similar experience — for a sense of identity and spiritual connection. She described “Moana” as a “funny and beautiful” way for her four children to connect with their culture.
“I just enjoy our language being spoken,” she said.
#like actually the most me i have A LOT of feelings about the credit people who menstruate don’t get for menstruating#oh you gave a good presentation? cool. i did the same thing WHILE ONE OF MY ORGANS WAS CONSTANTLY AND PAINFULLY CONTRACTING#oh you had to stand on the train? me too WHILE THE LINING OF ONE OF MY ORGANS SHED ITSELF#oh you had a good run today? me too WHILE ACTIVELY BLEEDING LIKE LOSING VISIBLE SOMETIMES SUBSTANTIAL AMOUNTS OF BLOOD#oh you had to stand up for eight hours while at work today? me too WHILE WRACKED WITH CRAMPS AND WORRYING ABOUT LEAKAGE#oh you thought that meeting/flight/drive was long? me too AND I HAD TO WORRY ABOUT THE GUSH FACTOR WHEN STANDING AFTER#it is such a ~thing to menstruate politely#so much work. so expensive. so much emotional labor involved. sometimes so painful.#and many many many people do it!#and that extra obstacle goes totally unacknowledged#because even though about half the population will do it at some point in our lives it’s….rude?#because people don’t want to hear about the lived realities of menstruating people’s lives?
#like actually the most me i have A LOT of feelings about the credit people who menstruate don’t get for menstruating#oh you gave a good presentation? cool. i did the same thing WHILE ONE OF MY ORGANS WAS CONSTANTLY AND PAINFULLY CONTRACTING#oh you had to stand on the train? me too WHILE THE LINING OF ONE OF MY ORGANS SHED ITSELF#oh you had a good run today? me too WHILE ACTIVELY BLEEDING LIKE LOSING VISIBLE SOMETIMES SUBSTANTIAL AMOUNTS OF BLOOD#oh you had to stand up for eight hours while at work today? me too WHILE WRACKED WITH CRAMPS AND WORRYING ABOUT LEAKAGE#oh you thought that meeting/flight/drive was long? me too AND I HAD TO WORRY ABOUT THE GUSH FACTOR WHEN STANDING AFTER#it is such a ~thing to menstruate politely#so much work. so expensive. so much emotional labor involved. sometimes so painful.#and many many many people do it!#and that extra obstacle goes totally unacknowledged#because even though about half the population will do it at some point in our lives it’s….rude?#because people don’t want to hear about the lived realities of menstruating people’s lives?
god bless the girl warriors, the defenders of teenage laughter, the women who push themselves between fire and body; god bless the women witches who pull love like endless scarves, who pull together families, who magic dinners in ten minutes; god bless the science dragon-kin who come with their scales rippling, who tear down STEM fields and burn the patriarchy just by studying, who work their bellies raw only to be told they’re “naturally talented,” who are keepers of the late nights and coffees, who catch doctor mistakes but get lower pay, who double-shift without wincing; god bless the art queens, hair messy and creativity overflowing, who present ideas without apologizing, who carve raw their bones and put honest on display – god bless the avenging seraphim in the form of women, the quiet close-standing of one woman watching another in a train station, the silent knowing here-i-am glance of women when men are too rowdy, the steel of women protecting young girls, the fire of women who protect their trans sisters, the arc light of trans sisters leading the charge in standing up for women’s rights; god bless women, seen as weak, seen as relenting, taught to bow and beg and apologize – god bless every social justice fighter, every freedom bell ringer, every young lady who does not just shake chains but instead is using them to shatter glass ceilings. go forth and conquer. you’re all my heroes.
Hello, you may be wondering why I have the text “If you’re not East Asian and call youself a weeaboo, don’t follow me” in my side bar. Here are a few quick disclaimers:
I am well aware that many people do it, especially in anime-related and related fandoms.
If you have ever called yourself a weeaboo at some point in time that does not mean that you can never follow me or that I will never follow you. I follow people now who do it or have done it in the past, which is part of why this page exists.
I am Chinese, not Japanese. I cannot specifically speak about the pain that this causes me from a Japanese standpoint, but because many East Asian experiences with racism overlap, I am still affected by this.
Origins of the Word
The word weeaboo comes from a webcomic. It is literally a nonsense word. The word became popularized when people on 4chan were getting upset about being called “wapanese” (wannabe Japanese). The mods put in an auto-censor so the “weeaboo” would appear rather than “wapanese.”
Why Do People Call Themselves Weeaboos?
I have several explanations/theories.
People use this to refer to their past selves when they come to realize that what they were doing was racist and harmful. This usage is okay as long as you realize that you may mess up in the future and are willing to correct that too!
East Asian people use this word to joke about their experiences and joke about weeaboos. This is an okay usage as long as they are doing this for catharsis! If there are other issues about East Asian people doing this, it’s an inter-community discussion.
People do not understand the origins of this word and mistakenly believe it means that they are into anime/manga rather than being connected to a fetishist viewpoint of Japan.
People do not understand that anti-racists use this word to call out fetishists.
What is a Weeaboo?
A weeaboo is somebody who fetishizes Japanese culture, but it may not be limited to that. A weeaboo also may conflate multiple groups of Asian people, randomly start speaking Japanese at anyone that might look Japanese, put down non-Japanese Asian people for being the “wrong type of Asian,” and even promote imperialism because of their inaccurate viewpoint of Japan!
Why Non-East Asian People Should Not Call Themselves Weeaboos
Weeaboo is a term that Japanese people and other East Asians use to describe those who do them harm due to fetishized viewpoints.
It is a term that people use in solidarity with Japanese/East Asian people to recognize this specific harmful behavior. When you are against fetishization/racism/oppression, and you claim to be this word, you are stripping it of the meaning that we assign to classify people who are harmful to us.
To be clear, you are not specifically appropriating Japanese by doing this, but you are undermining East Asian people who try to steer clear of harm. I have experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance about what I will encounter since creating this blog.
What Is Really Wrong with Being a Weeaboo?
The amount of harm done varies, so I will speak from my own lived experience.
I live in a 99% white area, but in a place with a lot of weeaboos. People will get unfriendly fast where I live and have grown up; if you are not their complacent Asian fantasy when you are around them.
When my school had a Chinese teacher teach Mandarin, the children bullied her so ruthlessly that she quit halfway through the year. Some of the white kids were angry that the district did not bring in Japanese and showed it (though I doubt a Japanese teacher would have been treated any better). This environment was very alienating and made it hard for nonwhite (especially East Asian students) to speak up to all the white kids.
Weeaboos’ fetishized viewpoints of Japan can be very misogynistic specifically and build up a fantasy idea of what Asian women are like, “submissive, docile, etc.” and cause them to sexualize people on basis of being Asian. This has caused a great deal of harm to my education personally for speaking out against injustice because I am expected to be docile, and I have developed retroactive ways of coping with attention I do not want pulled to my ethnicity.
Weeaboos can influence people into thinking they are the “wrong kind of Asian” with a strange policing of someone’s Asianness that centers on whether or not they are Japanese.
Weeaboos will thoughtlessly call people inappropriate and alienating things for wearing their traditional clothing because it is vaguely Asian and start fawning over it because they think it’s Just So Cool That You’re Asian. This may or may not wear off if you are a different type of Asian than Japanese. Either way it can be humiliating or uncomfortable.
Weeaboos don’t understand how painful it is to be ostracized for not blending enough and trying to connect to your cultural roots and will act like it is the same thing when Japanese people speak up about appropriation.
Weeaboos have also defended Japanese imperialism and neofascism, nationalism etc. without any idea of the context and get upset when people who have heritage connected to the countries hurt by this call them out.
If you read this list and thought that you would never do any of that, maybe it is time to stop calling yourself a weeaboo and evaluate your behavior. I am not insinuating that you are doing these things by listing them. I am saying that these are some of the things weeaboos do. Even if they are being less violently harmful than harrassing, they still buy into and perpetuate a larger culture of fetishization. These are the type of people that I, and other East Asians who speak about racism talk about when we refer to weeaboos.
If you are in anime/manga or related fandoms and this is the first you have heard weeaboo used in a negative manner regarding fetishism, I strongly suggest that you do some reading. If you want referrals, I am happy to provide them. Just ask me privately because I am not comfortable setting racist anons on blogs that already deal with enough vitriol.
Not a fan of the Google-autocomplete approach to this campaign, but I do like the message.
i absolutely love this. for years axe has been a symbol of the pinnacle of hypermasculinity and now they’re calling it out? axe youre doing amazing sweetie
not to be a bitter asshole but the overwhelming “my gf is perfect and relationships between women are are all pure and perfect” culture on here is annoying. there are a lot of us out here being used, cheated on, dumped, abused, having communication issues and shitty breakups, and lesbian culture is not a binary of “im alone and pining after an imaginary perfect gf” or “i have a perfect gf”. it does baby lesbians and bi women a disservice. don’t feel like there’s something wrong with you if you have bad dates or weird dates or women treat you like shit or trespass your boundaries and in general don’t act like perfect magical moon princesses and your relationship isn’t a magical dream of cat ownership and cuddling. women are people too, and that means women are flawed too. there are wonderful women out there and you will find one someday to build your life with but there are a lot of assholes out there too, you’re not failing at anything if you date one of them. and you have the capability of being a shitty asshole too!
Boy there’s a lot of defensive creeps on this post!
“I’m a lesbian in a perfect relationship and I would never downplay that so that other lesbians aren’t jealous that’s ridiculous“
jesus, yeah this is definitely about jealousy not lesbians and bi women in toxic or straight up abusive relationships feeling isolated and wanting to change that!
A key reason why some believe LGBTQ IPV to be rare may be due to an assumption that LGBTQ people are inherently nonviolent. This may be particularly the case for sexual minority women. In contrast to the aggression often associated with culturally prominent masculinity norms, many lesbian women are socialized to perceive relationships involving two women as a peaceful and ideal “lesbian utopia.” Unfortunately, this powerful stereotype can impede lesbian female victims’ ability to recognize that a partner’s behavior is in fact abusive rather than normal.26 For example, in reflecting on her same-gender IPV victimization back in the 1990s, Julie describes the ubiquity of the lesbian utopia ideal in the United Kingdom that prevented her from discussing the abuse with anyone: “Well it was during a period where everyone was just raving about erm how brilliant woman-to-woman relationships were and also I don’t think anyone believed that one woman could do that to another woman—there was just no, no sense of reality around that at all. There was sort of a political euphoria about lesbianism at the time; well not even lesbianism, just woman-to-woman relationships.”27 Echoing these sentiments, a victim of female same-gender IPV in the United States explains the powerful influence the lesbian utopia ideal had on her ability to recognize the abuse: “No—I thought, well, I just thought that it was fine because we were girls, like, and girls don’t hurt each other like that. So I just thought that it was the way it was supposed to be.”28
– LGBTQ Intimate Partner Violence: Lessons for Policy, Practice, and Research by Adam M. Messinger
An example of what can happen when a group of people are glorified
This is exactly how I got into an emotionally abusive relationship. My other bi friends had told me “relationships with women are better because there aren’t power dynamics like there are between women and men.”
I doublethought (doublethunk?) my way back to “this isn’t a power dynamic” every time I felt demeaned and afraid, because “there are no power dynamics between women,” so I couldn’t have been living one.
Lesbianism-as-purity stuff terrifies me now, y’all.
I’ve spoken about this before. One of the advantages of hands-on, community-building LGBTQIAP+ activism is that I had the opportunity to talk directly to hundreds of people and counsel them on a whole variety of concrete issues. By far the thorniest problem I was faced with was intimate partner violence within relationships between women. Many abused women came to me in emotionally fragile states, yet adamantly refused to do anything more than talk with me in confidence – such as speak to one of our official counselors or to a support group, never bloody mind even the idea of filing any kind of charges against their girlfriends!
Within the community, they were taught the idea that same-gender relationships between women were not only inherently ‘better’ and had ‘less capacity for containing abuse’ than other kinds of relationships (particularly straight ones), but that ‘airing their dirty laundry in public’ (talking publicly about their abuse) would be a damaging act toward the LGBTQIAP+ community as a whole, as it would give homophobes more dirt to fling in our direction. Given my disgust toward everything related toward purity politics and respectability politics, you can imagine what my stance toward the above is – I value truth, transparency and not throwing domestic abuse survivors under the fucking bus a hell of a lot more than I value us presenting a sanitized, artificially clean image to the world, when we should all know by now that our most irrational detractors would continue to hate us even if we were the human incarnations of purity! There’s a subset of people you just cannot win over and I’d rather have them crow like broken records about the problems within the community, rather than glossing over said problems and doing a hell of a lot of damage to young queer people in the process!
Before anyone starts screaming – the takeaway people should be taking from this isn’t ‘so now I can’t talk about my perfect WLW relationship?’ or ‘you people want to trash the image of lesbians!’ or other barmy shit like that. No, the message is ‘same-sex relationships between women fall on a scale that’s much more complex than ‘shades of soft, pastel-pink’, the way Tumblr all too often presents them.’ Queer women are people. Queer women are humans and as such, we’re as fallible and mistake-prone as anyone else on this Earth, no matter how much we might pretend that we’re some sort of ‘evolved form of person.’ We’re not exempt from perpetuating toxic, abusive models within our relationships and trying to ignore that does us all an enormous disservice.
Steel Phoenix Studios 