#in favor of the canonically gay brown protagonist

[o-wild-west-wind]

tumblr algorithm stop feeding me takes that this show is just a silly goofy comedy that shouldn’t include death or that Izzy is the token disabled elder queer on the show where an actual disabled elder queer is literally the romantic lead or that Lucius and Pete being called “mateys” is diluting their gayness because it’s not “husbands” or that it’s sexist that Zheng lost her fleet and later prioritized her love for a man or that Ed is Izzy’s abuser because we conveniently forgot all of season 1 or that trauma is never followed through with because sometimes actions are used instead of words or that Ed learned nothing because the inn was apparently a whim as if he hasn’t been obsessing over retirement from day 1 I swear did we even watch the same show?? I literally feel like I’m in backwards land?

I have a really novel concept for y’all complaining about character’s arcs not being fully resolved or healed and that’s called there is supposed to be another season of this show

I also have another really novel concept as to why every single character did not have a one on one trauma apology session and so much time was spent on Ed and Stede and that is because this is literally the Ed and Stede show and also sometimes parallels are meant to be inferred and extrapolated because that is what efficient storytelling does instead of spoonfeeding you

And my most novel concept of all as to why some beloved characters had less screen time is because Max is a massive jerk and cut the budget

Y’all this wasn’t personal and maybe this show was never about Izzy maybe the show called our flag means death is actually about death maybe sad does not equal homophobic letdown maybe the brown gay character introduced as the love interest from day 1 gets to outlive the angry white guy that had a redemption arc after actively bullying and trying to break up every gay couple for a season I don’t know what to tell you just can you please let non-white people have this arc for once without assuming it’s an attack on you I’m BEGGING y’all

[xenodile]

A while back I mentioned I had it in me to give a long sorta discourse-y post about Blizzard Entertainment, well here it is.

Blizzard, as a company, suffers primarily from 2 major issues:

1) It’s totally creatively bankrupt

2) It is actively racist/homophobic.

The two issues are closely linked but it’s caught in a “chicken or the egg” situation.  Are they so racist because they have no original ideas and racial stereotypes are easy to use, or are they so lacking in creativity because they’re racist at their core and don’t care about coming up with better ideas?

I’ve been playing Blizzard games for just about half my life now.

I started with WoW back in 2004, which then got me into Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Diablo 3, Overwatch, etc.

I’m going to start with Warcraft since it is Blizzard’s biggest and longest-running IP.

Warcraft is built on insensitive racist caricatures and recycled ideas.  The humans in Warcraft are all predominantly white and themed after medieval Britain.  Dwarves and gnomes, the other human-like races, are also white, with Dwarves being modeled after Ireland/Scotland and gnomes being a joke race that never get taken seriously ever.

I don’t think Warcraft had any black people in it at all until World of Warcraft because the inability to make a black person would have set off some red flags.

Every non-white ethnicity is instead represented as non-human, monstrous races.

Caribbean/African nationalities are all blanket covered by the trolls, lanky tusked cannibals that practice bastardized Hollywood voodoo, worship loa, speak with stereotypical Jamaican accents, and wear wooden masks, lead by their high king Rastakhan.

First Nation/Native Americans are covered by the Tauren, hulking cow people that carve totems, wear eagle feathers, and worship the Earth Mother.

The Chinese are literally just bipedal panda bears.  They’re always fat, love to drink, and all know kung fu.

Mongolians and Huns are represented by the centaur, who are consistently described in universe as “the bastard children of a demigod” and are stupid, smelly, and barbarous, to the point of having a cloud of swarming flies baked into their character models.

At least until Blizzard forgot about the centaur and replaced them with the Yaungol, subtle I know, a variant of Tauren that are based on yaks instead of cows, but just as rapacious and violent as the aforementioned centaur.

Orcs were originally Always Chaotic Evil savages stolen wholesale from Tolkien and Warhammer, but after Blizzard retconned them to justify having playable Good Orcs, they were modeled to somewhat evoke South American nations and Australian aborigines, living in mud/clay buildings, having brown(ish) skin, and wearing face paints.  At least until Blizzard decided to make orcs always evil again and threw that idea out the window in favor of being bloodthirsty savages all the time.

Inuit people are depicted as fat, mono-gendered walrus people called tuskarr.

And I’d like to give special mention to the Draenei, Warcraft’s stand-ins for Eastern European Jews/Romani.  Sporting comedic slavic accents, the Draenei are the exiled members of an alien species that goes on to become the primary antagonist and source of all problems in the Warcraft timeline.  They even had their own clumsy version of the Holocaust at the hands of the orcs and evil members of their own race.

That’s right!  The “good” Draenei, that suffered the from their Fantasy Holocaust and talk with funny accents, make up only 10% of their race!  The remaining 90% of their race are literal demons and the source of all evil in the universe.

And in an alternate universe, those good Draenei turn into an ethnic cleansing facist empire if they’re not actively oppressed!  I wish I was making this up!

The unifying trend here is that all of these “other” races, with the exception of the draenei, are uniformly depicted as being stupid and primitive.  Despite being culturally older than the humans, dwarves, and gnomes, they are consistently shown as being afraid or intimidated of the superior technology of the humans and their human-like allies, and easily cowed when their “primitive” idols and gods are defeated.

In addition to this, humans have been the de facto heroes of Warcraft since its inception.  Human protagonists are always core to the plot and have the most agency.

Meanwhile, non-human characters are not allowed to be anything other than a stereotypical example of whatever culture they’re a parody of.  Tauren can’t be anything other than a mystical Native American that helps the hero go on a spirit journey to learn something.  Trolls can’t be anything besides the wily and savage fighter that the hero is never sure they can really trust.  Draenei are not allowed to be relevant at all unless they’re fighting against their evil counterparts or dying heroically.

In addition to that, I cannot think of a single canonically gay character in the Warcraft franchise.  Not a one.

This is what brings me to Overwatch.  The very first thing I ever heard about Overwatch was “It has an LGBT+ cast”.  Before I even heard what the gameplay was, the fact that it had a “progressive” cast was a selling point.

And then it took Blizzard, what, a year and a half of the game being out for them to actually follow up and say which character is gay?

Think about it.  Everyone that liked Overwatch touted it as being this inclusive win for LGBT representation yet for the longest time, none of the characters were actually LGBT.  The community did Blizzard’s work for them and just made up who they wanted to be gay and/or trans, until Blizzard finally settled on Tracer and 76.

It also dips slightly in Warcraft’s niche of “foreign nationalities can’t stop reminding you how foreign they are”.  Every non-American character cannot STOP peppering words or phrases of their home language into their english dialogue.  

When I directly compare it to its most obvious competitor, Team Fortress 2, which also sported a multi-ethnic cast, I can’t ignore how much of Overwatch’s roster uses their ethnicity as the core of their personality.

When I look at Overwatch, I can’t help but see it as insincere.  I’ve seen Blizzard blatantly and shamelessly turn non-white cultures into literal monsters for the past 15 years, and I’m supposed to just believe that they suddenly turned over a new leaf?

Their second biggest IP, Starcraft, has a grand total of 3 black named characters, and they are respectively:

An eldritch monster in disguise that promptly changes to a white guy disguise

A mentally disturbed assassin with a caribbean accent and plays with voodoo dolls that becomes totally irrelevant after his personal story arc ends.

A stereotypical General Army Man that dies in the first set of missions of Heart of the Swarm.

So yeah.  For as much as I love Warcraft, and Blizzard games as a whole, the whole thing is undeniably built on a core of American/European ethnocentrism, with Overwatch being what I can only call a marketing experiment.

[acsversace-news]

You finally need two hands to count all the current TV shows with Asian American protagonists. Fresh Off the Boat (ABC) and Master of None(Netflix) arrived with fanfare for breaking ground (though a third season of Aziz Ansari’s romantic comedy was uncertain even before the star’s current scandal), while Quantico (ABC) and Into the Badlands (AMC) keeping chugging along, and the comedy Brown Nation (Netflix) and children’s melodrama Andi Mack (Disney Channel) have yet to become blips on the mainstream pop cultural radar. So it’s a bit strange, and off-putting, that the latest series with an Asian lead—one of the most anticipated shows of the year, it so happens—isn’t being described as such. In fact, its network—once a standard-bearer for prestige TV’s lack of diversity—is highlighting the drama’s focus on queerness and homophobia—and by doing so largely erasing its main character’s racial identity, especially in the first half of his story.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story isn’t about the titular victim but his killer: Andrew Cunanan, a San Diego native born to a Filipino father and an Italian American mother. Writer Tom Rob Smith adapted journalist Maureen Orth’s nonfiction account Vulgar Favors, structuring the episodes in reverse chronological order so we work backward from Versace’s murder. In a recent interview, Smith said of his source material that it “reads very much like an outsider commenting on a world of which they’re not part, and sometimes that can make you seem quite removed from it.” I agree with his assessment; Orth’s book includes lengthy and salacious discussions of Versace’s HIV status and the popularity of meth among gay communities. But Smith’s description could also be turned on The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which is a white writer’s dramatization of another white writer’s interpretation. American Crime Story’s first season, The People v. O.J. Simpson, tackled issues of both race and gender skillfully; there’s no reason why we should accept any less from its second.

The show’s Andrew, played by Darren Criss, does mention his father’s plantation in the Philippines early on. But between his pathological lying and that country’s colonial past, his race isn’t confirmed till about midway through the nine-hour season. A few character details here and there suggest Andrew’s racial self-hatred and the prevalence of anti-Asian racism within the gay community, but the relative sparseness of these implications is all the more noteworthy in contrast with the richly developed portrait of the decade’s homophobia.

Credit where it’s due, even if the bar for praise here is laughably low because Hollywood’s institutional aversion toward Asian stories and characters remains so entrenched: In casting Glee’s Criss (who played Blaine Anderson), Ryan Murphy hired a half-Filipino (if white-passing) actor to play the half-Filipino role of Andrew Cunanan. Criss is excellent, and in later episodes, the Philippines-born Broadway performer Jon Jon Briones is electrifying as Andrew’s father, the sociopathic Modesto, who teaches his favorite child all the wrong lessons about the American dream.

If The Assassination of Gianni Versace feels urgent as it revisits the stifling homophobia of the ’90s, it’s far less successful in reimagining Cunanan from a racialized point of view, at least in the first eight episodes. (The season finale was not provided to critics in advance.) It’s certainly not as if those racial and ethnic depictions of Cunanan don’t exist. In his analysis of the divergent foci of the mainstream American and Filipino American media narratives about Cunanan, scholar Allan Punzalan Isaac notes that the former wagged its tongue about his “deviant” sexuality (Tom Brokaw infamously referred to the killer as a “homicidal homosexual”), while consumers of the latter looked on with a mixture of “pleasure and horror.” The horror is understandable enough. The pleasure, perhaps, is easier to grasp when you’re part of a group whose presence and history are constantly made invisible by the larger American culture. “Perhaps [the Filipino American fascination with Cunanan] stemmed from a longing to be reflected in the small screen in this American media sensation,” Isaac wrote several years after Cunanan’s death. Filipinos preferred participation, he conjectures, in “any American drama, even for the wrong reasons.”

Nearly all of the eight Filipino American scholars, activists, and advocates I talked to for this story say that Cunanan has fallen out of popular Filipino American lore, just as he’s been forgotten by American pop culture until now. Professor Christine Bacareza Balance told me in an email interview that when she polled 40 or so students in a recent Filipino American Studies course, only one or two knew who Cunanan was. But among gay Filipino Americans, he remains something of a cult figure and for a few Filipino American writers, a literary muse. Isaac begins his seminal book about Filipino American identity, American Tropics, with a meditation on Cunanan’s incarnation of many of the concepts central to his subject: the possibility of “assimilation gone wrong,” the fear of rejection and the eagerness to belong, the embodiment of Filipino/American “mestizo” beauty standards, the corresponding ethnic ambiguity. (Isaac quotes a New York Times article describing Cunanan’s face as “so nondescript that it appears vaguely familiar to just about everyone.”) Paul Ocampo, a co-chair of the Lacuna Giving Circle, a philanthropic group that fosters leadership in LGBTQ Asian American communities, offers a more cynical interpretation: “There’s an aspect of the glitter and glitz of Hollywood to this story that attracts many in the Filipino American community more than the macabre.”

It’s important to remember that Cunanan murdered five people, apparently in cold blood. His victims deserve to be mourned. But in the absence of other well-known personages (or the inconspicuousness of many successful celebrities’—e.g., Bruno Mars’— Filipino-ness,), it’s perhaps inevitable that some Filipino Americans see or project certain facets of themselves in one of the very few Filipino Americans to appear on TV and on page 1, especially during that era. Ben de Guzman, a policy advocate in D.C., saw Cunanan on the news and thought, There but for the grace of God go I. “As a young, gay Filipino American man who was around his age when he was in the news,” de Guzman recalls via email, “I was forced to look at how the same forces of homophobia and racism that informed my life must have affected him too.”

The former party boy and escort remains a symbol of queer defiance for some in the gay Filipino American community. “Here was a gay Filipino man who seemed unapologetic and daring in his acceptance of his sexuality,” says Ocampo. “In this, he seemed to exude a self-possession that many people struggle with.” Balance says that the image of Cunanan as a “queer Asian/Filipino American on the warpath” “truly goes against many dominant representations within ‘mainstream’ U.S. media.” Isaac contrasts Cunanan’s narrative with the gay/bi film Call Me by Your Name, which he observes is “set outside the U.S., outside the AIDS scare, outside any class conflict—all part of the Cunanan spectacle.” Isaac seems to anticipate a reckoning as Cunanan’s story unfurls on the series: “How is this story of intergenerational sex, wealth, casual prostitution, and reckless living in the gay demimonde of the ’90s to be received in this age of domesticated gay marriage?”

And if Cunanan’s messy and unpredictable life story seems ripe for fictional inspiration, The Assassination of Gianni Versace certainly didn’t get there first. A decade after Cunanan’s death, novelist and playwright Jessica Hagedorn (a canonical Filipino American writer), along with songwriter Mark Bennett, launched in the killer’s hometown a workshop production of their musical Most Wanted, a thinly fictionalized version of Cunanan’s story that explores media sensationalism and marginalized individuals’ desperation to belong. Smaller-scale works like Regie Cabico’s poem “Love Letter From Andrew Cunanan,” Gina Apostol’s short story “Cunanan’s Wake,” and Jason Luz’s erotic short story “Scherzo for Cunanan” likewise attempt to humanize a murderer who, while deplorable for his actions and indisputably extreme in personality, almost certainly had some desires and experiences common to many Filipino Americans. None of these works add up to a complete portrait, or could. But created from Filipino American perspectives, they explore the aspects of Cunanan’s life that white America still isn’t fully grappling with.