bigheroshit:

((A repost from my personal blog explanation because I might as well just make its own post here.))

Big Hero 6 was originally an all-Japanese cast, including an Ainu person (Fred) which is an oppressed indigenous group in Japan. For all the source material’s racism and orientalism, it IS still an all-Japanese cast which is an underrepresented group in the U.S. To racebend and whitewash Japanese characters is to tell them a) their group isn’t worthy of representation and b) they’re not “diverse” enough. (And like many other countries, there are so many dialects and aspects of Japanese culture so this is so fucking loaded.)

I could understand changing it to an all Japanese-American cast, because yeah Disney’s main target is the U.S. and that would still be really cool, but you gotta change the races, too? As if all East Asian-American friend groups do not exist (aka MY friend group irl)? This just reeks of perpetual foreigner myth to me. If we don’t hang out with non-East Asians well by god we’re not “American enough” and the story is “too Asian.” Nope, gotta throw in the token Black and “Latinx” (I say this in quotations because Honey Lemon is literally Rapunzel 4.0 and several Latinx people have written why it is so goddamn sketch that they decide to represent WHITE Latinx of all people) for good measure. There, now you CAN’T complain about “racism” because we’re SO DIVERSE!!!!! No. PoC are not interchangeable. Our representation fucking matters.

This goes for Hiro being half White too. Monoracial PoC are still underrepresented as fuck, what do you get out of making him half-White? And then conveniently killing off his biological parents and sticking him with a White guardian (WHO LETS HIM WEAR SHOES IN THE HOUSE??)? Are we going to talk about how he, the half-white half-East Asian protagonist, is the focus of the story and has big round eyes and many audiences mistook him for 100% White? In comparison to a monoracial East Asian GoGo, who has slanted eyes and the least lines in the movie and is essentially Dragon Lady 2.0? (FUCK, SHE EVEN WEARS A YELLOW SUIT. YELLOW.) So yes, even making Hiro part fucking White is an issue. He has an excuse to look “normal” and not ~chinky~ and you know White people literally can’t relate to him at all if he’s 100% East Asian. (Like… ASIAN-AMERICAN PARENTS, WHAT’S THAT)

And honestly that’s just on the racebending/whitewashing. Japanese culture is totally accessorized and not treated properly at all in this film. Or should I say East Asian cultures because if you substituted all the Japanese writing with literally any other East Asian language it would be literally not be discernible at all. Why do you NEED to do a SF/Tokyo mix when a Japantown in SF already exists? There are several major, major issues with this.

a) It gives the idea that East Asian-Americans literally CANNOT exist except within an East Asian context. Like, you literally had to mix COUNTRIES just to justify our existence. Holy shit, do I really have to explain how offensive this is?

b) Throwing in temples and lanterns and kanji doesn’t suddenly make it ~Tokyo~. If you look up actual pictures of Tokyo it’s literally not any different from any other metropolitan city and in fact has way more Westernized buildings. Other East Asian cities such as Taipei, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Beijing are the same. So yeah, not only is “mixing the cities” really gross (like it reeks of Western Imperialism), the way it looks doesn’t even make sense? The first thing you think of when it comes to “Asia” is all these temples and shit when we’ve westernized so much of our countries because YOU FUCKS invaded us??? That is really really gross.

And adding to that, like I said, it’s not discernible from other East Asian cultures either. We do have distinctions in our architecture and our cultures and you’ve just left in the most vague shit. Chinese and Korean cultures, too, have martial arts and paper doors and temples and incense at funerals and pink blossoms (did you give a shit about differentiating peach and cherry blossoms? no? ok). If you took away the Japanese names and writing I would literally not be able to tell this was Japanese-influenced except for that disgusting caricature you call Yama at the beginning.

c) If someone goddamn point a gun to your head and said “mix an orientalist depiction of Japan with an American city” why. Why in God’s MOTHERFUCKING NAME would you pick SAN FRANCISCO. You know, the city most known for its population of CHINESE-AMERICANS?? There is a whole fucking HISTORY of us being discriminated against and forced into these ~Chinatowns~ (now purposely designed tacky and stereotypical to appeal to tourists—by the way, San Fransokyo doesn’t look any different), but nah. Nah, that’s not important. Anime is the IN THING right now, so destroy all Chinese presence ever, erase all hints of it and make way for the cash cow that is bastardized view of Japanese culture. (Eradicting Chinese people for Japanese people hmmmmmmmmm starts with “Japanese” and ends with “occupation”—not that the contexts are at all the same but I did catch the rising sun flag in Hiro’s room in earlier concept art.) And this isn’t to deny Japanese-American presence in SF, but Chinese-American history is like a REALLYY REALLY heavy thing here.

This is the most I’m gonna rant about for now because this is getting really really long but tldr Big Hero 6 is REALLY REALLY FUCKING RACIST. (GOD, DO YOU WANT ME TO TALK ABOUT YOKAI I WILL SHIT ON YOKAI SO MUCH.) And that’s not even touching on why the plot is shit too, that’s like A WHOLE OTHER POST.