This past week Tumblr and Twitter burst into (yet another) uproar over cultural appropriation, specifically a Tumblr based webcomic called Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club, a comic set in Japan and based on the trials and tribulations of Japanese voice actors in Tokyo. The creators, although not Japanese, had studied the language and even lived in Japan for a while. Their Twitter commentary on the debacle indicated that they had sought input on the comic from Japanese people and had gotten positive feedback. However, after a couple of aggressive and angry comment via the Tumblr Ask feature, Toril Orlesky and Katie O’Neill, the creators, decided that they would prefer to simply cease making the webcomic rather than to “create a comic that will hurt people…” Shortly after they released a statement indicating that they would no longer be working on Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club, Orlesky and O’Neill were embroiled in a bitter contest between Twitter users who spewed vitriolic hate at them and at their creation, and users who defended the art both for art’s sake and for the sake of the medium. The full conversation, spanning dozens of users and roughly six days, is all available here.
https://twitter.com/suntoril/status/572631139136872448
The entire argument centering on these two artists is absolutely ridiculous for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s important to realize that the entire point of art is to see what the artist creates, not to mold and shape what is the artist’s work before it is even finished (in this case before any proper shape had been taken). Critiquing art is all well and good—in fact, it’s a vital part of the artistic process—but only after the art is complete. There is no way to have known what these two creators were intending to say, since they were cut off before they could finish saying it. Unfortunately, the internet as a whole makes it easy to comment on art partway through and influence the outcome—or in this case, abort it. This is a serious problem and will inevitably result in the decline of new creative endeavors as artists are simply too fearful to make their work public, for fear of offending Philistines who lack even the grace to wait for the finished product.
Another ridiculous aspect of this complicated disagreement is the argument that posits that white people who introduce people of any non-Caucasian race into their work must be doing it due to fetishizing racial stereotypes and objectifying the foreign culture. Racial fetishism is a popular Tumblr buzzword and it has been used in this case with vehemence . “… Most of the fetishization is just “oh wow Japan! Isn’t Tokyo awesome! Its so fashionable and hi tech [sic], and anyone who has lived in Japan for a significant amount of time knows that’s laughable.”
https://twitter.com/GabrialCanada/status/572971605892186112
But is it laughable? I know plenty of people who have spent a summer or even a semester abroad, who come back to the United States ready and willing to argue the culture, foreign policy, and domestic interests of a country to an audience that sometimes includes citizens and diaspora of that state. You can believe that their commentary is not only not welcome, but often scathingly criticized. Assumptions about the artist’s knowledge and assumptions about one’s own knowledge relative to the artist’s are a good way to look silly and foolish.
It is also important to realize that not everyone on the internet is of the same age and maturity level. Especially when they use Tumblr’s Ask feature, which allows the sender to be anonymous, it’s easy to conclude that one is speaking to another person of roughly one’s same age, education, and maturity status. This really is not the case. Apart from the ubiquitous internet trolls, there are plenty of people of all ages and education levels—many of whom are young teens who will need a hormone purge before they can become functioning members of society. After reading through the entire Twitter war on the subject of Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club, I am now convinced that the ratio of teens and preteens to mature adults on the internet is far higher than I initially assumed.
Lastly, leaving out for a moment that the world is supposed to becoming blinder to racial differences, I don’t believe that only people of a particular race should be allowed to write about that race. I want to point out that in cases such as this one, intent matters. While it’s obvious to nearly everyone who is familiar with the various internet factions that any webcomic that is primarily Tumblr based will have to be far more politically correct and sensitive to social topics that the rest of the world never really even needs to consider, it’s still important to realize that some creators—and I honestly believe that Orlesky and O’Neill fall into this category—simply want to do homage to their favorite entertainment medium. Even Felipe Smith, creator of the popular Peepo Choo manga, agreed that it is not reasonable to require artists to depict only their own race in their work.
The eternal message of Therefore I Geek has always been one of compassion to fellow geeks. There is absolutely no reason that we should be cannibalizing artists of our own. Tearing down other geeks doesn’t make anyone taller or stronger or more interesting—it just destroys the fabric of what ought to be an amazing and vibrant community. I am sad that these two creators felt the need to leave their work unfinished because of what amounts to internet bullying, but I certainly hope that in the future this type of attack will be seen for what it truly is: the petty bias of a few people with a misplaced guardianship complex for a culture that cannot and should not remain stagnant.
Therefore I Geek 