[ SECRET POST #487 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #487 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 09 pages, 223 secrets from Secret Submission Post #070.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 3 - too big ], [ 1 - personal attack ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[weaselistic.livejournal.com]

8. I have been wondering something similar about myself, but the other way around.
Don't know the other two, but Maya, I probably wouldn't have grown to like so much if it wasn't for the way fandom treats her like shit. Maybe this is just what fandom is all about, it forces you to choose sides and doesn't allow you to stay indifferent about a character.
And I think a lot of Maya bashing is soaked with racism and sexism, and I'd rather die than side with racists.

32. HELL YES! I miss him.

67. Good for you. I remember the fics from... ages ago. 1999? 2000? They left me with a feeling of great "meh", though.

[cleverthylacine]

I don't want to side with racists and sexists either, but I don't feel the need to defend or like a badly written character in order to avoid that. There was almost no good writing in S2; the only thing I liked about it was Nathan and the shotgun. But at least the characters from S1 had been written well before, and could therefore hold my attention.

[weaselistic.livejournal.com]

I mostly watch for Mohinder, so I enjoyed Season 2. The Petrellis do nothing for me, and never did. Which is kind of strange because I used to have a huge brothers fetish.
And I don't find Maya all that badly written. There are more sides to her personality than most people like to pretend. The problem is that we did not see her in very many different situations, and it was mostly extreme circumstances, and she really reacted realistically to them.
Things like these are hard to judge objectively, or maybe that's impossible. But I don't think that Maya is objectively written any worse than Adam. But Adam is totally beloved by his fangirls. Why?

But I probably shouldn't argue with someone who only liked Nathan and th shotgun about S2.

[cleverthylacine]

Yeah, my s2 hate is strong in the force. I didn't like what they did with Peter and Caitlin. I didn't like the stupid that Claire caught and I wanted HRG to macerate her stalkery boyfriend. I didn't like what they did with Sylar. (I am a Mylar shipper in part because they're both smarter together than separately.) I can't stand Adam so I am not the person to ask why he has fangirls because I think he's loathesome and I sure didn't like that they turned deliciously smartly evil Mama P into the former Squeaky to his Manson. I found there to be so many skanky offensive things in the Hiro/Yaeko/Adam plot that they are impossible to enumerate, but we'll start with Obligatory Cherry Blossoms and the inability of a native speaker of 16th century Japanese to tell the difference between someone from Renaissance England speaking her language and someone from 21st century Japan speaking her language (which had changed a bit in the intervening years). I love Japanese history and just the fact that Takezo turned out to be white was offensive enough and it just snowballed from there.

I had been excited by the possibility of Latino heroes and then it's The Bad Telenovela Cliches, and the Contagion from South of the Border and so much WTF. I kept falling asleep during their parts of the show.

Also, I do not ship Matt/Mohinder. I can't get behind that because I need to see how Matt came to terms with that to believe in it.

[weaselistic.livejournal.com]

I love Japanese history and just the fact that Takezo turned out to be white was offensive enough and it just snowballed from there.

Huh, why? It's not like they used an existing Japanese legend to create this character. And he turned out to be a villain, all his good aspects were influenced by Hiro, who, in a way is the real legendary Kensei... I know some people interpreted Kensei's identity as "of course, the legendary hero would be a WHITE man, zomg outrage", but that's more wishful thinking on their part, I think. And I don't think that theory survived Kensei's turning evil...

[cleverthylacine]

Well, yes, the Japanese hero being the WHITE guy is offensive, in fact.

And doubly so when they say Japanese people aren't smart enough to tell the difference between him and another Japanese person.

[weaselistic.livejournal.com]

But he turned out not to be te hero, but a villain. Hiro turned out to be the Kensei that the legend was about.
Every good the white guy did was because the Japanese guy made him do it.

There are two opposite ways of interpreting this storyline. I see a message of "Japanese > white guy" in this, you see "white guy > Japanese" in it. I don't know for certain which interpretation the writers aimed at.

[cleverthylacine]

But he turned out not to be the hero, but a villain. Hiro turned out to be the Kensei that the legend was about. Every good the white guy did was because the Japanese guy made him do it.

And nobody could tell the difference?

SRSLY?

Idk, by the time we got to that point I was so pissed off I was pretty much just watching Nathan, hoping they wouldn't fuck him over as much as everyone else (they did, of course, but at least with something he could recover from more than character degeneration).

I don't know for certain which interpretation the writers aimed at.

No idea, and not sure it matters since they never hit what they aim at anyway. But it was annoying as all hell. I basically lost my lunch when the Obligatory Cherry Blossoms turned up. Because Japanese people falling in love always makes cherry trees spit up all over them, right? If I were less sensitive to the cultural history and the abuse of tropes it might not have pissed me off so much, but you gotta understand, I read Japanese court diaries (in translation, because I'm not that amazing--manga I can do in original Japanese, 16th c prose not so much) FOR FUN.

Actually that was the problem with a lot of s2. They wanted a more multicultural flavour and their method of trying to achieve this was to throw shopworn stereotypes at us: obligatory cherry blossoms, bad telenovela plots. The way to include moar foreign culture is not to take the most overused cultural tropes of a people's own fiction and then put each and every one of them onto whatever character gets to represent that culture in your story. That's like Barbie Dolls of the World. I remember travelling in my early teens and realising to my great shock that nobody looks like that.

[weaselistic.livejournal.com]

American television getting details wrong on foreign cultures: normal. Not worth the outrage in specific cases, really. I can't remember an instance where my country is portrayed properly at all. *shrugs*


And chances are that with his mask on and nobody probably getting that close a look at ensei to begin with, in battles, I'd say it's safe to assume that most people really would not notice the difference. How many people even saw both Kenseis, and had time amd reason to think about it?
I guess Yaeko should have noticed, but it's still noting but a common, harmless fantasy/adventure/comedy trope, and when you think it means "Japanese people are dumb", you are reading FAR to much into it.