Would these black characters by today's standards be changed

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Cipher
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Re: Would these black characters by today's standards be cha

Post by Cipher » Mon Nov 19, 2012 12:06 am

Herms wrote:Not sure if this was meant for me or TRL, but I don't defend Toriyama's use of racist caricatures, if that wasn't clear from my last two posts.
Oh, no. Sorry. I realize that wasn't clear.

It wasn't directed at you. It was supposed to be a rhetorical "Doesn't this cement ..." rather than any kind of counter-argument. I know you weren't defending it.
Fox666 wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slut

I think she falls in the definition. But if it bothers you I edited my post.
Oh, man, did we just get into some good old-fashioned slut-shaming?

Is this just Social Ignorance: The Thread now?
Last edited by Cipher on Mon Nov 19, 2012 2:40 am, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: Would these black characters by today's standards be cha

Post by Kingdom Heartless » Mon Nov 19, 2012 12:19 am

CaBrPi wrote:She's also hardly promiscuous, and that's only one facet of her character. She also develops as a person over the course of the story.

Popo does only one thing: serve Kami (whether it's "Kami" or Dende), and has no such development.
I think that does discredit what Popo was a little. He was essentially one of Goku's major masters, since he handled most of Goku's training, and he was one of the few characters to completely embarrass Goku in a fight.

Not to say anything of his offensive design or role as a servant, but to say that's all he did isn't exactly accurate.
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Re: Would these black characters by today's standards be cha

Post by sonikku956 » Mon Nov 19, 2012 12:27 am

Attitudefan wrote:With everything said, Kingdom Heartless was pretty on the money.

And yes, whitewashing all the features is just as racist; something that many people seem to not consider. I guess, to not offend anyone, all characters should be a shade of grey, where they have no point of origin except mother earth. :roll:

Uub was a South Asian type character, or North African type character, I honestly see no black in him.

Black's features are no better than Red's like someone pointed out: look, Red is short with RED hair, which only white people can have gasp). And don't get me started on how blue plays off nationalist and racist stereotypes... Guys, Black was portrayed as a strong smart character; shouldn't we take character qualities over looks? isn't that what we are taught?

And to those making comments on "privileged whites" see down town Vancouver, or better yet, see South Africa. Mandela's policies turned a 180 over there.
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Re: Would these black characters by today's standards be cha

Post by Fizzer » Mon Nov 19, 2012 6:34 am

I know the stuff about Bulma isn't directly on topic, but there is a point there. The use of female characters in the early parts of the series in general is quite bad.

Bulma is promiscuous, her first attempt at bribing Goku out of his Dragon Ball was letting him feel her butt, then she's peeing herself, then she's getting her underwear removed in her sleep, then she's showing Kame-Sen'nin her underwear (and accidentally, much more, which is humorous as always), then she's getting sexually harrassed by Oolong, then Kame-Sen'nin is asking to feel her up, then she's having her breasts felt by Yamucha, and by the time we get to Pilaf saying "I'll do something dirty to you", I'm thinking "Oh, this again".

Chichi got felt up by Goku and then decided to marry him because of it. Launch didn't get away without being used to plenty of sex gags, especially in the anime. When Luanfan turned up, it was sort of cool to see a strong female fighter who got into the finals, but then it turned out she was only there so Toriyama could use her for a sex joke.

Men in this part of the series, with obvious exceptions, are overly-sexual or perverse in a steriotypical sort of way. This is mostly Kame-Sen'nin and Oolong of course. It's enough that, later on during the Dr Brief's capsule incident, you know what Toriyama will put in the capsule, just because Dr Brief is male. This doesn't really stand up to the female characters going through one dignity-stripping experience after another though.

I can't complain, this is just how the characters are, it may not represent how Toriyama thinks of people, and this is actually the other way around to most shows, which encourage the audience to laugh at men being undignified, getting kicked in the balls and whatnot, but never anything similar for female characters.

The characters we see who are clearly of different races to the main cast, on the other hand, are all generally smart, powerful characters with good roles. There's Namu, Black, I think Blue was intended to be German or something like that, and they aren't really abused for any sort of racial comedy. At least until later on, the material comes across as quite sexist, and not at all racist.

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Re: Would these black characters by today's standards be cha

Post by Fin » Mon Nov 19, 2012 7:21 am

TRL wrote:I guess my concept of racism is not as broad as some of yours is. I consider it only when there's intent to harm or discriminate. Otherwise I just call it stereotypical thinking, which we all do. Who hasn't jokingly portrayed an asian by pulling your eyelids?
The problem here is stereotypical thinking has more power to harm marginalised groups than privileged ones. For example, these days most people who insult guys by insinuating they're gay would say they don't genuinely have a problem with gay people, but they're still adding fuel to the fire of a culture that considers homosexuality shameful.

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Re: Would these black characters by today's standards be cha

Post by Fox666 » Mon Nov 19, 2012 9:06 am

Why is nobody saying how offensive this is?

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Re: Would these black characters by today's standards be cha

Post by Cipher » Mon Nov 19, 2012 9:23 am

Fox666 wrote:Why is nobody saying how offensive this is?
Because the world doesn't operate on binaries of "everything is equally offensive"/"nothing is offensive" and it has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Fizzer wrote:I know the stuff about Bulma isn't directly on topic, but there is a point there. The use of female characters in the early parts of the series in general is quite bad.
I created a thread about the use of women in Dragon Ball a while back if you want to go take a look at that.
Last edited by Cipher on Mon Nov 19, 2012 9:36 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Would these black characters by today's standards be cha

Post by VegettoEX » Mon Nov 19, 2012 9:34 am

Yeah, I do want to help point out that there's been plenty of discussion about gender roles in the series (in addition to Cipher's thread, we had a podcast episode about it way back in 2006), so it's not like other points of criticism have been ignored or swept under the rug. I don't think anyone's truly trying to use that as a distraction to get away from the racism conversation, but yeah, it's out there.
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Re: Would these black characters by today's standards be cha

Post by TRL » Mon Nov 19, 2012 9:45 am

I honestly think there's not a single offensive thing in all of Dragonball. The term "offensive" is pretty american as it is. Your culture seems to be really walking on your tippy toes in that field.
It's comedy people. Non protagonist characters will tend to look silly, stupid, ugly, evil for expressive, comedic effect.

@fin: If you're going to say that these marginalised groups should be off limits for stereotypical bashing, doesn't that further marginalize and isolate them? It's like that one kid on the playground who's protected by the teachers or "snitched" which further enrages the other kids because of the special treatment.

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Re: Would these black characters by today's standards be cha

Post by Rocketman » Mon Nov 19, 2012 2:28 pm

TRL wrote:I honestly think there's not a single offensive thing in all of Dragonball. The term "offensive" is pretty american as it is. Your culture seems to be really walking on your tippy toes in that field.
It's comedy people. Non protagonist characters will tend to look silly, stupid, ugly, evil for expressive, comedic effect.
Comedy has been used in America to oppress entire subsets of humanity. That's what blackface was.

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Re: Would these black characters by today's standards be cha

Post by TRL » Mon Nov 19, 2012 4:56 pm

I think it was first slavery and then segregation and not being able to vote that did the major oppressing. Blackface may have been a result of that culture yes not the other way around.

Anyway, I'll keep believing that Popo being badly edited to blue without any shading doesn't serve anybody any good. You may believe otherwise. I just don't see it.

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