oh I don't even

[kaigou]

From an interview with the author:

Q: I’ve studied Japanese for six years and been to Japan yet still may not have been able to execute a Japanese-inspired world as real and sensational as yours. What was the research involved in bringing the world of Stormdancer to life? Or did you drink some magical sake and try your luck?

A: I’ve had a few people say that, and it’s really flattering, but honestly I think most of my research was done via osmosis. I’ve always had an interest in Japanese cinema and manga, so I absorbed a lot of knowledge through that over the years. Wikipedia was really my go-to source for information, plus a few specialized sites dealing with the Tokugawa age.

The cool thing about writing a setting that’s inspired by Japan, but not actually Japan, is that you can take what you want from history and mythology and leave the rest. Take thunder tigers, for example – there’s nothing close to griffins in Japanese folklore. But without thunder tigers, there would be no Stormdancer.

My theory has been that if you want a place inspired by Japan (or anywhere) that's not actually Japan (or wherever), then you must avoid all non-English words that are not long-standing loan-words, for starters. At the simplest level. Otherwise, you're obviously writing about a certain place because the non-Englishness is going to act as a red flag, and pull people back into the concrete this-place that's the analogue to your wherever. This is why authors make up their own words & phrases in fantasy and science fiction, except in those cases where they specifically want you to be thinking France, Japan, Mozambique, or wherever.

But I'll let other folks do the talking, since that's hardly the only thing wrong with this story. Oh, Goodreads, why do you recommend stuff that just makes my blood boil?

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/365384575

Discounting manga/anime, I can count on two fingers how many Asian-inspired fantasies I know of. Stormdancer gets the middle one.

http://ykmreviews.blogspot.com/2012/08/071-stormdancer-by-jay-kristoff.html

I'll admit, I was a little leery of Stormdancer from the start - Japanese steampunk sounds cool, but coming from a white western author, the chances of problematic weeaboo fuckery are high. Exoticization. Romanticization. Plain old appropriation. Yet for some reason, I didn't really peg Stormdancer as a weeaboo outing. I don't know why. There was no good reason, and yet, I expected Kristoff to be a scholar of some sort, or at least, to do some very in-depth, scholarly research, borne of a deep interest in, and respect for, Japanese culture. And while even that could have also potentially yielded something problematic, at least it would have been sincere. What I thoroughly did NOT expect to get was a book informed by fucking Wikipedia and anime, set in Japan for the sake of novelty. That came as a genuine shock. And a dramatic rise in blood pressure. WHAT THE FUCKITY FUCK?

The thing is, that Wikipedia part? You can kinda tell. I mean, the first hundred pages or so of Stormdancer, basically until the airship crashes, are a chore to wade through, mostly because of the Wikipedia-esque info dumps. It takes almost exactly half of those pages to make any progress on the plot. The first fifty are just about showing off the world and detailing every little aspect of it, which is why it takes like twelve paragraphs for Yukiko and her father to walk down a street: we have to hear about the architecture, detail the clothing being worn (because we're using Japanese terms here, and not many readers will know offhand what a fucking hakama looks like), and explain the exact geographical setting, right down to which rivers cross where, and the ~exotic smells~ in the air, even though none of it is actually relevant to anything that's going on at the moment. I understand wanting to set the scene and acquaint readers with the world, but Jesus Herbet Christ, get on with it already. Work this stuff in to the action. Make me not want to put the book down out of sheer boredom. I mean, I haven't even gotten the chance to get angry yet.

Making the world-building harder to parse are the Japanese words and terms strewn throughout the descriptions, most of which assume a familiarity with the culture that many readers just won't have. I had to break out the Google more than once to give myself a better mental image of what was going on, and though many of the terms aren't exactly vital to the story, it was still annoying as hell. I want to be able to see this shit in my head, to get what's going on, and it doesn't help when half of the words are in Japanese just for the flavor of it. It's one thing when a word doesn't have an English analog; it's another when you're including easily translatable and even borrowed words, like "sarariman" (seriously? it's "salary-man" or even just "businessman", kthnx), in their romaji form just to make the story seem more ~authentic~. At the very least it's unnecessarily confusing.

http://seireviews.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/stormdancer-by-jay-kristoff.html

Another qualm I have with this book is the lack of research. It's not that the author has no idea about Japanese culture, or historical authenticity. We're not looking for that, of course. Stephen King once rightly said that research should be firmly in the back of the story, because nobody wants to read a dissertation on the New York sewer system for the sake of authenticity if your characters have to pass through those murky waters. (Paraphrased from On Writing, Mr. King's excellent memoir.)

However, Kristoff really fell foul of this rule. In the first part of the book, we are subjected to very, very lengthy passages about Shinto mythology. Raijin, Susano-ou, Lady Izanami, Amaterasu, etc. It's nice to see that the author knows the legends and mythology, but I soon dreaded every moment where a character would sit down and pretty much say: "Let me tell you a story…" Telling stories around a fire or holding an impromptu history lesson may seem like a good way to get weave exposition into the story from a screenwriting point of view, but it just doesn't work nine times out of ten. Nor does it work when characters bounce these stories back and forth between each other, mostly in the first act of this novel.

http://requiemformorebooks.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/stormdancer-by-jay-kristoff/

Despite the lengthy narratives on description of a person belongings, or colour of the hair or dress or house, there’s actually barely decent conversations in this book which is quite off-putting.

Why cant the dialogues be like a normal conversation without these streotyped Asianized-movie-talking-english-trying-to-sound-asian thing. I speak asian english which make sense because I’m 100% Asian. But do you speak in stunted phrases while discussing inane things? Its a story where everyone speak japanese to each other. The dialogues shouldn’t be this weird hybrid of bad Asian dubbed movies. Marisa Meyer’s Cinder (Beijing-setting YA steampunk) is possibly a good example of an author who doesn’t try so hard to make their characters sounded Asian but ARE Asians. Just write normally in English because its a pain to read even for a non-native English user like me.

http://wistfullylinda.blogspot.tw/2012/08/part-i-asian-american-fantasy.html

I'm not saying it's a bad thing to take inspiration from a particular culture/time/place. Writers do so with non-Asian influences, too, setting their stories in fantasy versions of Renaissance Italy, Medieval France, or Victorian Britain. But in most cases when a fantasy world doesn't correspond to one specific era or place in history, everyone's automatically white, because that's how it goes in generic fantasyland. Which makes me think the main hint for readers that the characters in a fantasy could possibly look similar to East Asians in our world is if the story takes place in a world recognizable as fantasy Japan/China/Korea. Another case of white = generic/normal, PoC = specific/exotic.

Which kind of sucks. I wonder if I could pull off writing Asian-looking characters that aren't set in a fantasy version of ancient China or Japan or Korea. That's my goal, because I love fantasy and would like to read something that includes representations of Asian-Americans. I mean, I'm Taiwanese-American and grew up in the States with first-generation immigrant parents, and I still occasionally get culture shock living in Taiwan. I don't want to write a fantasy set in Ancient China just so I can have Asian characters — many of the values and worldviews and traditions of that period would feel largely foreign and unfamiliar to me, not to mention rather bothersome for the kind of protagonists and plots I like. I want setting and characters that appeal to my imagination, which has been influenced by both Western and Eastern cultures.

Parts 2 and 3, continuing on the Part1:
http://wistfullylinda.blogspot.com/2012/08/part-2-asian-by-authorial-decree.html
http://wistfullylinda.blogspot.com/2012/09/part-3-green-eyed-asian-love-interest.html

And some useful posts, for you guys and also for me:
http://whatfreshhellisthis.tumblr.com/post/5261084308/whats-wrong-with-cultural-appropriation-i-mean-i
http://thesadnessofpencils.tumblr.com/post/3485124248/do-you-have-any-guidelines-on-how-a-white-not-english

Comments

[dharma_slut]

I am so fucking sorry that the Internet even exists sometimes, allows so many people to parade about with no pants.

On the other hand, requiemforbooks suggested "Marisa Meyer’s Cinder (Beijing-setting YA steampunk)" which might be worth looking into...

[kaigou]

I'm not even into YA, or steampunk, and I'll be looking up Cinder. There's one good value for bad reviews -- the hope that the reviewer will mention someone who did it right!

Although in this case it's not really the internet's fault, it's the fault of the author for thinking wiki is the first-and-last stop for research. Which, okay, for some things, fine -- like when I want to know what a fuse is made of, I don't need the library and sixteen books, I just want to know whether a fuse can be waterproof. But still... I don't think I'd actually mention this as a selling point. That would be like, sheesh, someone complimenting you on your award-winning cookies and admitting that actually, you just bought those ready-made cookie dough rolls and sliced them up and stuck them in the oven. So many kinds of wrong, admitting you basically did no work at all. This is supposed to be a good thing?

[dharma_slut]

It's surely pants-down-ness. And not in any good way.

The cover for Cinder is totally awesome, did you see it?

[christeos-pir.livejournal.com]

So much fail, so few shanks.

[tiercel]

I read a couple more reviews and just... the author used "sama" by itself? Consistently?

My favorite review was the one where someone wrote some sample paragraphs where every other phrase was French, just to show up how annoying that shit is.

[kaigou]

I could sort of forgive 'hai' misuse, since most people don't realize it's not a simple 'yes' -- but since it gets used in all the places we'd say "yes" in english, it gets translated/understood that way. But really, yeah. Sama as a title, not as a suffix. Over and over. I'm still scratching my head over that one. I mean, isn't that like what you learn in anime-manga 101, the various honorific suffixes and that they are, y'know, suffixes?

*heddesk*

It's really a bummer. Shit like this gets published and it gets all the hype?

I keep telling myself this is just lowering the bar so far that when someone does do it right, they'll blow everyone out of the water. Well, I tell myself that on a good day. The rest of the time, when I'm being realistic, I have to admit the chances are high that a well-done story will get completely panned by the masses. Because, y'know, it's not littered with foreign inexplicable phrases and words and completely misusing someone else's language. Le sigh.

*knows next to nothing about Japanese*

[swordqueen]

For some reason I thought 'hai' was one of those deliberately misspelled words, like pr0n. I blame my ignorance on the fact that I've mostly given up on keeping up with the current internet slang.

Re: *knows next to nothing about Japanese*

[(Anonymous)]

It is both how you spell the japanese word *and* how you say hi in LOLspeak.

[kaigou]

...and if the author is mistaking lolspeak patterns for japanese, that's even more kinds of fail.

[tiercel]

After The Da Vinci Code, I just sort of... gave up hoping. I'm no longer surprised at all that badly written, poorly researched nonsense gets praised to the heavens. I'm just sad.

[isana]

Ugh. I just can't even. I translate Japanese for a living, and this author kind of just...well, no. (And I have to toss in a vote against Cinder: as a Taiwanese-American, the cultural backdrop is thinly and poorly sketched).

I honestly don't know if there's really any good YA out there with Asian settings. I've heard Silver Phoenix being thrown about, but I found it incredibly disappointing.

[kaigou]

I heard good things about Silver Phoenix... and really, really bad things about its embedded gender assumptions. Sometimes it feels like you can't win, as a reader -- you find something that's just awesome for the sense of place, or the sensitivity to language, and it means swallowing sexist crap about what a woman's allowed to do (in a story) versus a man, or whatever. And then you find something with an awesome female lead, and the setting or plot or whatever is just so much tripe.

(That said, reading some of the reviews, it seems like once you peel back the steampunk/asiatic veneer of the story reviewed in the post, you don't actually get a strong female character. Maybe what I'd call a transitional damsel, but not a true strong character.)

I only know Japanese to the extent of living with a student of it, but I cannot honestly think of anyone I've ever met (and I've known more than my fair share of animanga fangirls) who's been confused about how those honorifics work. Seriously, it's 101. Current theory around the dinner table is that the recession has required publishers to cut back on copy editors. I mean, isn't that the kind of thing a good copy editor would do? Look up the word and say, "hey, this word doesn't mean what you think it means, you may end up offending or pissing off a lot of readers who do know what it means..."

[isana]

Yeah, same here. I figured I'd give it a chance earlier this summer, but to me, the book fails both culturally and with its gender issues. The heroine has potential, but it's never really touched upon, so in the end it feels like a story told from the MacGuffin Girl's point of view. And that's not even getting into the heaps of internalized misogyny (along with the love interest being a straight-up asshole.)

The cultural screwups pissed me off a lot--I'm trying to write my own wuxia/fantasy story, and I figured that hey, Cindy Pon's got a similar background to me! This'll be amazing! Except it didn't really feel so much like Chinese people in a Chinese fantasy counterpart country. More like Chinese people acting like Westerners and/or Western concepts of Chinese people. There is a lot wrong when you have a phrase like "you said 'he'" when the third-person pronoun is gender-neutral in spoken Mandarin, and when the heroine considers scallions and ginger to be exotic scents, when in fact, those two ingredients are essentials in a Chinese kitchen.

Actually, the usage of the word "exotic" really rubbed me the wrong way, mainly because it was used toward people/things in that country, and not toward the one character who was half-foreign.

(/rant)

[kaigou]

The whole gender-specific pronouns of English really started to bother me once I got used to gender-neutrals in Mandarin, and IIRC, also in Korean and Japanese, too. And several others, I think -- I want to say Thai and Vietnamese, but I could be wrong on those. My point is that once you get away from gender-specific pronouns, it really opens up things, because it introduces an ambiguity. Or just makes you more sensitive to what you're spelling out, without even thinking, that in other languages is left inexplicit until intentionally spelled out. And it's not that hard to avoid the conflict between the two ways of seeing pronouns. Over the past few stories I've written, I've found it informing my own stories even when the characters are from a culture with gender-specific pronouns. Like saying "the boy" instead of "he", or calling someone by a gender-specific title (ie "lord" or "mistress" or whatever).

As for exotic... yeah. I think the only time I've seen that done tolerably (even if the word still bugged the hell out of me) was Jeanne Lin's first Tang-dynasty romance. Yes, it drove me bonkers that the hero was a blond-haired European. Something I couldn't quite put my finger on about it, especially since the story was through the (chinese) heroine's eyes. It just felt... odd, although it made sense within context that he'd be incredibly exotic to her. But he'd also be a massive barbarian who didn't bathe regularly and couldn't read and spoke with a lot of grunting. Heh.

Sometimes I get the sense that editors are in there, somewhere, inserting "exotic" because to them, it is, and they think it'll sell more books or something, and it doesn't matter that to the characters, things exotic and unfamiliar -- like fried okra, or tomatoes, or freshwater eels -- are perfectly everyday, nothing to get all het up about, kinds of things. At least, if I blame it on the editors or copy editors, I can give some last smidgen of doubt to the authors. Or else I'd end up even more cynical than I already am... and tripe like this most recent weaboo offering aren't exactly helping me in that attempt. Bleah.

Ack!

[swordqueen]

I wanted to avoid having a sense of righteousness while I do real research for my futuristic conculture, is it wrong this is feeding in to my own ego? Anyway, thanks, your post is a good reminder for me to check out books on the cultures of Eastern Europe soon, I've been too lazy looking at Wiki when I should be reading real peer reviewed stuff and visit cultural centers like I've planning to do. This is a great How Not To.

-Otherwise Known As TheJeopardyMaze :P

Re: Ack!

[swordqueen]

Granted, I can understand the desire not to make a carbon copy of a culture, but you really need to know your stuff first if you want to get the feel for it. Despite a lot of problems I have with the Kushiel books at least something in Carey's alternative France felt natural despite how ludicrous it really was (maybe it was the fact I was in my early 20's that made me enthralled with first book).

[kaigou]

Ahaha, I totally get the feed-ego part. I mean, my first reaction was, "I don't even know Japanese and even I know what 'hai' means and that you do not, ever, ever, use honorifics as their own nouns." And then I thought, "gee, I've even got ACTUAL BOOKS that I've read for research! I'm already way ahead of the game!"

Then I had some chocolate and came to my senses that doing more research means people expect even more. Like the fact that I've read only academic works, someone would complain that I've never read a travelogue. There's always going to be something.

Odd, about Carey's world -- throughout the first book, I kept thinking Venice. I was rather confused afterwards when someone told me it was an analogue for France. And yeah, it was ridiculous, but more importantly, it did have some kind of basic internal consistency, even if some of the pseudo-antiquated quirks in the narration eventually drove me up the wall.

It's a Mary Sue society

[swordqueen]

No way could I ever write one unless its a parody. But the consistency was great, and I think the positives shouldn't be ignored despite the Mighty Whiteyness I've heard about in her last trilogy (I refuse to read that, I don't have the patience anymore).

My current idea is more for a future society tens of thousands of years later on a very distant planet, so I think there is a limit of how much of the past hundred years to apply, but I want to avoid being a presumptuous ego maniac and learn some things first.