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lian, how did you survive the last week? Translating OTW texts can be so exhausting. And after two hours, German kind of stops making sense in the same way a newspaper picture breaks down into pixels if you stare at it for too long.
At least it distracted me from all the profic fail that's going around for a while. Victorientalism. Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Out of curiosity, I read the first article, because it's my area of expertise. Sort of. I should just stop reading what people who haven't taken Japanese Studies write about Japan. It never ends well.
It also proves that you shouldn't write about samurai if you learned everything you know about them from The Last Samurai.
The article has basically nothing at all to do with Japan and all to do with the West's idea of Japan. It's about how Japanese culture enriched the West with its otherness (as if that's all there is to it). It completely ignores the fact that these Japanese cultural exports were shaped by the West, to a degree. It's all about an exoticised idea of Japan's past, how we repeat these tropes again and again and how this is a good idea! Japonism at its finest.
( My ramblings about early modern Japanese history, because I have to get it off my chest and I didn't read all those books for my intermediate exam for nothing. )
I haven't read any steampunk yet (that I know of), even though I am interested in theory, but attitudes like this are really off-putting for me:
Can somebody please point out something that is not wrong with this? All I'm seeing is "I want to be a racist without feeling guilty" (and I'm vaguely reminded of Avatar - the same thing in blue, literally). Am I the only one who would like to read steampunk that doesn't glorify the past?
I think I really have to write this steampunky (or would it be dieselpunk or plain old Alternate History?) plot bunny I have. It's a) about women, b) Wilhelminian, not Victorian, c) one of the women is black and everyone else is at least a little bit racist, including the other sympathetic main characters, d) one of the women is a communist. Unfortunately it would mean a crazy amount of research about Wilhelminian Germany, the First World War, women in the early 20th century, communism, the German colonies, lock picking and so many other things.
And this post doesn't even touch upon the sci fi writer who thinks that stories only exist if they're in a language he can read (= English) and published in a format he has access to.
lian, how did you survive the last week? Translating OTW texts can be so exhausting. And after two hours, German kind of stops making sense in the same way a newspaper picture breaks down into pixels if you stare at it for too long.At least it distracted me from all the profic fail that's going around for a while. Victorientalism. Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Out of curiosity, I read the first article, because it's my area of expertise. Sort of. I should just stop reading what people who haven't taken Japanese Studies write about Japan. It never ends well.
It also proves that you shouldn't write about samurai if you learned everything you know about them from The Last Samurai.
The article has basically nothing at all to do with Japan and all to do with the West's idea of Japan. It's about how Japanese culture enriched the West with its otherness (as if that's all there is to it). It completely ignores the fact that these Japanese cultural exports were shaped by the West, to a degree. It's all about an exoticised idea of Japan's past, how we repeat these tropes again and again and how this is a good idea! Japonism at its finest.
( My ramblings about early modern Japanese history, because I have to get it off my chest and I didn't read all those books for my intermediate exam for nothing. )
I haven't read any steampunk yet (that I know of), even though I am interested in theory, but attitudes like this are really off-putting for me:
[S]teampunk allows us to reject the chains of reality and all the racism and guilt associated with it, to explore anew this imagined world of sultans and saberrattling Islamic conquerors; harems and white slavery; samurai, dragons and dark, bustling bazaars frequented by the strangest sort of folk. Isn't this, after all, steampunk's very premise?
Can somebody please point out something that is not wrong with this? All I'm seeing is "I want to be a racist without feeling guilty" (and I'm vaguely reminded of Avatar - the same thing in blue, literally). Am I the only one who would like to read steampunk that doesn't glorify the past?
I think I really have to write this steampunky (or would it be dieselpunk or plain old Alternate History?) plot bunny I have. It's a) about women, b) Wilhelminian, not Victorian, c) one of the women is black and everyone else is at least a little bit racist, including the other sympathetic main characters, d) one of the women is a communist. Unfortunately it would mean a crazy amount of research about Wilhelminian Germany, the First World War, women in the early 20th century, communism, the German colonies, lock picking and so many other things.
And this post doesn't even touch upon the sci fi writer who thinks that stories only exist if they're in a language he can read (= English) and published in a format he has access to.
