(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

Found another one lurking in my bookmarks:

Restrictive Portrayals of Asians in the Media and How to Balance Them

(A lot of this is good general advice on avoiding stereotypes of all kinds.)

Comments

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

These are rather neat.

The last one, "What, no Asians?" raises a question -- what's the difference between casting an Asian actor in a role that wasn't written specifically for an Asian actor, and plain old tokenism?

I mean, from the writer's perspective it's different. Sure, if the Asian actor is the best one for the role, cast him in it even if the character wasn't originally conceived of as Asian. But a cynical viewer might think "they just made him Asian to make the show more diverse", which is not the same thing as avoiding unnecessarily restricting a role to actors of a certain colour.

I suspect that maybe white viewers don't understand what tokenism really means -- if a character is non-white without a plot reason for him to be non-white, they call him a token. Eek.