i mean i suppose you could read this post that way. but i will point to the second sentence which is the more serious part before i started cracking jokes about paczki: lady shiva’s moral code was already part of a rather ungenerous racist stereotype. when shiva is written, from an american comic writers perspective, as a foreign enitity, her moral code is reinforced as a part of her upbringing. this is inescapable, unfortunately; no single individual writer can change the memetic power of a culturally reinforced stereotype when their character perfectly slots into it. for a brief moment, this stereotype was subverted with potential for deconstruction, but retconning shiva back just reinforces it again.
shiva has always been a dragon lady stereotype from her first appearance in richard dragon, kung-fu fighter, because denny o’neil was obsessed with dragon ladies, but a key feature of that stereotype is moral inscrutability. specifically, that it is the connection to the orient itself that is the source of moral inscrutability. the east is still portrayed as a place that is fundamentally alien, irrational, and primitive compared to the west. shiva’s blue-and-orange morality system is an orientalist one; white american viewpoint characters like tim and richard dragon express shock and frustration with shiva’s amoral and framed-as-illogical view of violence and combat. these go hand in hand, and there are always framing elements in these comics reinforcing this connection between backwardsness and asianness.
conversely, gabrych’s choice in batgirl v1 to establish that shiva was raised in a decidedly western location and was groomed by cain is a subversion of the stereotype. her philosophy cannot be implicitly attributed to her asianness when her early environment is one deemed acceptably rational in an orientalist framework. shiva’s character does not change, but you cannot fall back on a lazy orientalist handwave to explain her motivations anymore with this origin in mind.
by writing a canon in which shiva is instead from an unnamed or fictional vague region in mainland china or by appropriating 原阳县 or tibet for the #aesthetic, this reinforces the core stereotypes of shiva’s character. “shiva is raised in china” is not showing a version of shiva’s childhood as one of two daughters of, say, a small farmer in rural 安乡县 who leaves home to pursue a place on a CWA team after showing an aptitude in school and eventually decides to use her skill for power over sport; if it was actually grounded in the reality of chinese life and portrayed chinese people as the friendly, intelligent, normal people we are, then there wouldn’t be a problem. but that’s not what gets written. instead, shiva’s backstory as of brombal’s batgirl is full of bullshit like blood ninjas, family betrayal, shiva ranting about dishonor, unnamed monasteries ‘in the himalayas’ training young women in wushu, etc—for a story that allegedly takes place in dengist china and not the qing dynasty. that’s not even talking about how brombal also decided to make her part japanese, which is such a thorny position to take but was done so specifically to inject more weeaboo bullshit about ninjas into cass’s story, completely trampling over the national and cultural identities of both countries as a white writer. when shiva and her sister go to detroit, mingye is characterized as less stable, less friendly, and more backwards than meixing specifically because meixing wants to assimilate and mingye wants to continue on her tonally asian and primitive revenge quest; the scene is very awkward and played for comedy because mingye sticks out and makes their american friends uncomfortable. it’s the same racism as shiva’s pre-gabrych depictions, and it’s the same racism and misogyny that denny o’neil wrote in 1976 when carolyn was the good sister for going to NYU and dying and sandra was the evil sister for wearing sexy qipaos and monologuing about the honor of violence.
a lot of this is fact-value distinction stuff. it is a fact that you cannot escape orientalist baggage when shiva is written this way, and it is a fact that she is written this way and she very briefly wasn’t before. that doesn’t reflect my values or what i happen to think is ‘cooler’. i can’t personal-opinion my way out of living in a world in which shiva is overwhelmingly written by weebish white american men, the dragon lady stereotype exists, and orientalism is alive and well.
it’s not bad that lady shiva isn’t american. it is bad, however, that modern writers chose to revive a racist depiction of her character instead of continuing with an existing subversion or building a new one in which she was a chinese national while grounded in actual reality. it’s bad that they did this for the express purpose of being able to indulge in the same lazy, trite, generic, racist fetishization of the mystical inscrutable oriental sexy martial artist from a mysterious dangerous village that shiva’s character has always been built on with a new, updated coat of paint for the 2020s.
so, yes, i find the change distasteful and regressive and prefer the origin that at least somewhat subverts the stereotype she’s built off of, and yeah, i do think that a world in which we could have had a deconstruction of the dragon lady character by grounding her in a distinctly non-asian environment and building on the juxtaposition and perceived ironies is richer than yet another Mystery Eastern Village Of Ninjas character that has been plaguing american media since the 1920s.
i don’t really care about the american part. it so happens that gabrych picked detroit and so there’s a canonical basis, and i do think that placing shiva in an area not reputably known within the us (contemporary driver of sinophobia) for its asian population makes it more striking, but it would be just as interesting if shiva was from kingston or paris or cdmx or lima or even, frankly, given a normal upbringing in china that contrasts with her present day lifestyle. contrast is interesting. stereotype is not. this is not representation of non-usamerican asians, it’s just return to form for dc’s long history of orientalism. hope that clears up my thoughts.
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