deathbycoldopen replied to your post: Dear Yuri on Ice fic writers, I just want to say...
That’s great! I do kind of wonder about the trend in yoi fic where Yuuri is referred to as a “boy” and viktor is referred to as a “man”. Obviously there’s an age difference, but 23 is old enough that I’d comfortably call him a man. Which leaves me with the reminder of infantilizing poc by white americans (particularly calling black americans boy). As someone affected more directly by that kind of thing, does that bother you at all? (sorry for the rambly message)
I cannot speak for all Asian-Americans, or even Asian-American men. Please take this as my personal opinion of the kind of stuff that bothers me. And I apologize in advance for being kind of wordy, but I have LOTS of thoughts and they’re very complicated, so it’s hard for me to put them all down.
I have kind of a hierarchy for things that bother me, ranging from “super-racist, holy crap do NOT do this” to “argh” to “sigh.” I encounter “argh” and “sigh” level stuff all the time, everywhere. YOI fandom is no exception.
Super-racist stuff in fandom I will nope out of. Won’t read, won’t like, won’t recommend, will silently grit my teeth at all the positive comments. Argh and sigh? If the fic is otherwise redeeming, I’ll keep going, and sometimes I will even love it.
Super-racist stuff, IMO, is almost never okay; there’s just almost no way to present a character in which it makes sense, and so unless you’re an insider (in the case of writing a Yuuri that speaks imperfect English, that means a Japanese person from Japan who has gone to an English-speaking country and experienced racism for the way you spoke) you probably don’t have the experience to know how to write that well, and your dominant culture has probably given you an idea of how you think that feels for the person who is speaking that is absolutely counter to how it actually feels internally.
Stuff that isn’t at that level--the “argh” and “sigh” level--is harder to classify, and there are fewer hard and fast rules as to whether I argh or sigh. There are things I can say bother me, but someone will handle it so well that I’ll love it unreservedly.
Again, what follows relates to my personal tolerance--other people (including Asians) will not be bothered at all by things that really grate at me. On the other hand, there are things I can tolerate, that will really hurt other people.
Things that hit somewhere between “argh” and “sigh” level for me include: desexualization of Yuuri, making Yuuri a lot less competent than he canonically is, saying that Yuuri has a tiny dick, treating Yuuri as having less agency and being incredibly dependent on others to function, treating Phichit as an adjunct to Yuuri without his own wants and wishes, and... a lot of other stuff. YOI fandom isn’t perfect; it just mostly avoids super-racist.
These things can be quite complicated--there’s a real difference between writing an Asian character who is a complex, wholly functional human being, who is ace, or who has a small dick, or who has difficulty making choices--and writing a caricature where those same things feel like ugly, painful racial stereotypes. I don’t want to suggest categorical rules in these categories.
(You can already see why this is so complicated--“small dick” is both an Asian stereotype and an insult born of shitty toxic masculinity. Men can have small and/or no dicks and still be men, and be sexy and lovable and good lovers. Likewise, Asian men can have big dicks, small dicks, or no dicks at all. Dick isn’t indicative of anything at all, and in a fic that recognizes that, I do not mind. I do mind when the fic unconsciously accepts as a given that bigger dick=better, and Yuuri is tiny.)
I think it would fall into the “super-racist, don’t do this unless you’re black and can process how this hurts and how to alleviate that hurt” to call an African-American character “boy.” I don’t think there’s a context in which a non-black person can use that word, applied to a black person, in fiction and not get tangled up in the history of that word applied to that person. (There’s a giant asterisk here about portraying racism in fiction that I’m not going to get into because it’s so massive.)
But Yuuri is not African-American, and the characters are not American, and I don’t think it carries that same context. That means that it depends heavily on how it’s handled.
In terms of Yuuri being called a boy, in my mind, this depends on a lot of factors that depend on who’s doing it and what the context is. I feel like friends saying, “Yeah, boy!” to each other isn’t a big deal. The word “boy”--in addition to the specific usage for African-Americans--can sometimes signify friendship (“that’s my boy!”) or queerness or a number of other things other than “young man.” I’ve had Victor call Yuuri a boy--as in “I don’t kiss boys who don’t cry over dogs”--and in that case, Victor is clearly assigning himself as being in the same classification as Yuuri, and that doesn’t personally bother me (obviously, or I wouldn’t have done it). It also wouldn’t bother me to have Yakov calling Yuuri a boy--Yakov is seventy, so both Yuuri and Victor are absolute CHILDREN to him. It probably would bother me if Yakov thought of Victor as a man and Yuuri as a boy, though. It’s more likely to be the reverse--Yakov has known Victor since he was a literal boy, and he met Yuuri as a man.
You didn’t suggest this, but I would also personally be leary of claiming that because “boy” is a slur used to put African-Americans in their place, it should not ever be used to describe Asian-Americans. I personally try not to disclaim ownership over the specific types of racism experienced by black people. Asians are (mostly) not insiders to the incredibly harmful use of “boy” in this case, and representing that it harms them equally implies that they would have the ability to call African-Americans “boy” as insiders, and...no. No. We don’t, we can’t, that’s not okay.
Asians experience racism, but it is not the same kind of racism that black people experience. As Asians can often be guilty of anti-black prejudice, I think it’s especially important to not coopt the African-American experience.
This is a very long response to your question, and I already know I’m glossing over some points as it is, so my apologies both for the length and incompleteness of the answer. These are my personal opinions and not everyone will agree with me, but here you are.
