Gentleman Troper!
Orientalist Romance also includes White Gal With Asian Guy, Asian Gal With Black Guy, Asian Gal With Asian Guy, and so forth. Not to mention the LGBT variants thereof.
Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!
The first one is already included as gender-inverted. The others are not included, as they are not traditional in Orientalism.
Oriental Romance and Orientalist Romance are terrible names, in my opinion. But that depends on what this trope is supposed to be about.
If it's supposed be about a romance with an oriental person, then I have to ask: why do we need that trope? We don't have a trope specifically about X Race with Y Race. As people have noted, that's People Sit On Chairs territory. So, if we're going to use this trope and rename, I suggest the name actually reflect the way the relationship dynamic works in fiction. Remember, the entire reason this is being renamed again is because the name is being used as "interracial romance with asians".
That's why I prefer the "__Love You Long Time" titles.
edited 9th Mar '12 4:52:57 AM by KingZeal
Yes, this trope is NOT about just a white person and an Asian person together.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Also, can I respond to this:
That is misleading. Do not vote down a rename just because one proposed name is disliked. This is about whether or not it needs a rename, not promoting specific names to that task. Do not sabotage the crowner like that.
edited 9th Mar '12 8:46:58 AM by KingZeal
Right now, neither of those names mention the actual trope and both will cause continued trope decay. Neither of them should be considered in my opinion. They're probably about the two worst ideas we have.
I don't think Me Love You Long Time is great, but at least it captures the spirit. Now we need something that captures the spirit, but doesn't sound like dialogue and will make sense to random tropers so they stop listing every last romance with an Asian person on the page.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Calling crowner in favour of a rename. Hook up an alt names crowner.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
If Me Love You Long Time doesn't work, I suggest: She Love White Man Long Time.
Pros
- Captures the essence of the trope: a submissive, hypersexualized Asian woman with poor English-speaking skills (whether due to alienness or poor education) forming an intimate relationship with a caucasian male.
- Self-Demonstrating
- Slightly offensive name to demonstrate a slightly-offensive trope.
Cons
- Offensive, regardless.
- May be used specifically for prostitution, which is tangentially related to this, but not necessarily inclusive.
edited 9th Mar '12 9:56:58 AM by KingZeal
@shimaspawn,
Would you please clarify what you consider to be the spirit of the trope?
Whatever it is, I highly suspect that it doesn't at all fit the example list (as it is, and has been since long before the last rename). This is fine, of course - as long as we combine the rename with the nuking the example list and starting over - or at least make a major cleanup.
I also request that i the spirit of the trope is going to have racist overtones, it should be limited to objective in-universe examples. Lets NOT have room for the mentality that "we only list objectionable examples, so we'll list all and any relationships where the man is white and the woman Asian - because such relationships are inherently immoral".
A No Real Life Examples tag is also in order.
Tsundere pet.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Yes, cleaning the examples is absolutely necessary. There's no point in a list of "unproblematic interracial relationships with no narrative significance". And as for Real Life, well, there were (and still are) plenty of real relationships that involve racially-driven inequalities. Madame Butterfly is supposedly based on a real story. So the Real Life section would need some policing, but I don't see a need to exclude it entirely.
The spirit of the trope is entirely racist and misogynist and the title should reflect that. That doesn't make it any less a trope. It's about an unequal relationship with a white man dominating a submissive uneducated Asian woman. No, submissive does not mean can't kick ass. It just means that she lets herself be manipulated by him. He is the one with the power in the relationship.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
@King Zeal,
You have stated your vision of what the trope should be. This vision does not fit the example list at all. Which doesn't have to be a problem, as long as we combine the rename with nuking the example list and starting over, or at least do some MAJOR pruning. And, of course, make it crystal clear that the trope is about stereotypes in fiction - No Real Life Eamples Please.
SLWMLT (She Love White Man Long Time) is a bad title, but FAR less bad than MLYLT:
- It is far clearer, specifying that it's about a woman and a white man.
- It is not a Stock Phrase
- MLYLT is squarely associated with prostitution and disdain for Asian women who doesn't stick to their own race. While SLWMLT still has an unnecessary association with MLYLT, and thus a bit of these problems, it is not nearly as squarely rooted in that morass. These are the cons you listed: It is indeed "Offensive, regardless" - but not as offensive.
- While still too much dialogue and too much word salad, it's not as bad as MLYLT in these regards either.
No, but it fits the original definition of the trope before it was turned into Not A Trope by people offended that it was racist.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
@187 shimaspawn,
The trope you suggest is a good trope. AGWWG is not good, and MLYLY was awful: While your trope is about racism and misogyny, the old MLYLT was racist and misogynistic. All three tropes cover pretty much the same field, and your's is the one that cover it in an interesting and useful way.
So, what should we call this retooled trope?
White Mans Little Asian Woman, perhaps?
(With "The old MLYLT", I mean like a year ago or so. The original trope, back when it was newly launched, may very well have been in the spirit shimaspawn promote: A trope page about a racist stereotype. I'm sure the decay happened gradually.)
@186 lebrel,
I don't want people arguing over this or that real life couple. One thing we have done at some tropes is limiting real life examples to structural ones: No individual cases, but discussion on attitudes and migration and such... This solution worked fine on Ethical Slut for a while, until some guy started a big edit war arguing that women deserve to be raped if they dress in a certain way...
I predict that having a real life section, even a structural one, on White Mans Little Asian Woman (or whatever we'll end up calling the trope) will eventually turn into a major headache as well.
So, my condensed opinion:
- On individual examples: Big "NO!".
- On structural examples: Meh, rather not, but I'm okay with giving it a try if you guys really want to. Could be interesting, anyways.
Which examples doesn't it fit?
It doesn't fit the examples added since the rename. It fits all the old examples. The reason for the rename is because of the trope decay.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
@194 shimaspawn,
On page 2 of this thread, King Zeal posted a web archive from 2010. Lets have a look.
Starting with the comic books section, it has ten examples. Of these ten examples, ZERO fit your vision of the trope. One of the examples, the watchmen one, would have been a valid example. However it's in the X Just X format. The other example descriptions doesn't have any racism or misogyny in them either, and it doesn't seem like the works they describe do either.
Moving back to the trope description, this is not surprising at all. The trope description has five bullet points, claiming that the difference between MLYLT and Mixed Marriage (which was not yet redefined into Maligned Mixed Marriage) is that it is MLYLT if the woman is Asian and the man is white and at least one of these bullet points is true. These bullet points are:
- A white man expressing a desire or preference for Asian girls;
- An Asian girl expressing a desire or preference for white guys;
- Western man travels to Far Eastern country and shacks up with a local;
- Western guy scores with an Asian girl despite many Asian men being in the cast;
- Western man "liberating" the Asian girl from some oppressive facet of Asian culture (foot binding, prostitution, arranged marriage, etc).
Of these five bullet points, only the fifth even approach the territory of racism and misogyny. The first two are merely Race Fetish, if even that. The third bullet point is written in a way that include all or any cases of immigration, travel, tourism, whatever. The fourth bullet point is pure Entitled to Have You.
Considering these five bullet points, the trope had already turned into a total mess by august 2010. It was "People Sit On Chairs, And People At TV Tropes Hate Those people".
If a trope i to have a spirit of racism and misogyny, i NEED to be limitd to actual racism and misogyny. Traveling to another country and find love there is not in itself racist or misogynic. Having an aestetic or cultural preference for a certain group of people is not automatically/inherently racist or misogynistic. And most importantly: No, choosing a lover of another skin-color does not automatically make you a whore. (No, not even if men who share your skin-color are available.)
Many of those examples are flat out wrong, though, as they are "inversions" or something that is patently not this trope. Also of note is the fact that most of these examples were an example of Race Fetish or Maligned Mixed Marriage, which we have since declared to be the tropes where those types of relationships should be listed. Not here.
That would still be part of the new trope description, although it's moreso Race Fetish.
See above.
Yes, which I listed two pages ago as being one of the identifiers of this trope.
Yup. Though, I didn't directly say this, this is part of the redefined trope.
Yes, which is still taking advantage of the power dynamic. A Mighty Whitey comes into a foreign land and woos a local girl. Conversely, she comes to the West and falls in love with a white man while she's fresh off the boat.
Which is misogynistic.
From what I'm reading, a very large number of the examples were correct, particularly in the Film department.
Also, I want to state that many of the examples were contested because the characters did not have the goal of an interracial relationship. For example, in the Skies Of Arcadia example in the Videogames section, it's noted that the white prince and asian princess were not specifically introduced to fall in love with each other.
But that can't matter. The reason why is that this is one of those stereotypes where it doesn't matter why it happened or what the justification for it is—if it happens, it's this trope. For example, The Last Samurai wasn't specifically about a guy who wanted to fall in love with an asian woman, but he passes the trope with flying colors regardless.
Racial preference as a whole is sketchy, although that falls moreso under Race Fetish than here. The stereotypes associated with the races, however, CAN be why the fetish happens in teh first place.
While traveling to another country to "find love" isn't necessarily a problem in and of itself, it still invokes the Mighty Whitey dynamic when it's a white man obtaining an asian girlfriend (even if that wasn't intentional) and it still invokes "submissive asian girlfriend" if she's foreign, uneducated, underaged, destitute, etc.
edited 9th Mar '12 12:58:44 PM by KingZeal
@King Zeal:
Interesting points.
Based on those, moving on to how we will define WMLAW (White Mans Little Asian Woman - or whatever we'll call it) with regards to those bullet points.
- Regarding race preference, yes, it is more of Race Fetish. And should thus not in itself be a criterion of this trope.
- Regarding travel, it's about how it's portrayed! Returning to that shortly.
- Regarding Entitled to Have You: Yes, entitlement is often misogynic or misandrist or both. The problem with the bullet point was that it was TROPER entitlement, not in-universe entitlement. Returning to that as well.
So, we have two interesting issues here: Travel and entitlement.
Travel: I think you nailed it almost perfectly with your paragraph, but I would like to change "it still invokes" to "it can still invoke". Like this:
While traveling to another country to "find love" isn't necessarily a problem in and of itself, it can still invoke the Mighty Whitey dynamic when it's a white man obtaining an asian girlfriend (even if that wasn't intentional) and it still invokes "submissive asian girlfriend" if she's foreign, uneducated, underaged, destitute, etc.
Entitlement: in-universe entitlement is highly relevant, and surely a good source for the "playing with" kind of examples.
Edit, answering your updates:
King Zeal: "Many of those examples are flat out wrong"
Yeah, that was my point! I was indirectly asked whether any examples added before the previous rename needed to be removed, and my answer is: "Yes, the entire comic books section for starters". I haven't even begun to analyze the other sections, simply took the comic books section as an example. Going through the entire example list, lets do that AFTER we finished working on the new and improved sharpened up trope - but before we launch it!
edited 9th Mar '12 1:20:07 PM by Xzenu
I think we can agree there.
Cool.
Made a thread with a draft for White Mans Little Asian Woman at YKTTW
.
It doesn't need a YKTTW. It is this trope. This page just needs to be cleaned up.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Crown Description:
What would be the best way to fix the page?
"romance involving an oriental person" is sufficiently accurate to avoid inviting misuse.
As for the risk of offending people, "Orientalist Romance" is far worse than "Asian Gal With White Guy", but far far better than "Me Love You Long Time" - which beside being extremely offensive to some people ALSO has problems with being dialogue and with easily being confused for being Asian Speekee Engrish or Asian Hooker Stereotype.
Right now, Asian Gal with White Guy and Orientalist Romance are the only reasonable options we have. If you think Orientalist Romance is too offensive or too unclear, then vote "no" to renaming. Or think up a new name.
edited 8th Mar '12 11:41:01 PM by Xzenu