Discussion Main / EthnicScrappy

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Should it be merged with The Scrappy?, started by DragonQuestZ on Jan 17th 2011 at 3:39:37 PM

I would like to vote to make this article [[Administrivia/In-Universe Examples Only]], a lot of users appear to be airing their personal grievances with characters in this article.

While citations aren't required on this site, I'm curious about the "Ol' Man Author" parody quoted here. (I'm guessing it's a parody of "Old Man River"?) I can't find it anywhere. Does anyone know where I can find it? I'd love to be able to have a link with the quotation.

As a Street Fighter fan, the whole paragraph about Blanka is weird to me :

• Street Fighter II's Blanka played this straight at first, then subverted it. A total misfit on the roster, he was an uncultured green beast-man that shoots lightning whose stage is in the middle of the forest living in an indigenous Brazillian tribe and that seemingly had no motivation, personality nor connection to the story whatsoever.

This applies to half of the cast of SF. In a game that has characters like Dhalsim, Dee Jay, or T. Hawk, Blanka is really far from being the most stereotypical.

• Needless to say, he wasn't very popular back then.

I've never heard of anyone having any issues whatsoever with Blanka. As I've said, the SF series has a significant amount of characters that are objectively ten times worse.

• Allegedly, the series' creator apologized for Blanka's portrayal of Brazillian culture

I've never heard of this, and couldn't find any evidence of it anywhere.

• and promised he would fix that on Street Fighter III (where he created Sean and Oro, plus Capoeira fighter Elena).

Elena is kenyan.

• Blanka himself got a major overhaul, got plenty of in-story Character Development, a slightly tweaked backstory that usually was made fun of and an amusing crazy personality. Nowadays, he's one of the most popular characters in the series.

Ok, this is the weirdest part by far. His backstory wasn't changed one bit, his design wasn't changed one bit, and he certainly didn't get any "character development" (it could be debated whether there's such a thing as character development in the SF series). He just became more of a joke character. If you thought that he was racist before, then arguably, he's even worst today.

Overall, this just seems completely innacurate. Dee Jay would be a better example of this trope, I think. But again, with a franchise like SF, you could practically put half of the cast in that category, so... If that's ok with everyone, I'll remove this paragraph.

• 18-Volt from WarioWare is pretty obviously a stereotype of a black man—though not necessarily a negative one. He's more like a would-be rapper, complete with boom box and gold teeth. However, some players still dislike him, considering his only lines of dialogue are "word" (Nintendo's understanding of rap culture? Hulk Speak? Who knows?) and he seems like an arbitrary addition to 9-Volt, a more developed character.

Can anyone verify this? From what I've seen, people seem to like him, or at least don't hate him enough to complain. Not to mention he doesn't really look like a stereotypical black man.

Is being a racist stereotype an example of why people hate 'em?

Speaking from 2013, the first time I saw Chop-Chop I had no idea what he was. His portrayal was so ludicrous that, beyond being even unrealistic, it was practically abstract. Hearing that he was supposed to be Chinese didn't help, because he didn't even look like the typical Qing-Dynasty stereotype, which I had seen the Thompsons pull off in "Tintin and the Blue Lotus. Chop-Chop looked like he was put together out of secondhand tales by people who had never seen a single image of either Chinese people or the stereotyped portrayals. I understand that he belongs on this page because he was called Chinese, but...something about 1940s Chop-Chop is beyond even Ethnic Scrappy territory.

Would people in the 1940s have felt the same way? Were the familiar enough with the stereotypes that they could identify him as Chinese?

Is the second paragraph of the description using Sarcasm Mode and such because they think it's bad that this trope has largely died out, or because they are saying that it sometimes still exists?

Because it's certainly not true that the trope is present only in foreign (i.e. non American) examples now, as there are some modern examples listed under Film and other headings.