Foreign Culture Fetish

Idi Amin, President of Uganda for life and King of Scotland.

I have seen the things which they have brought to the King out of the new lands of gold... All the days of my life, I have seen nothing that reaches my heart so much as these, for among them I have seen wonderfully artistic things and have admired the subtle ingenuity of men in foreign lands.

— Albrecht Dürer, on seeing an exhibition of Aztec artifacts sent to Europe by Hernán Cortés.

Some folks have an uncritical admiration for all aspects (not just one medium) of a foreign culture. Often they're only enamored of The Theme Park Version of the given culture, purposefully ignoring all negative points.

This can lead at times to Hype Backlash against, well, an entire country. Also often leads to Pretty Fly for a White Guy on the part of the fan. Also can lead to a Misaimed Fandom if the fan misunderstands crucial aspects of the culture. Common targets include Japan (mostly on the internet), France (among intellectuals and gourmets) and Rome (historically). In real life this phenomenon is called xenophilia, which is a whole other trope in fiction, usually. Often accompanied by Cultural Cringe. Leaders may hire a Cadre of Foreign Bodyguards.

No Real Life Examples on the personal level, please. Cultural or country level examples are fine.

A sub-trope of Cultural Rebel. Compare Pretty Fly for a White Guy, Germans Love David Hasselhoff, Occidental Otaku, and Cultural Personality Makeover. Contrast Creator Provincialism and Cultural Posturing. Might overlap with Cyclic National Fascination. See also Race Fetish, where this sort of thing gets a bit more...personal. Not to be confused with Foreign Fanservice.

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Examples:

• Real Life

Anime & Manga

• Nadeshiko "Naddy" Yamato from The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You claims to be from America when first introduced, but it's quickly revealed that she's actually Japanese. Her strict and traditional parents raised her to be a Yamato Nadeshiko, but she absolutely hated it. When she found an American movie and saw how much freedom American children were allowed in it, she became obsessed with American culture and started defining her entire identity around it.
• Bleach: Chojiro Sasakibe is a Japanese man obsessed with Western culture, mostly England. For example, he prefers English style tea to Japanese style tea, and his Shikai makes his Zanpakuto change from a katana to a rapier. It's one of the things he's always at odds with Commander Yamamoto about.
• Blend-S:
  • Main character Maika Sakuranomiya is obsessed with anything that isn't Japanese, to the point where her first childhood crush was...Colonel Sanders of all people. This motivates her to find a job at Stile in the first place—she wants the money to study abroad. This likely has something to do with the fact that she comes from a very traditionally Japanese family.
  • Her manager, the Italian Dino, also holds this towards Japan, hence him moving there in the first place.
• Daltanious: Six-year-old Ochame loves animals and has always wanted to see different species of them. To her delight, Kento promises to take her to Africa^note Daltanious runs on Africa Is a Country, so she can visit their exotic zoos and see all of Africa's unique wildlife.
• Kiniro Mosaic: The two leads, Alice and Shinobu, both have a fetish for each other's cultures, which ties into their friendship. Shinobu did a homestay at Alice's home in Britain because she loves Western culture so much, and Alice then moves to Japan both to be with Shinobu and experience Japanese culture. The main difference between them is that Alice studied Japanese so much that she can speak the language fluently and knows more about the culture than many real Japanese people, whereas Shinobu can only say "hello" and nothing else and has only superficial knowledge about the English culture despite having lived in the United Kingdom for a while.
• It goes both ways for many of the characters in Lapis Re:LiGHTs. Characters from the West Europe-inspired Waleland and Dortdgard are enamored with the culture of the Japan-inspired Yamato and many transfer students from Yamato are just as taken with theirs.
• Mischievous Twins: The Tales of St. Clare's: Colin is British, but adores Native American culture so much he dresses up as an Indian, feather hat and all, and starts playing rambunctiously. He then climbs the school roof and begins crying because he's scared of heights until a teacher brings him down.
• The Story of Pollyanna, Girl of Love: John Pendleton is an American who traveled all over the world when he was young, and his mansion contains many works of art/trinkets from the countries he visited.
• One Raideen episode has Akira win a race on his Cool Bike. Mari suggests he use the prize money to buy a castle in Sweden, where the two can live together.
• Furinkan High School's Principal Kunō of Ranma ½ has gone native after a three-year vacation in Hawaii. Since then, he's since always wearing gaudy Hawaiian Shirts, playing the Ukulele, sporting a miniature palm tree atop his hair, and peppering his Japanese speech with English and Hawaiian terms. He also decorates his office with all sorts of Hawaiian knick-knack and even recreates a fake Hawaiian beach somewhere under the school. He's a weirdo all-around, although this Hawaiian fetish is hardly the worst thing about him — the coconuts and pineapples he throws around are explosives, for starters.
• Superman Vs. Meshi: Superman gains an obsession with Japanese food after eating at a Japanese restauarant once, and many times, declares his love for Japan as a country. Later, he takes Batman to the Futotoya restaurant, and Batman likse the good there so much he decides to open up a branch of it in Gotham.

Comic Books

• In Lucifer, the demons developed a vogue for 18th-19th century England and were extremely pleased to have a soul from that era teach them how to best immerse themselves in it. It's implied that this obsessing over other cultures is pretty much all that the high ranking demons do anymore.
• Asterix:
  • The Gaulic chief Aplusbégalix (Cassius Ceramix in English) has this for the Roman empire. Even if it makes no sense. "We'll build an aqueduct even if we don't need one, because it's ROMAN!" The Roman Big Bad even jokes that if all Gauls were like him it's the Romans who would look Gaulic. Also note how everything in his home is a cobbled mix of Roman and barbarian elements.
  • The same comic starts with a panel where a young Gaulic man gets his hair cut Roman style, while an older, long-haired Gaul looks on disapprovingly. Just like an old square from The '50s or The '60s would when meeting a hippie (alternatively, a member of La Résistance seeing a collaborator).
• Under Frank Miller's pen, The Kingpin has shown an interest in Japanese culture. This was carried over to Spider-Man (PS4).
• New Super-Man explores this. The reason Kenan becomes Superman, and why Western-style superheroes (as well as supervillains) are said to be on the rise in China, while Ahn Kwang-Jo has a predilection for a cartoon about a family with yellow skin - and no, we're not talking about racist asian caricatures. He has to resort to illegal means to watch it in his home country, though.

  "The s-son is always telling his father, "Don't have a cow, man!"

• The Land Lovers were a group of Atlantean teens in 90s Aquaman who were fascinated with surface world culture; they comprised Sheeva the mermaid, Blubber the whale, and Breakout Character Lagoon Boy.

Fan Works

• In Chrysalis Visits The Hague, as per the general Fanon consensus, Lyra Heartstrings is borderline-obsessed with the human world (and has been even since before its in-story discovery).
• In Queen of All Oni, Filler Villain Anton Mortimer is obsessed with Asian culture, to the point he's basically a dark parody of an Otaku.
• This can happen to fanfic authors too. A.A. Pessimal realised, after a character only ever intended to be a one-off take on white South Africans took off and took on a life of her own, that he'd better stop winging it, and do some bloody research about South Africa so as to get it halfway right. Word of God is that the author now finds the place and its history and culture to be so bloody fascinating and attractive that he even started formally learning Afrikaans. And in more recent tales, a Discworld take on Russia, based on bare bones in canon, is emerging. The author points out that at least this time he actually studied a bit of Russian in school. And he is finding Russian culture and language every bit as absorbing as he does Southern African.

Films — Live-Action

• In Another Time, Another Place, Janie falls in the love with the new and exciting culture that the Italian POWs bring to her austere village.
• Barbarella: Dildano is a Sogoite who believes that My Species Doth Protest Too Much. He thinks of Earth as the "planet revolutions" and is very admiring of its culture (this being set in the far future where Earth has become ultra-pacifistic). His attempt at a revolution in Sogo is inspired by Earth history and he enjoys partaking in other aspects of the culture, while deriding his own as savage.
• The Last King of Scotland gets its name from its subject Idi Amin's real-life love of Scottish culture. "The Last King of Scotland" is a real title Amin gave himself. Conversely, he specifically despises English culture, so his affinity may also have something to do with seeing both Uganda and Scotland as rebels to the British state. When first meeting Nicholas, he immediately befriends him on the basis that he's a Scot, although he adds that redheaded women are ugly to him and other Africans.
• Django Unchained has Candie, who has one for the French. Strangely, it only extends to being called Monsieur Candie and naming a slave after a character from The Three Musketeers, he can't speak or understand French. When Schultz has to tell him that Alexandre Dumas was black (by the standards back then, having a black grandfather was enough), it's enough to stun him into silence.
• Mr. Devlin in Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred who suspected by Fred to be a vampire and probably have a thing for Transylvania. The truth is this is just a misunderstanding and Devlin is into Korean culture instead. He later teaches Fred about bulgogi and kimchi and keeps an East Asian armor in his house.
• Leroy Green in The Last Dragon is an African-American man who displays a lot more interest in Chinese culture than just learning Kung Fu, so much so that he almost feels like a foreigner in his own hometown, to the amusement/irritation of his brother. This results in an interesting contrast with the Big Bad, who has a similar fixation on Japanese culture and styles himself after the Samurai of old. Also humorously flipped around later in the movie when Leroy meets a couple of actual Chinese people who dress and act like stereotypical black teens, complete with nigh-indecipherable Jive Turkey slang.
• The character John Connor spends a good deal of the film Rising Sun pontificating about how effective and powerful Japanese culture is. Ironically, the point of this was not to compliment Japan but to warn American readers of the threat the nation posed to 1990s America.
• Rob Lowe's character in Thank You for Smoking loves Japanese decorations; he has a koi pond, a rock garden, Japanese art, and wears a kimono in his off-time.
• Played for Laughs in Balls of Fury where the hero Randy Daytona is asked by the FBI to help them take down the reclusive Chinese crime lord Feng, who turns out to be the very white Christopher Walken living it up as a Fu Manchu style supervillain, and even more hilariously it is mostly uncommented on.
• In Mario (1984), Simon is deeply obsessed with all things Arabic. He dresses his little brother Mario up like a sheik, plays elaborate Alternate History games in which the Arabs conquer all of Europe, and even leads the neighborhood kids in a prayer to Allah despite the fact that they live in a Catholic area.
• In Quigley Down Under, Marston, an Australian cattle baron, is obsessed with The Wild West of America, collecting cowboy memorabilia and fancying himself The Gunslinger. This eventually comes back to bite him when Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs and, as Quigley tells him, "This ain't Dodge City, and you ain't Bill Hickock."
• Rush Hour: The Chinese consul Han's daughter, Soo-Yung, is kidnapped by Hong Kong crime lord Juntao as revenge for having his collection of ancient Chinese artifacts seized. Towards the end, we find out that Juntao is really Thomas Griffin, a British diplomat and Han's close friend, who talks about how he spent years amassing the collection.
• The Bride of Kill Bill has a definite obsession with Japanese culture. Speaking the language and extoling the "Exquisite art of the Samurai sword" despite being white as sour cream.
• Ten Little Mistresses: One of the younger mistresses, Moon Young, styles herself as South Korean and even sprinkles Korean words in her dialogue. When Coco asks if she is of Korean descent, Moon Young admits she just does it for fun.

Literature

• Cat Planet Cuties: The series as a whole is massively pro-American, both in pop culture references and story structure, on account of the author being a giant westaboo. In the anime adaptation, nearly every episode's Cold Open is a parody of a famous western series, and all the main characters' restaurant of choice is A&W "All American Food©". To put this into perspective, when was the last time any of you American readers even saw an A&W?
• Rias Gremory of High School D×D is very fascinated by Japanese culture, to the point that she has several Japanese artifacts in her bedroom. Having a Japanese boyfriend might count too.
• In the historical novel A Gathering of Days, the main character doesn't want to call her stepmother Ann "Mother", so she settles on "Mamann". The stepmother approves, saying something like "we can say it is after the French, and therefore the height of fashion."
• Tinker: Windwolf is fascinated by human cultures, which is one of the reasons why he's the highest-ranking elf who deals with the humans on a regular basis, as Viceroy of the Westernlands.
• The Western Monk from Cultivation Chat Group, who is obsessed with Chinese martial arts and Buddhism. Unusually for this trope, he's portrayed positively; he manages top cultivate a powerful aura of virtue (which requires significant dedication to ferrying the souls of the deceased), and Shuhang notes with annoyance that despite being a foreigner the Western Monk's Chinese is even better than his.
• Shanti Shruti (born as Amanda Weed in Skokie, Illinois) in The Poison Apples loves India and everything and anything related to it. Much more than her husband, who is actually from India, or her step-kids, who have Indian heritage. She studied in India, became a yoga teacher, changed her name to an Indian name, had a big Indian wedding even though her husband was ambivalent about it, wears a bright pink sari as casual everyday wear and decorates her entire house with Indian decorations.
• Discworld:
  • Lord Hong, Big Bad and grand vizier of the Agatean Empire in Interesting Times, is fascinated with Ankh-Morpork, as he sees its culture as more dynamic and adaptable than his own country's. He plans to take it over, and to this end, has an authentic Ankh-Morpork nobleman's costume made, which he likes to try on and admire in the mirror when no one's around. He thinks it would help show the locals who their natural leader is. It doesn't occur to him that the Morporkian masses would look at someone dressed like that and see an insufferable toff they'd like to heave half a brick at, just like it doesn't occur to him to understand the mindset of Agatean peasants.
  • In Thud!, the dwarfs and trolls at Mr Shine's Thud Society tend to become this for each other's cultures, due to the way the board game encourages you to see both sides. So you see dwarfs carrying clubs, and trolls with battle bread and iron helmets. One troll player hopes to learn from the greatest dwarfish Thudmeisters, who Mr Shine says will "teach him how to play like a troll". Since the more usual interaction between dwarfs and trolls is all-out war, this is presented as unambigiously a good thing.
  • Human fetishisation of dwarf culture, especially in the spin-off material, is generally presented as a bit silly — there are in fact rituals a human can do to join dwarf culture, but it's strongly implied that the sort of people who go to restaurants with stone-effect wallpaper and human food shaped to look like rats haven't done this.
• Under Heaven: Nearly everyone in Kitai would Squee over Sardian horses; some of it has to do with the fact that local horses (including from the 'barbaric' North) are, relatively, ill-fed shaggy-haired ponies. (Local conditions do have something to do with the differences.) Also, there are certain foreign women that would command high prices in the brothels precisely because they are foreign; they don't even have to confirm to the standards of knowing current poetry, and the latest musical forms.
• In the Doctor Who New Adventures novel Original Sin, many humans in the Earth Empire have an alien culture fetish, ranging from collecting model spaceships to extreme body modification to look alien. The Doctor darkly notes that this has no effect on the Empire's Fantastic Racism regarding the aliens themselves.
• The Witch of Knightcharm: Starlyght is introduced telling Chosovi, who is implied to be Native American, how much she enjoys talking to members of 'enlightened' peoples. It's made clear that she fetishizes all sorts of indingeous cultures, though it's also clear she doesn't really know anything about the spiritual traditions she's appropriating.
• In Karneval in Köln, the Sicilian main character gets a lucky break when he is hired to house- and pet-sit for a couple who are absolutely gaga about Sicily. (It's a lucky break for them, too, because they adopted their dog in Sicily and he only responds to Italian-language commands.)
• The Pianist For Syria: Aeham is put off by Middle Eastern music but loves European style musicians like Beethoven, Mozart and Lizst. One day he refuses to play Arabic music in class and is sent to the Principal's office while his dad is called. His dad insists Aeham is in the wrong and he has a duty to play Arabic music, but on the way home he tells Aeham to follow his heart, but try not to piss off the teachers.

Live-Action TV

• Atlanta: When Earn and Van visits one of her old school friends in a Juneteenth-themed party, they meet the woman's husband, a rich white man who loves and praises African-American culture. Even all of the couple's friends are prominent and rich black people. Earn later points out that the reason he's able to travel to Africa and immerse himself in its culture is because he's so rich, an opportunity not afforded to him, an African-American himself.
• Daniel LaRusso in Cobra Kai has a strong affection for Japanese culture, owing to the influence of his Okinawan sensei and surrogate father, Mr. Miyagi. He gives away a free bonsai tree with each sale of a vehicle at his business, and meticulously makes sashimi for special occasions. It even gets in a Take That!, as Daniel gets criticized online for cultural appropriation.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Doctor appears to have a massive thing about 19^th/20^th century British culture, always using a British accent of some kind (generally Received Pronunciation but they've been Scottish, Cockney, Manc and posh-Scouse in some incarnations) and usually dressing in a combination of 19^th/early 20^th and late 20^th fashion ('70s Hair and knitwear over Oscar Wilde Victorian clothes! A 1940s leather jacket over a modern jumper and black jeans! A 1920s-style suit with a Hipster influence! A Nineties-style suit with a 1930s trenchcoat!). They always seem to hang around this era and place, and praise it a lot. Both the Fifth and Eighth Doctors have referred to themselves as either almost-English or honorary-English. Susan displays one too, getting very excited about whatever pop music is in the charts, and mentioning a lot how being in 20^th Century England has been the best time in her life.
  • According to Susan, the First Doctor has a massive thing about The French Revolution, and says it is his favorite period in history. The Doctor takes great pleasure in this story indulging in a bit of Cosplay and roleplaying as locals rather than just being blatantly anachronistic as usual. The Tenth Doctor also inherited this trait, having a bit of a fetish for anything French.
  • The English develop a fetish for Dalek culture in the audio story "Jubilee". Since Daleks are A Nazi by Any Other Name, the Doctor is quite freaked out by this.
  • The Third Doctor seems to particularly like Venusian culture; a master of Venusian lullabies, Venusian hopscotch and Venusian aikido.
  • The Twelfth Doctor visually looks like a much older man than the more recent incarnations that preceded him, and he's as crotchety as that sounds. Only, not like your average old man, because he's usually dressing like an alt high-schooler, with a love of hoodies and generally comfortable but low-contrast dark clothing as much as he loves loud guitars and sunglasses. Basically, a 2010s alt teen in the body of an old man.
• Elementary: The victim of the week in "You Do It To Yourself" is a Trent Annunzio, a white man who was professor of Asian Studies at a local university. As Holmes and Watson investigate it becomes clear that Annunzio's obsession with Chinese culture ran far deeper than an academic interest. In addition to frequently visitng the country he was also a regular at multiple illegal mah-jong parlors and was treating his eye cancer with traditional Chinese herbal remedies. His "wife" is a Chinese woman who is actually an illegal immigrant he was abusing using techniques developed by the Chinese secret police.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): Lampshaded by Grace de Pointe du Lac in "In Throes of Increasing Wonder..." when she reminds her brother Louis that their mother Florence (an African American) "loves European" as a reason why he should invite his French friend Lestat de Lioncourt to their home for dinner.
• Mad Men's Bert Cooper is very much the Orientalist. That is, the old-school version of the Japanese culture fetish; he has shōji partitions and has ukiyo-e prints (including The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife) in his office (which he makes people remove their shoes before entering).
• The Mandalorian: Moff Gideon is an Imperial leader who carried out an ethnic cleansing on the Mandalorians prior to the events of the series and nuked much of their homeworld. Despite this, he shows a keen and rather twisted fascination with their culture that colors much of his own behavior and later schemes, such as giving his troops (and himself) beskar armor and having them emulate Mandalorian fighting styles. He generally is portrayed as something of an especially extreme cultural appropriator, someone who believes that he can "harvest" Mandalorian traditions and assimilate them into the Imperial Remnant to "improve" upon both the cultural qualities and the Empire. This paradoxically manifests in him showing odd reverence for shallow aspects of Mandalorian culture, yet viewing the actual Mandalorians themselves as barbarians worthy of destruction.
• On My Name Is Earl, one of Catalina's uncles adopted the ways of American Delinquents after seeing them on television. (However, he comes across as Totally Radical, because his TV broke back in The '80s. Curiously, Earl recognizes this, even though he himself comes from Camden, which is a bit of a Retro Universe, itself stuck in that same decade.)
• Georg from Næturvaktin admires anything to do with Sweden and Swedish culture. A new employee from Sweden is one of the few people in the entire series he treats pleasantly or respectfully.
• Dwight Schrute from The Office (US) seems to have a special liking for the culture of India. He can reel off facts about Diwali with fanboy enthusiasm and defends the Bollywood nerds that Kelly is chagrined about her parents wanting her to date. As for Kelly herself, he might be a little attracted but this is outweighed by what he sees as her annoying traits.
• The Other Two: Parodied. White American actress Blake Lively opens a Thai fusion restaurant because she was so enamored with Thailand...after staying there for a layover. It serves spaghetti. The characters are repeatedly assured by staff that the restaurant isn't racist.
• Jeremy Jamm, the resident Jerkass on Parks and Recreation, loves what he calls "Chinese crap", i.e. random things from every East Asian culture put together with no awareness of what they are.
• David Rose on Schitt's Creek is a Japanophile. He's talked about his visits to Japan, wears clothes by Japanese high fashion house Commes des Garcons and once purchased a Japanese cologne that was meant to smell like a car crashing into a cedar tree. Also, his father gives him a bag of yen for Christmas, and his best friend Stevie invites him to see the cherry blossoms at the Elm Valley Botanical Gardens. He's very disappointed when he doesn't get to go on the tour, but he consoles himself with drunk karaoke.
• Curzon and Jadzia Dax from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were both enamored of Klingon culture- Curzon is a legend among Klingons and Jadzia married Worf and joined the House of Martok. Ezri Dax, the next incarnation, was less fond of Klingon culture (she retches at the sight of gagh), and cast a much more critical eye on the Empire, pointing out the vast amounts of hypocrisy and corruption among a people that claimed to be "honorable".

Music

• Kate Bush's song "Egypt" is narrated by a person obsessed with a surface-level image of Egypt, which they've never been to, based on romanticized depictions of it in western media. According to Bush, the aggressive tone of the instrumental breaks is meant to contrast these wistful lyrics by representing the un-glamorous reality of the country, describing the juxtaposition of the two as an allegory for "how blindly we see some things."
• The Lonely Island's song "Ras Trent" is from a white Ivy League student who sings about his love Jamaican culture in a thick Caucasian accent.
• Taylor Swift: In "London Boy," after falling in love with the titular boy, the (American) narrator loves everything English.
  And now I love high tea, stories from Uni, and the West End
  You can find me in the pub, we are watching rugby with his school friends
  Show me a gray sky, a rainy cab ride
  Babes, don't threaten me with a good time
  They say home is where the heart is
  But God, I love the English

Theatre

• From the Gilbert and Sullivan operas:
  • In The Mikado, the roster of "...society offenders who might well be underground, and who never would be missed" in Ko-ko's "little list" song includes "... the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,/All centuries but this and every country but his own."
  • In Patience, Bunthorne confesses that "I do not long for all one sees/That's Japanese" as part of a greater confession that his devotion to the Aesthetic movement is mere affectation "born of a morbid love of admiration".
  • In Utopia, Limited, the uncritical adoption of British ways by its colonies is one of the two main targets ^note the other being the concept of limited liability for corporations of Gilbert's satire.

Video Games

• Mass Effect: Andromeda: squadmate Cora Harper is majorly into asari culture, stemming from the time she spent training with asari commandos back in the Milky Way. Ironically, the actual asari on the team, Peebee, disdains her own culture and tries to acknowledge it as little as possible. This causes some friction between the two.
• The World Next Door: Jun, the protagonist, is a massive fangirl of the magical world of Emrys. As a result, she's thrilled when she wins a lottery allowing her to visit it during the time when a portal opens between Earth and Emrys, and dialogue choices can really play up how much she geeks out over Emrys's culture and magic.
• Seiyo Akanisshi in Yandere Simulator is obsessed with all things western and prepares miniature hamburgers for the Cooking Club.
• Scratches: James Blackwood had an entire room in his mansion set up as a gallery for all things African culture. His interest turned out to make things worse when he brought a cursed mask belonging to a cannibalistic South African tribe.
• The New Order Last Days Of Europe: The Aryan Brotherhood in Russia is fascinated with Nazi Germany and convinced Russia must become culturally Aryan to survive. This extends to espousing Nazi ideals themselves even though as Russians they would be considered untermensch within the Nazi racial hierarchy.
• Jagged Alliance: "Tex" Colburn is a mercenary who insists on dressing like a cowboy, referring to enemy soldiers as "Rustlers!" and taking to the field with a single-action revolver in every hand. All of this would be weird enough, but on top of his aggressive Texanism, he's actually Japanese.

Visual Novels

• In Strawberry Vinegar, Licia's mother loves Japan, to the point where she cosplays around the house and has a bonsai tree in their garden.
  Licia: It keeps dying, though, since the air in Hell is filled with sulfur.
• Kinzo Ushiromiya from Umineko: When They Cry has a fetish for western cultures in general (though he seems to like Italy and Germany in particular), being obsessed with the western occult, building himself a western-style mansion to live in and giving his children and grandchildren western names transliterated from kanji. His flashback in EP 7 shows that he was fond of foreign literature as well.
• In the It Lives series, Tom Sato (who is Japanese) mentions at one point that his first girlfriend called him Sempai. (He wasn't a fan.)
• Ace Attorney:
  • In the original Japanese script of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, the Zaimon brothers (renamed the Marshalls in the dub) are a pair of Japanese police officers who dress and act like American cowboys.
  • Conversely, in the English version of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies, prosecutor Simon Blackquill is a Westerner (possibly British given his accent and occasional vernacular) man who styles himself as a samurai and frequently uses Japanese Honorifics in his speech. His mentor Metis Cykes similarly dressed in a kimono and kept a collection of Japanese artifacts in her lab — including the katana that was used to kill her.

Web Animation

• The Teen Girl Squad spinoff "4 Gregs" has Japanese Culture Greg.

Web Comics

• Something*Positive:
  • One of the characteristics of the strip's catgirls is that they know virtually nothing about Japanese culture, but are obsessed with it anyway.
  • Mentioned by one of the characters after she scared off some guy with a Calling Your Attacks moment: she says adding "Ancient Secret Chinese technique" will scare opponents off much more effectively, adding "White people are so much fun" or words to that effect.
  • There's a strip where PeeJee and Aubrey (both Asian) mock Gwen Stefani's pop adoption of Japanese memetics, complete with having four "Harajuku girls" who follow her around and aren't ever referred to by their real names. PeeJee suggests the girls are likely "tutoring" Stefani in Japanese — "Seeing a withered little pop star trying to order sushi in Japanese and instead telling the waiter about her intense venereal disease would be better than any Christmas bonus I've ever received."

Web Original

• Urban Dictionary: The term "Sabaton Effect" (named for the Swedish metal band known for its detailed songs about military history) is defined as feeling Patriotic Fervor for countries one is not actually from, due to learning about dramatic moments in their history from pop history works.

Web Videos

• Regular Car Reviews: A car review show featuring two guys from Pennsylvania, Brian "Mr. Regular" Reider and Nick "The Roman" Roman. Mr. Regular likes stuff from Australia and New Zealand (especially New Zealand, after Season 20, in which they traveled to NZ to do car reviews). This includes both automobiles (he has a solid respect for Holden and Ford Australia) and slang. He particularly likes the word "bogan", and even described the Subaru WRX STI as a "cashed-up bogan" of a car in the BMW 335i review. He is also fond of the Aussie car-culture term "hoon" (for ostentatiously reckless joyriding); though that word had already caught on in some corners of American car culture, he seems to use it in practically every video involving a cheap, high-powered or tight-handling car since the first trip to NZ. (The Roman, for his part, likes one Australian in particular.)

Western Animation

• Deepak from 101 Dalmatian Street is a dalmatian with a deep admiration for cats. He tries to emulate them to the point where he coughs up a fur ball at one point.
• Code Lyoko: Ulrich has an interest in Japanese culture, and even acknowledges a few customs for Yumi's sake.
• The Legend of Korra:
  • Empowered Badass Normal Visionary Villain Zaheer's fascination with Air Nomad culture has led part of the fandom to label him a "weeablew." His fascination with it is what blows (if you’ll pardon the pun) his cover when he tries to infiltrate Air Temple Island. Kya quickly realizes that he’s a bit too knowledgeable (after he breaks into her brother’s study) to be some random guy.
  • The Air Acolytes are non-benders who took up the Air Nomad culture under the leadership of Avatar Aang. A few of them appear to worship the ground that Tenzin and his family walk on. After Harmonic Convergence happened, at least one of them became an actual airbender. Let's just say that he was extremely enthusiastic about it.
• In Lilo & Stitch and Lilo & Stitch: The Series, Pleakley is the one non-Earthling who's a fan of Earth and had studied it extensively, though he was never able to visit it until the events of the movie. While he gets a lot of details wrong because he was only able to infer through distant observation, he is still a trusted authority because he at least knows more about Earth, by a long shot, than any of his colleagues.
• Star Wars Rebels: Grand Admiral Thrawn is Wicked Cultured in general and frequently studies the artistic output of enemies to get in their head, but he shows a particular fascination with Twi'lek culture that seems more than strictly professional. An Imperial officer badmouthing Twi'lek art nearly gets decked for it by Thrawn in an entirely uncharacteristic display of anger, and he makes sure to steal a family heirloom of Hera's for his private collection, acting morally indignant when Hera says she would rather see it destroyed than in his hands.

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