Asian in a Black nerd space
Spiderverse, Peni Parker; and when it’s not your fandom and you’re a guest to that space
- There are spoilers in this Medium article of the Spiderverse movie.
I went to go see Spiderman, into the spiderverse a couple nights ago. Overall it was very nice. I had seen people on my twitter timeline singing praises about it, about how it was animated beautifully, how it was colored beautifully, how it really captured the look and feel that comic books white people make, and how it was nice that the movie — though animated — was intended for teens rather than elementary school aged kids.
I love cartoons and I want to love movies.
Many people were praising the movie for featuring a Black teen lead, so I went in expecting that this would be a film about being Black and Latino while also going on a grand adventure as a superhero. To my surprise though — Peni Parker.
Peni Parker is an alternate universe spiderman who is a young teen girl from the future who rides a spider-like robot. She is one of five alternate universe spidermans that are featured in this film as a sidekick to Miles Morales — the hero of the story and the spiderman of the universe the viewer starts in.
I watched in awe as Peni Parker revealed how much of a walking race stereotype of a Japanese teen she actually was. I was stunned at how awful and annoying her character was portrayed in contrast to the two white characters, Gwen and Peter B. Parker.
Believe it or not, my new years resolution this year is to be more chill about stuff like this when it happens. I wanted to spend less time on things I didn’t enjoy; and hopefully, as a result, spend more time on the things that I did enjoy. It felt unfair to myself to spend so much time focusing on problems I didn’t create nor were being paid money to solve.
When the movie ended and I got home, I felt very conflicted on what I should do, but old habits die hard, and I took to twitter to see what people thought of how I felt about Peni Parker as a character, followed up by another thread on how orientalism affects what white writers write. This took up the rest of my night and a few hours of my morning the next day ; Time I could have spent on things I actually enjoy if Peni Parker had not been a racist caricature.
Since a few years ago, I had been shifting my media habits to have more voices of color in my daily media habits, especially more Black voices. It may had been that if I hadn’t shifted my media habits and proactively followed more people of color that I might not have heard of the Spiderverse movie, since I’m not a fan of spiderman: I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it. I knew I heard about this movie because I saw people on the timeline excited about a Black teen character, and from seeing retweets that praised Spiderverse from twitter accounts operated by Black people. I didn’t want to go after things a lot of Black people like, because I felt this is a form of overpolicing. There are lots of other things to analyze in the media instead.
I don’t live in the Spiderman fan club, but sometimes I visit as a guest. After writing the two threads, and reading what other people thought, I felt even more like a guest to this fandom and not actually in this fandom. As an outsider to the fandom, I wondered if it was even my place to bring attention to the orientalism in this movie at all. Also I wanted to be chill this year. And I was not the one who was excited to finally see a Black teen Latino hero in a superhero movie — This wasn’t something I had been wishing to see as much as I had hoped to see a kpop group hit it big in the US one day as a Korean American. Or the way I hope for the day an anime movie might get a simutaneous theatre release in the US and Japan.
If the Spiderverse was a party, I’m not the one hosting this party. I’m just a guest at this party. A +1 to another guest who was actually invited. I’m not there to tell the party host how their furniture should be rearranged. I’m there to chill for a polite amount of time, and then to leave.
Whose perspective is the movie in?
One of the tweets I saw mentioned an interesting idea, that the entire movie is in Miles Morales’ perspective. In that the way every character looks is through Miles’ eyes. So it’s not how those characters actually look and feel, but rather Miles’ understanding or observation of what those characters appear to be to him — and how they feel to him.
I tweeted about the film with the assumption that the writers of the movie must be white, the director must be white, and the company that paid for the movie to be made must be owned by a white person; because I hadn’t seen any people of color tweeting about how they were excited to see a writer or director of color involved in this exciting project. Usually the absence of excitement for the movie staff to me means the staff is white.
But what if the whole movie was about how different people appear to Miles? It would mean that Miles thought that Gwen was beautiful, because that’s how she appeared in the movie. It would mean the pig and the monochrome character looked like moving life-sized cut outs to him rather than like people in the flesh. But what about Peni Parker, who introduces herself as a Japanese American from alternate dimension Brooklyn 500 years in the future?
It would mean that Miles Morales is a weeaboo. That when he sees a Japanese person, he’s not sure if they’re really a person, or a life-like highly-detailed anime fantasy character. It would mean that his exposure to Asian things has been so limited to anime that he’s not sure if East Asians are really people the way he is. It’d mean that he behaves as though he’s not sure if Asia is really a place where a variety of people live (like his own country), or if Japan is an artificial place designed to entertain him like Six Flags or Disneyland.
It’d mean that he behaves as though Japan is the only country in Asia, which is too close to what actually almost happened in history to be a comfortable attitude for Asians to want to hang around him for too long. Otherwise, Peni Parker, a human Asian teen girl, would not appear as an anime character in the movie, if every character’s appearance is from Miles’ perspective. It means that when Miles saw Peni, his mind went straight to “I know Japan! Anime! Sushi! Samurai! Kawaii!” and failed to go a step beyond that to see her as an actual human being the way he saw Gwen and both Peter Parkers as human beings.
Interestingly, while I would object if Miles was white, I’m OK with Miles Morales being a weeaboo because he’s Black. I think Black fans in nerd spaces should have the space to figure out what kind of fans they want to be, at their own pace, the way white anime fans and Asian anime fans have always been able to do. White anime fans don’t start out perfect either. They too sometimes go through a weeaboo phase where they’re toxic to Japanese Americans and other East Asians that look Japanese enough to them. But some of them, over time, figure out they don’t want to be that kind of person, and find a way to be a fan of a TV show that happens to be anime without invading Japanese American spaces, or by taking up roles that should be held by Japanese Americans or at least somebody Asian.
But in the movie, Miles Morales doesn’t show any evidence that he watches any anime. He doesn’t draw anime in his sketchbook. He doesn’t wear anime shirts. He doesn’t listen to anime songs. He doesn’t watch anime in the movie. There are no anime posters on his walls. There is no anime figurines nor manga books on his bookshelf. His friends don’t mention anime to him. He doesn’t seem all that keen on sewing a cosplay (In the movie, he simply buys a one-size-fits-most costume for his actual superhero work), he doesn’t display that he can read Japanese, and he doesn’t have anime buttons on his bookbag. There’s not a single billboard ad for an anime. I’m unsure if anime exists in his world.
If how Peni Parker looks is a statement about Miles Morales, then what it says is that he has a very poor opinion about anime. It means he doesn’t like anime or Peni Parker, and he finds anime and her to be annoying or gimmicky. A cheap trick. A trend. Kind of fake-looking. A knock-off.
I think it’s fine if the Spiderman fandom wants to celebrate this movie. It would be nice if I could — as an Asian woman — join their celebration, their fandom, and to enjoy this party too without stepping on my humanity. But if the spiderman fandom can’t see how Peni Parker is a walking steretype against anime and Japanese-passing girls, or can see it but don’t think it’s important enough to address, then it also means I’m not in this fandom and that I’m not part of their celebration.
I’m OK with this. Not every fandom space needs to be welcoming to me. There are other places for me to go where I’ll feel welcome. I think it’s for the fans of spiderman to be accountable for the content of their own fandom. I am just a guest. And I have my own actual fandom spaces to be accountable in. We can have our separate modest parties instead of one big one.
