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casual instances of controversal character flaws


Eponine

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I know some who would crack you for calling them Native Americans, here they are First Nations. Though Indian is still sometimes used. (If only because they haven't changed the names of a few parts of the government) Of course even worse would be to call an Inuit an Eskimo, you'd get fucked up by a lot of people for doing that.

Canada is a bizarre and mysterious place.

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Exactly. British English is not American English, and Raids, it would be appreciated if you stopped lecturing us on the nuances of a language you don't even speak.

ETA: And enough with the "especially you Brits" bullshit too.

Yeah seriously. And it still remains totally ok to say shit like that about the British 'cause we just sit back and take it, right?

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"Oriental" and "Orientalism" are not directly related concepts. They share a root word is all, like "Nigerian" and "N****r".

Different things are offensive in different places. When my Hong Kong Chinese flatmate emerges from his room, i'll ask him what he thinks.

Edit: He says some people might find it offensive, but he doesn't understand why and it wouldn't bother him.

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Then there are two issues at hand.

1) Issue of the word itself. Surely the fact that many/most/all East Asian Americans find it an offensive term means that if there is a value neutral term available, an author trying to sell books in America should use it. Even if the author thinks it's ridiculous for an ethnic group to have opinions about words used to refer to that ethnic group (...), why be needlessly offensive? At the best, it's a bad commercial decision.

2) The wider issue of the difference between a character's view and the book's view. I don't think that "controversial character flaws", as Ep put it in the OP, should be avoided in protagonists and their cohorts for the sake of avoiding them - but if a character uses "Oriental" in speech because s/he doesn't know or doesn't care that it's an othering term, that's an entirely different matter from the author endorsing it.

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