okay, I think I need some advice.

[lotesse]

I seem to be writing a Fullmetal Alchemist/Sherlock Holmes fusion with Holmes as an alchemist. And I'm having huge amounts of fun with it, but I need to figure out how not to make it a whitewash.



It's not a problem for Holmes and Watson to still be phenotypically western, because the manga contains plenty of blond, blue-eyed characters. But Amestris is also populated by Japanese-analogue characters, and the culture is a mix - signs are frequently drawn in English, but there are enough untranslatable jokes and characterization points based on things like suffixes that I think it's clear that they're also really speaking Japanese - that Japanese isn't being used to translate western characters for a Japanese audience, but that Amestrian culture is really an east-west smush.

So how do I represent that? If I'm going to leave Holmes and Watson white, I figure I've got to populate the spaces around them with a properly mixed culture in order to avoid a complete whitewashing of the source. But I can't refer to them as Japanese, or at least I don't think I can - because in this verse they're all Amestrians, with no differentiation between east and west. Can I describe characters' faces?

Also, language. Better or worse to do the fangirl-Japanese thing of using suffixes and titles interspersed with English dialogue? I think I could pull that off, although I am a bit leery of my abilities wrt appropriate suffixes.

Advice plz?

Comments

[schemingreader]

Do Holmes and Watson have to be white? busaikko has several Harry Potter stories in which characters whose ethnicity was never specified (and who we therefore expect to be white and British) are from Brazil or Japan or...wherever. The way she did this was by making them POC in Britain, which means knowing something about that minority experience. Or you could make Holmes Japanese, but that means knowing enough about Meiji period Japan to figure out who Japanese!Holmes was.

Well, except that he's in the Full Metal Alchemist parallel universe, which I don't know much about, and maybe Holmes has to be, whatever--Ametrisian?

[lotesse]

I absolutely could POC the entire thing,but as this isn't really issue!fic and the world contains obviously coded western characters ... I guess I'm trying to figure out if I can do this without it being issue!fic, or if that's going to be a bridge too far. Because honestly - I'm not the girl who ought to write that story. I simply don't know enough to pull it off.

[ponderosa]

You could never explicitly mention race, not use suffixes, and simply get the idea of the multicultural blend of Amestris across primarily in how they act. Tea services could reflect more of a Japanese ideal than the British for example. That, or depending on if you're writing anime or manga verse you could bring up non-Amestrian lineage and discuss that say surnames or given names are uncommon or minority.

Really though, I'd argue that Amestria is very western, only it's western as viewed through the Japanese cultural lens, as many characters in anime/manga are and that's where the east-west smush comes in. The untranslatable jokes/status via suffixes are there for the intended audience versus an explicit statement of race. In general I find suffixes to be pretty awkward unless the setting or the status relationships are hardcore integral. I could more easily digest suffixes for Al to Ed, but I'd have a harder time with say Riza to Roy where more polite dialogue or a 'sir' would suffice.

And now I feel like I have yammered on way too much.

[lotesse]

No, thanks for the yammering! I absolutely know what you mean about suffixes, which is why I was hesitating about them in the first place - I just feel like I have to find a way to express that lens-ness of Amestris, and since I'm a western brat myself the whole thing is very through a glass darkly if you know what I mean!

question: it's a fusion rather than a crossover, so no canon Hagaren characters appear. Would suffixing feel more or less wrong applied to, idk, alchemist!Sherlock Holmes?

[ponderosa]

Personally I'd still find suffixes awkward, but then it's a pretty rare instance where I don't find them awkward. Prince of Tennis or Japanese school settings where status and addressing others is pretty integral, but then that's set in Japan itself.

I've read a lot of very good fusion fic for FMA, although most of it blended other anime/manga sources which in some ways eliminates the issues you're bumping up against. Figure that if you were really going to go for getting some of the native cultural things across that some of the most noticeable are also some of the most problematic, particularly with gender roles.

Amusingly, I was cosplaying Roy Mustang when I was told by a person from Japan that they liked it more when they visit US conventions and saw cosplayers since they 'looked more like the characters should' than Japanese cosplayers. Snerk.