okay, I think I need some advice.
Nov. 16th, 2010 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI 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?
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?