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?
no subject
Date: 2010-11-18 12:38 am (UTC)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.