Pie >> #8643
Posted on 2013-01-10 04:59:43 Score: 0 (vote Up/Down)   (Report as spam)
Unless you just hate Damara down voter...


Meenah get out of here.

Ninety >> #28172
Posted on 2013-06-08 00:33:48 Score: 0 (vote Up/Down)   (Report as spam)
Who could possibly hate Damara?

Ninety >> #28176
Posted on 2013-06-08 01:17:29 Score: 0 (vote Up/Down)   (Report as spam)
...Somebody around here, apparently.

Anonymous >> #28179
Posted on 2013-06-08 03:37:28 Score: 0 (vote Up/Down)   (Report as spam)
i don't like her because she's a racist caricature of asian women

Anonymous >> #28184
Posted on 2013-06-08 03:57:03 Score: 2 (vote Up/Down)   (Report as spam)
Well, sure she is... if you ignore everything about her character. Let's just ignore her motivations, reasons for choosing to act as she is, and the fact that at the point we meet her in the story, she is deliberately caricaturing herself to separate herself from her past image of a cutesy, quiet girl. It's less that she's a dull and racist character and more that she is simply reacting to how society treated her (abandoned by Rufioh, bullied by Meenah, with no one else trying to really branch out and help her) in a manner she sees fit, even if it's a juvenile and harmful manner of reacting. She's a pretty well developed for her short existence.

Anonymous >> #28192
Posted on 2013-06-08 06:12:26 Score: 0 (vote Up/Down)   (Report as spam)
just because she has reams and reams of ~backstory~ doesnt divorce her from the ugly implications of drawing directly upon the "me so horny me rove you rong time" stereotype of asian women. or of belittling the integrity of the japanese language by treating google translate japanese as a "troll quirk" and "weird accent." or how she's behaved patronizingly towards by the human characters because she "looks harmless and docile." this is shit that has real world ramifications for me, as an actualfax asian person who has to deal with people thinking shit like this is funny. her being a sympathetic character doesn't make her not a big fat smelly racist dogturd on the lawn of homestuck that would've been better off not existing.

Primal_Zed >> #28193
Posted on 2013-06-08 06:37:52 Score: 1 (vote Up/Down)   (Report as spam)
So she's terrible because you say so, regardless of how she's actually written?

Using 'fake' Japanese with the obviously wrong google translating reinforces that Damara is fake Japanese. She is very specifically /not/ intended as a representation of actual Japanese or Asian women.

She is entirely not "me so horny" submissive, either before or after she went nuts - if anything her hyper-aggressive attitude is a subversion of that. (I wouldn't even say that's a stereotype, at least not one I'm aware of. The character from Full Metal Jacket was a prostitute; just because she was a Vietnamese prostitute it's suddenly an Asian stereotype?)

I'm not sure what's terrible about the humans thinking she's harmless because they can't understand her and she seems cute - which Damara abuses the hell out of.

I'd say she's handled far better than (for example) Kankri being a unapologetic mockery of 'social justice' advocates, or Rufioh being a caricature of Dante Basco personally.

Anonymous >> #28222
Posted on 2013-06-08 21:07:00 Score: 2 (vote Up/Down)   (Report as spam)
Kinda lost me at "belittling the integrity of the japanese language"

are you serious

epoxy >> #28464
Posted on 2013-06-11 19:27:55 Score: 0 (vote Up/Down)   (Report as spam)
Anon has a point, Damara does invoke a (possibly racial) stereotype, but I think AH knows what he's doing with it: I got the sense he didn't much like the "anime schoolgirl" trope and took the opportunity to have Dams crap all over it. If you assume she fits her image, then she must be innocent, clean, demure and sexually submissive, right? Nope! (Not anymore.) She's sexually aggressive with no apparent dignity, gleefully violent to the point of self-destruction, and probably does all the drugs (all of them). And yet it's implied that being her disgusting psychopathic self gets her more respect than being a cliche ever did.

Of course since she gets almost no lines that aren't garbled filth, she doesn't actually transcend that cliche. But I hope she will because the other reason for invoking a stereotype is to trick people into not taking her seriously (which she does consciously). Remember what we used to say about Gamzee? "Lame. His character is just one joke: juggalo stoners suck. That guy's easily the least important character in Homestuck." I kind of hope a similar prank is in place with Damara and just as we see more of the Empress we might get a peek at the Handmaid too.

Anonymous >> #28465
Posted on 2013-06-11 19:32:20 Score: 0 (vote Up/Down)   (Report as spam)
All the dancestors are potentially really interesting characters with interesting backstories that could but probably will not be fleshed out by canon due to Andrew being pretty much over Homestuck at this point. I guess the dancestors are what you want to make out of them yourself at this point.

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