I'll be tackling three requests in one chapter so let's goooo!

Requested by SelcouthSerendipity: "Could you do a discussion on people thinking that Asian representation is solely comprised of East Asian nations? Because people conveniently forget South Asia, South East Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, Indigenous Asia, etc. Truth be told, I'm getting tired of people thinking only China, Taiwan, Japan and the two Koreas exist as Asia and the rest in a limbo."

I'm Filipino so after getting that comment, I related to it and went straight to writing this chapter as fast as possible 😃

(Lol I typed out "fast" even though it took me a couple days to finish this 💀)

So, lately I've been seeing a lot of people make their main characters Asian, and that's great! I love it! But like Selcouth said, most of them are just Chinese, Japanese or Korean. Most of the times, they're Korean though. 

There are other Asian countries aside from the eastern ones, you guys! Filipinos exist! Indians exists! Malaysians exist! The Burmese, Afghans, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Yemen etc etc. They all exist! 

East Asia is not all of Asia. That's why it's called east. That means there's a southeast Asia, south Asia, west Asia, and all that. 

And don't give me the whole, "we don't wanna write about them because we don't know about them well enough and we don't wanna write them wrong 🥺"

I'm pretty sure half of the people writing Asian characters aren't even Asian themselves. If you can write a Korean, Chinese, or Japanese character, then you should have no problem writing an Indian or Burmese one right??? If you did your research on Korean, Japanese, and Chinese culture, then you can easily do the same with these other countries. 

Another thing I noticed is that the characters or the faceclaims being used are almost always fair skinned. I know for non-Asian people, whenever you think of the word Asian, the first thing that comes to mind is a person with light skin thanks to media always favoring them over the dark-skinned ones. 

But dark-skinned Asians do exist. Heck, even Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese people could be dark-skinned too! 😮 I know, shocking. In the TV shows and movies, they're always light skinned, but they don't represent every Korean, Chinese, and Japanese person in the world. 

(I think the whole reason why people use East Asian characters is because of how popular they are in media, the Koreans especially because of kpop and kdramas. People keep seeing them on TV or hearing about them in media which explains why they're such a popular choice for authors to write about or use as faceclaims since they're not shown anything else.)

If you're going to write about an Asian character, trying expanding beyond the typical fair-skinned Chinese/Japanese/Korean OCs! 

Here's some other Asian faceclaims that you can use! 

(I'm also aware that some people prefer using faceclaims with gifs or gif hunts already made and admittedly, some of the people that I'll be listing below don't have many gifs. However, I already have a chapter made titled "How to Make a Gif" so check it out if you're not lazy!)

- Alia Bhatt (German and Indian)

- Sydney Park (African American and Korean)

- Urassaya Sperbund (Norwegian and Thai)

- Vachirawit Chivaaree (Thai, Chinese, and Caucasian)

- Liza Soberano (Filipino, Danish, French, Irish, Scottish, Swiss-German, and Welsh)

- Earth Vangwithayakul (Thai and Danish)

- Simonas Pham (Lithuanian and Vietnamese)

- Pooja Moor (Indian)

- Yara Shahidi (African American, Native Choctaw, and Iranian)

- Christina Nadin (Saudi Arabian, Filipino, and Irish)

- Han Hyun Min (Nigerian and Korean)

- Ariunzul Oyunbaatar (Mongolian) 

- Saana Mirzaie (Kurdish)

- Marcel Fritz (Indonesian)

- Aramis Knight (Indian, Pakistani, and Caucasian)

- Cymphonique Miller (African American and Filipino)

- Way-Ar Sangngern (Thai)

- Jade Thirlwall (Egyptian, Yemeni, and Caucasian)

- Koya Rosado Elliot (Japanese and African American)

- James Reid (Filipino and Caucasian)

Requested by Ihatebananas: "STEREOTYPES STEREOTYPES STEREOTYPES the next chapter should be about that STOP MAKING INDIANS LOKK NERDY AND WEAK WFT ??? DISNEY MADE A MISTAKE AHHHH!!!! So in one of their shows Jessie, there are four siblings (three adopted) and a nanny, two out of those four siblings are boy, both the same age, though one is Indian and the other is American, born in the U.S. So what they did was make the Indian, Ravi, like scrawny, weak, studious, cares more about grades, terrible at sports, stuff like that, while the American boy, flirtatious, popular, great at sports but not so great in his studies, but oh who cares, like people have to stop doing that! Okay, I have and Indian best friend and she's the fastest in our whole grade, and I worry about my grades waaaay more than her. (and the fact that she could probably beat me in any sport)"

OH MY GOD YES PLEASE, THEY'RE TOTALLY RIGHT!

Look, it's common for Asians to be studious because most of us have strict parents who expect a lot from us (I know from experience), but oh my god, you guys please stop making 'nerdy' our only personality trait 💀

The stereotypical Asian characters are so annoying, they never do ANYTHING other than read, study, and do homework. WE ARE SO MUCH MORE THAN THAT. We can be party animals, we can be lazy, we can stupid af, mean, unstable, WE HAVE ACTUAL PERSONALITIES BEYOND OUR ACADEMICS. 

And weak??? Wtf??? Ya'll act as if a majority of the martial arts styles don't come from us 🤨 If it wasn't for us, a bunch of you would only know how to swing your arms around like an idiot and think that qualifies as a 'punch' 😒

Please stop depicting us as weak, especially during these times of Asian hate where we (especially the women) are constantly being fetishized, objectified, hypersexualized and seen as docile, weak targets who can't fight for themselves. 

It's annoying, insulting, and just downright harmful. Those stupid stereotypes are everywhere and not just in literature too, but in TV shows and movies. The Asian guys are always submissive and inferior when compared to men of other race, and the women are depicted as even more submissive in a sexualized manner. 

It's 2021, you guys. You should (hopefully) know better than to use stereotypes in your writing. These stereotypes are fucking racist. Not all Asians are nerdy and weak. Get that through your fucking heads. 

Requested by Ihatebananas: "cud you write a chapter about Native American 'Indians' versus people-hailing-from-India-Indians and give tips on how to differ from them, it's so goddamn annoying, like we were learning about Native Americans and stuff, (I think) I mean someone pointed to my friend said 'she's Indian too!' Like dear lord."

DEAR FUCKING GOD THERE BETTER NOT BE ANYONE ACTUALLY CALLING NATIVE AMERICAN AS "INDIANS" IN THEIR FUCKING BOOK! 

I see this so much in textbooks and it aggravates the SHIT outta me. 

This should be common knowledge now, but I guess not. 

Look, the only reason Native Americans were initially called "Indians" was because stupid fucking genocidal mass-rapist/killer Chr*stopher C*lumbus thought he ended up in INDIA. This absolute piss drinking cunt kept going around bragging about how he finally "found South Asia".  

So when he saw all these people roaming the land, he went "ah, these must be the Indians! What fine slaves they would make!" 

Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, had to go up to this dumb mother fucker and tell him straight up "this isn't India you fucking moron" and then they decided to name the country after him. Woo hoo.

Unfortunately, the term "Indian" still stayed which is evident from the amount of textbooks that are still calling them that 🙄 But that is WRONG, okay??? They're not called Indians, THEY'RE CALLED NATIVE AMERICANS. They're not from fucking India, THEY'RE FROM AMERICA.