Opinion on Stereotypes in Media

I think that the use of stereotypes depends on what exact stereotype people intend to use. Things such as goth or prep personalities/aesthetic are completely harmless, where racist stereotypes and caricatures are certainly more on the “do not do this” scale. When it comes to race and sexuality stereotypes, I believe that it’s something that content creators need to very much leave behind. A straight person cannot joke about homophobic things and someone who is not Black cannot have stereotypes that are not offensive when they make a Black character with even the slightest bit of negative stereotype applied.

Overwatch, a game that I greatly enjoy, has so many characters from different cultural backgrounds and identities and it’s one of the reasons I love it so much. When looking at characters like Doomfist and Lucio, they are Black but they do not contain any harmful stereotypes. Unfortunately, audiences can still create stereotypes simply because these characters are Black, such as unappealing and disgusting jokes about them and Asian characters from the game, and applying out-of-character personalities to them. Doomfist, for example, is an intelligent villain yet some players perceive his grunting as “too aggressive and scary” and his debut came with many racist comments based on Black stereotypes and his accent, but of course he would have one being from a fictional city in Africa. Lucio is from Brazil, yet because he's Black people are quick to make jokes about him being from Africa. Hanzo and Genji, Japanese brothers, on the other hand, are frequently made by some people to be a submissive, feminine, and “exotic” people… although it is far from their characters and nothing in their appearance suggests this. Hell, I've even seen people literally do art of Hanzo and Genji with yellow skin, another racist depiction. Anytime regular aspects of a non-white culture are displayed by the diverse range of any Overwatch character, they are made into jokes and their accents are frequently poorly imitated by white people, who see it as something funny. Because the gamer fanbase has grown up with many of the stereotypes as jokes, to me it seems like all they know. They think it’s acceptable and content creators must revert this to end harmful stereotypes.

[Doomfist, Lucio, Hanzo, and Genji (and him before he was a cyborg) for visual aid... see? They're simply characters whose designs show that they're inspired by the cultures they're from.... yet some fans of the game.......]

As someone who is a dark-skinned Asian and is numerously told that Filipinos are “not true Asians” and that “The Philippines is an island, you’re not Asian you’re a Pacific Islander” (in retaliation to that…. Japan is also an island but you don’t see anyone saying they’re not Asian), I think that the portrayals of Asians and the belief that they are all light skinned is very harmful to those who have darker skin. Whenever I get my hair cut, my mother and relatives always fawn over how pretty I look because the haircut “makes me look Korean”, and I’ve been very uncomfortable with those comments. In the Philippines, there are many products that are advertised as skin bleaching/whitening and I doubt that they even work. My cousin recently had a baby and all of my relatives were excitedly talking about how they were going to start the baby girl with skin whitening products right away. Darker skin is seen as ugly and it’s a terrible thing for people to view it as such. My dad’s skin is darker than mine and another Filipino woman had assumed that I was half Black because she assumed that my dad was Black. Of course, this could be an embarrassing and harmless misconception, but she said it with the assumption that my dad was a bad person.

Asian countries, from my knowledge, do not have much first hand experience with people of other ethnicities. All they know come from news reports and fictional media… which tend to portray Latinx and Black people as evil. The misconceptions they have towards real people stem from harmful stereotypes that Western media has chosen to portray, and I believe that it’s something that really needs to stop. There’s actually a video of Koreans being interviewed on how Black Panther has been changing their perception of Black people, so at least things are beginning to change.