PJO & HP for Dummies

😍 Asian Representation 😍

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!)