Aki Kaurismäki

- Fallen Leaves

2023

Edward Burra (British, 1905-1976), Dr Fu Manchu, 1931. Pencil and watercolour, 24 x 19 1/4 in.

Custom made Manchu hunting knife 🔪🔥💎

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The thing that bugs me about Cazador

Allow me to ramble about a thing that really bugs me about Cazador and his character design.

Let me start out with the fact, that it is super iffy that Cazador is the one recognizable east asian character in the entire game. At least from what I came across. And, you know. It is iffy if you take a minority and make their only representation the "sadistic vampire who wants to sacrifice 7000 mostly white people to become a god". I hope I don't have to explain that.

And yes, technically speaking... yeah, Karlach is technically also East Asian. With just one problem: Her being red-skinned and having the make-up very much hides this fact. Like, I did not realize this until I saw the mod that removed the make-up from the companions.

But outside of the basic issue with the trope... Well, look. I do not think that the folks Larian were like: "Hehe, we will use this character to show how evil the Asians are!" or something like this. But the game very much shows that there was a lot of internalized biases. And be it just in the fact, that we barely come across non-white characters in the entire fucking game. All non-white characters are basically tokens.

And before someone comes in with: "Faerûn is based on medieval Europe!" First off: "Shut up." Second: Going by official DnD Lore Faerûn is a super diverse place, where you will find all sorts of Asian, Arab, and Black people. I mean, just look at the DnD movie, where they made an effort to have half of the cast be non-white. Like, the Faerûn that Larian depicts is basically the Faerûn of 3e, not 5e.

And then... Well, when it comes to Cazador, then there is the Early Access design.

Now, this is actually where WotC stepped in and was like: "Yeah, you cannot do this." Officially by explaining that elves do not have facial hair. But I do imagine that someone at WotC actually looked at this design and was like: "... Do they realize that this is Fu Manchu?"

Because yeah, this design is simply just Fu Manchu. And for those who are not aware: Fu Manchu is a character popular in pulp fiction of the early 20th century, that arose mostly from Yellow Peril stereotypes.

He was a Chinese magician, who was up to all sorts of evil schemes, which suspiciously often involved sacrificing white people (mostly white women) to evil gods or demons. He made appearances in all sorts of media back then, including movies (where he obviously was portrayed by white actors in yellowface) and some off-brand Sherlock Holmes novels that were not written by Doyle but other writers.

Fu Manchu was also what the original Mandarin in the Marvel Comics was based on.

This is one of the Renditions of Fu Manchu in one of those off-brand Sherlock Holmes stories.

And here is the earlier Mandarin design:

And, like, I am sorry. But that stuff leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Again, I do not really think that this stuff was done on purpose. My best guess is, that Cazador was either based on the Mandarin, or on some of the other "Chinese Magician" villains that some American Kung Fu movies put into their media in the 70s and 80s.

But I also think there was nobody at Larian who did any sort of sensitivity consulting when it came to the inclusion of non-white characters.

Sax Rohmer The Mask of Fu Manchu First Edition (Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1932)

Illustrations by John Richard

Get yourself someone who looks at you like Johnny Boy over here looks at his wife Christine.

Psychedelic Doom map

The Mask of Fu Manchu will be released on Blu-ray on May 7 via Warner Archive. Based on Sax Rohmer's 1932 novel of the same name, the 1932 horror film stars genre legend Boris Karloff as Fu Manchu.

Charles Brabin directs from a script by Edgar Allan Woolf (The Wizard of Oz), Irene Kuhn, and John Willard (The Cat and the Canary). Lewis Stone, Karen Morley, Charles Starrett, Myrna Loy, and Jean Hersholt round out the cast.

The Mask of Fu Manchu has been newly restored uncut in 4K from the best preservation elements available. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio commentary by film historian Greg Mank

Freddy the Freshman - 1932 cartoon short

The Queen Was in the Parlor - 1932 cartoon short

The diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu (Boris Karloff) patiently awaits the discovery of Genghis Khan's tomb. For he is certain that possession of Khan's mask and sword will enable him to rule the East and lead it to victory over the hated Western world. When British scientists in the Gobi Desert discover the tomb, Fu captures and tortures them in his elaborate Torture Garden, hoping they will take him to the treasure he craves. But an unexpected traitor has other plans for the doctor.

Pre-order The Mask of Fu Manchu.

The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (Rowland V. Lee, 1929).

(1979)

May 1971. Neal Adams cover for the first appearance of Talia, today called (deplorably) Talia al Ghul. (Adams did not do the interior art for the cover story, which is by Bob Brown and Dick Giordano.)

With all the — entirely justified — criticism of how Talia has been handled over the past decade, one may wonder if there was some prelapsarian nonracist early version of this character. Nope! Talia, like her father, is a character for whom a troubling degree of Orientalist racism is a load-bearing conceptual element. In her initial appearance she is, by O'Neil's own later admission, just a plot device, a helpless damsel in distress; her relationship to Ra's al Ghul (who had not yet appeared) was apparently added to the dialogue at the last minute, after this issue was mostly finished. In her second appearance in BATMAN #232 (June 1971), this time drawn by Adams, Talia is "promoted" to exotic eye candy, an Orientalist caricature without a single word of dialogue. By her third appearance three months later (in BATMAN #235), she's emerged as a femme fatale of ambiguous motives, an obvious pastiche of Sax Rohmer's Fah Lo Suee, the daughter of Fu Manchu.

Both Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams tended to bristle at the suggestion that Ra's al Ghul has any relationship to Fu Manchu, but the similarities are hard to miss, and Talia is one of those. Fah Lo Suee, first seen in THE HAND OF FU MANCHU in 1917, was at times her father's dutiful servant; at times his rival; and occasionally his enemy, since she could be swayed by the charms of one or the other of his white opponents. She herself was Eurasian, and her moral conflict was unambiguously racialized: Her choice was to succumb to the evil, Asian side of her nature (through allegiance to her father and/or his pan-Oriental secret society), or embrace good and whiteness (in her case, through romance with a heroic white man). You may notice that this also summarizes the basic tension of Talia's roles in the Batman mythos, and not just recently! In a 1984 interview, O'Neil described Talia as "tainted with evil" because of her father, and the degree to which she's ever been portrayed as good or heroic has always been directly tied to her willingness to reject her father in favor of Bruce and whiteness. Save for a throwaway line in this issue about her studying medicine at the University of Cairo (swiftly forgotten even by O'Neil), her role in the stories has never allowed for even the possibility of any third alternative.

To be sure, some of Talia's appearances are more offensive than others, but the point is that she, like Fah Lo Suee, is a character who is fundamentally shaped by Orientalism and ideas of white supremacy, which don't disappear even if one tinkers with the details (e.g., by making both Ra's and Talia white, as the Nolan movies did). That in turn has fundamentally shaped the way Talia is characterized with regard to her son, to whom Talia's racialized moral conflict has essentially been transferred.

Rafael Lopez.

Fu Manchu - Hands Of The Zodiac (Official Visualizer)

6:46 PM EST February 25, 2024:

Fu Manchu - "Tilt" From the album Daredevil (January 1, 1995)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm