In the delightful new rom-com Crazy Rich Asians — which consists of a principal cast entirely of Asian descent, a major feat in Hollywood — a college professor (Constance Wu) travels to her boyfriend’s old stomping grounds in Singapore to attend the most opulent wedding of her life. (And to survive the wrath of the women vying for her boyfriend’s attention. And her boyfriend’s intense mother.)
The film, an adaptation of the 2013 novel written by Kevin Kwan, is a major win for the Asian acting community, but in a new Hollywood Reporter feature, some behind-the-scenes drama nearly prevented it from being a faithful big-screen experience.
As Kevin recalled to the publication, he rejected numerous “lucrative” offers and instead optioned his film for a mere $1, forgoing a large paycheck to ensure he maintained involvement with creative and development decisions. This was, Kevin said, after one disastrous pitch strongly recommended he change the Asian heroine to a white woman, since nobody would be interested in seeing the film otherwise. (“It’s a pity you don’t have a white character,” he was told by the producer.)
“Interestingly, Kevin and the film’s director, Jon M. Chu, also rejected an enticing offer for Crazy Rich Asians to be a Netflix-exclusive film — “dangling complete artistic freedom, a greenlighted trilogy and huge, seven-figure-minimum paydays for each stakeholder” — but the duo ultimately decided the need to bring Asian actors to the bonafide big screen was more of a priority. “Jon and I both felt this sense of purpose,” Kevin explained to THR. “We needed this to be an old-fashioned cinematic experience, not for fans to sit in front of a TV and just press a button.”
having parents that were really angry and petty and abusive when you were young is weird, because it makes part of you grow up to want to be kind, to generate good things, to be a source of peace and wellbeing for others; but it makes another part of you grow up to be quick, and sharp, and spiteful, and that’s always the part that shows itself first in a hard situation, so it’s a struggle between your hateful gut reactions and your wish to not add any more misery to the world. it’s a hard balance, and the people who really, really know me – i know they see that anger flash in my eyes before i quiet it, if i quiet it…i want to overcome years of conditioning, and with gentle, constant force, i know i’ll mellow it. it just takes time.
Growing up with years of anger surrounding you will do that to you and the struggle to actually be a better person is always there, just beneath the surface, and pushing it down and looking for a way to transform it and release it in a positive way takes some time and so much effort, but it’s always worth it in the end, because you feel so proud of yourself when your empathy wins over years of conditioned anger.
The most popular remix of the studio killers’ Jenny is the one by the living tombstone which depicts the singer as a creepy dangerous obsessive stalker who wants to steal jenny’s soul and I think that says a lot about how men view lesbian narratives that aren’t porn
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@sporksinthegarbage The reason people are getting upset about this is mostly because thats kind of an insensitive way to look at the situation. Not only does it ignore the mass of lgbt+ censorship (something that still happens to this day, RS said she had to fight tooth and nail for almost every single ruby/sapphire moment and that a lot still got cut and edited out, and many scenes were censored outside the US) lgbt+ writers have had to rely on implying characters are lgbt to simply not get their stories banned or cut. Even in SU no character has outright said their canon orientation, which means the claim that fans should stop erasing the orientation of “canon straight” characters is based in the notion those characters are straight until proven otherwise AND the notion that that is somehow damaging to straight people. The first is pretty homophobic clearly and the second is more complicated. The reason LGBT erasure is so bad is because we have barely any positive representation in the first place, so people denying or erasing what little we have hits us pretty hard. But thats not an issue for straight people since 99% of series don’t even have an lgbt character at all! They aren’t struggling for scraps of positive representation. On the contrary, we get so little positivity for ourselves and our relationships that often we have to make our own, which is why so many fanwriting communities are predominantly lgbt folk.
So tldr the reason people are getting upset about this is because you’re basically throwing shade both at harmless fanartists and writers who think a potential ship is cute and at lgbt people for daring to headcanon characters as lgbt or make fics and art exploring that in a way almost no media actually will, and you equated all that to “erasing” straight characters, despite nobody being confirmed as straight, which hurt straight people anyway since they make up 99% of everything.
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