Removing "Chop Chop" Token Characters

S

starlette

New member
Ok first off Chop Chop was the name of a member of the BlackHawk team.

Early depictions are now considered very offensive towards Chinese and even other East Asians.

Such characters can be revised to be less offensive. However, I want to explore the outcomes of killing of a "Chop Chop" off-scene or into thin air because killing them on-scene would result in further backlash.

On one hand some people want the removal because it offends them. However it is possible that some people don't want the person removed because he or she is a token character representing his or her ethnicity, nationality, or gender. If the creator remove the character, they might face bad publicity about how they denied a minoity character a place in their work. If they keep it they would get boycotts from those people offended by the character.

So even though the obvious choice is revision, there was a single incident in which editors had to choose between potentially offending the ethnic group or potentially offending people pushing for representation of that ethnic group.

It was this.
 
you know that minor One Piece character would probably be thanking 4kids for changing his race. Now he's quite popular. I remember when the FUNi dub started people pointed him out because he was black again.

He was just a forgotten crew member before what 4kids did to him.
 
Comic books handle it pretty well, I think. A lot of superheroes actually have a sidekick that's an offensive stereotype in their closet. The Green Lantern sidekick, Tom "Pieface" Kalmaku, an Eskimo, is a good example.

The way some later writers handled characters like Pieface was not writing them off, but ditching the stereotyped named and characteristics and simply writing the characters as closer to real people. Some PC writers can go too far with that, I think they did that with Pieface actually by making him something like a world saving saint in the Millenium crossover, but if they don't take it too far it can work out well.

They did the same thing with Chop Chop. They just slowly made him more like a real person. The whole Blackhawk team was basically ethnic or national stereotypes from the start.

Another good example is Ebony White from The Spirit. He wasn't a completely negative character, but he was definitely a stereotypical one with exaggerated blackface features. Darwyn Cooke didn't put a bullet in his head or kill him off screen when he did a new Spirit series recently, he just reinvented him without the racist elements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebony_White

At any rate, killing them off or changing their race is not the answer. It's better to revamp them to fit the times.
 
Unfortunately in the case of one adaptation incident it was either offensive stereotype with token or no stereotype with "changed skin" background character.

IMO they should've just cut entire footages to avoid screentime.
 
I thought that was one of the most WTF edits since, I thought that it would take less effort to edit the lips compared to changing the skin together. I wonder if there is going to be a song about him, like "Soldier A" down the line.
 
I cant wait for the FOX Sunday night season (as well as new South Park episodes) to start up again so we actually have something to discuss around here. I feel like these threads keep circling the same territory without ever getting anywhere.
 
Itty was in the comics, too.

Edit: Oh, okay. I checked out the cartoon and it's even weirder. And it's pretty tough to be weirder than adopting a space slug and carrying it around as a pet.
 
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