Good old Nick never fails to surprise people.
Let me tell you… it’s really not unusual here in Quebec for people (mostly older people?) to use the “Chinese” blanket term to refer to anything east asian, and it’s been annoying me for as long as I was old enough to understand that different countries existed. (Also, Tintin did wonders to teach me about the world…)
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meanwhile in here, the old people tend to use the “Dutch” blanket term to refers any Caucasian.
Really??
Whoa, the more you know!
I know that feeling Dez, there are also people who say that in Eastern Europe there are only Slavs.(clearly they didn’t pay too much attention in history and geography classes). Oh, on a (funny) side note, my country’s capital tends to be confused with Hungary’s capital. I know we are neighbours and both our capitals start with “B”, but come on! There are different letters in both those names, it’s not that hard to differentiate.
Bucharest, Budapest, I always got the two mixed up when I was younger. ^^
The funny thing is, Asians also cannot always tell one Asian folk from another. When I was in
China, locals always thought one girl I knew to be Chinese… Even though she was Buryat.
I actually repeated my own comment from page 113 =((( Come on, memory, you can do better than that…
As long as the concept needs to be repeated, so can the words.
Well, to be fair, as European I can’t really tell one European people apart from another either. People are people and unless there are really big differences I’m bad at telling them apart.
I think just a few years ago (in-universe), that would have ended the expected racist way.
How?
You already know: you made it seem like it was going to. (Or rather you obviously telegraphed that it was going to be an inversion.)
But… Canada is part of America…
As are Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Belize…
(I get what Nick means, I just find it bizarre how ‘America’ is used to refer either to a pair of continents or to the United States)
There is *no* America, except as the term is used as a shorthand for the US. Canada is part of NORTH America, Brazil and the rest part of SOUTH America. Two different continents. Two different names. The only ppl trying to say we are Americans are ppl tying to push the garbage that ‘America’ isn’t referring to the US.
Collectively, they get referred to as The AmericaS. Plural, cause they are two places.
It’s not Garbage. ;)
I believe that “America” should belong to everyone on the American continents. There are a few people in Quebec who refuse to call people from the US Americans and instead call them “États-Uniens” from “États-unis”, french for “United States”.
I think I’ll start using that.
The main problem is that “citizen of the United States of America” is too bloody long. Plus “United States” is more a descriptive term than a country name, saying it’s a bunch of states, which also describes lots of other countries like Mexico (whose official name of “Estados Unidos Mexicanos” is basically “United States of Mexico” if you translate it from Spanish to English). Thus why everybody down here in the US says “America”. Saying “United States of America” every time we want to reference our country is as clunky as saying “Dominion of Canada” every time you want to reference yours. At least you guys officially took “Dominion of” off all your government literature and web sites etc., we’re still stuck with that full long tongue-twister “United States of America” every time we want to reference our official country name…
As for why that name for our country, the people who chose it are dead and gone, so feel free to curse them all you want. Meanwhile, it seems we’re stuck with it…
>“United States” is more a descriptive term than a country name
The same could be said of other countries, like the United Kingdom, but we’ve kinda got dibs on United States. If brevity is important there’s always initials; everyone knows who the U.S. is.
I find that Gaia’s face in the last panel is more of a surprise than Nick’s racial non-discrimination speech.
Because she displays some surprise and confusion?
No, because it’s just so funny. The fact that she’s surprised isn’t surprising, what’s surprising is the face she made.
Tintin was very good about the whole teaching you about the world thing*
*as long as it wasn’t the Congo, Russia, or the United States**
**And Japan if the bad guy of the story happened to be from there
Well, I’m talking about Tintin from “The Blue Lotus” and beyond, of course. That’s when Hergé started to care. The earlier albums were just a long succession of terrible stereotypes.
And the evil portrayals of the Japanese in the Blue Lotus was kinda deserved, from a Chinese point of view back then.
Not so much started to care as it was always cared, but now his publishers weren’t breathing down his neck
Hergé & race relations is a extremely complicated subject. It’s not helped by the fact that quite a few of his albums were produced during WWII with a pro Nazi publisher and the German occupation authorities breathing down his neck, and had to be heavily revised afterwards.
It’s far to complicated a subject to properly cover in a comment on a lighthearted comic
Hard to say if such thinking is racist or ignorant. No real excuse for either though. (not to say that I can brag about my performance) You appear to have a rather internationally diverse readership here sir. That is so cool!
So in the text box, would not Saki be more into JAPANESE Martial Arts – like Karate, Judo and (especially) Kendo than Chinese Martial Arts (like Kung Fu) if not for cultural reasons then surely practical business reasons…. ?
It would be more practical for Saki to learn something like Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art because it is possible to become a “black belt” in KM within 6 months because of it’s pragmatic nature, Asian martial arts take many years to become black belts and even longer to master.
Wow !!! 6 months to learn a martial art !!! Sounds like the amount of time needed to send your Ground-Mail order form to somewhere in Israeli and have the diploma shipped back to you via ground mail !!! :P :P :P
That was the joke. I was imagining Nick just being ignorant again.
A trainer Nick strip and I nearly missed it! 0_0
How dare you nearly miss a Frivo strip!
I haven’t checked Frivo’s Webcomic rating for quite a while and it’s 138th place.
Nobody’s voting anymore. :(
I still vote when I visit, just not enough people are voting I guess.
I keep forgetting to vote. I do vote for Frivolesque when I remember, though!
I look at Frivolesque every day (until I catch up with Dez) and I always vote.
I recently watched a video in which three Asians started by talking about how many white people have laughable difficulty telling the difference between people of various Asian nationalities. But then they took a test based on face alone, and they didn’t do so well.
It made me feel a little less foolish in my complete ignorance. Mind you, as the people in the video said, many of telltale clues are cultural, from accent and clothes and manner and all that. So I guess I can still feel foolish and ignorant.
Well, obviously, it’s hard to tell where someone is coming from based from their face alone, although it’s easier with some people than others. But there are many other clues. Anyway, I think the thing isn’t about not being able to know where someone is from, it’s about not giving him or her a random ethnicity because you don’t know better.
That’s always a problem here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I can usually tell who is Japanese and who is Vietnamese based on a variety of differences between them and other East Asians, but I can’t tell the difference between the Chinese and the Koreans. I try to keep ethnicity out of conversations unless they introduce it first, because it’s embarrassing to assume the wrong one!
The few times in my life someone has acted “offended” because I get their ethnicity wrong, I just ask them to identify mine. Not once has an Asian or any other minority simply looked at me and guessed “German”. It’s literally the most common ethnicity in the USA. Once I show they can’t do it reliably either, it becomes easy to convince them that people mistaking their own ethnicity aren’t doing it out of malice and it seems to make them a lot happier and easy going for the rest of the conversation.
Well… not only did he save himself from falling off the edge, he pulled himself up, jumped, barrel rolled, did three summersalts (not sure if this correct), and landed with a split…
And now I realise that this comment doesn’t make sense.
I saw your question on http://thewebcomicsreview.tumblr.com/ today, I hope hir answer will help you in your goal of reaching new readers.
A possible new site meta description:
Frivolesque. By OmegaDez, a slice-of-life webcomic(with a dash of supernatural) set in Quebec featuring lots of quirky girls with glasses.
You might want to change it but hir was right about wasting too many words on your name, if the readers want to know more about you, they can just click on the ABOUT link.
That was a good point he made. I already changed the Meta earlier this week. I hope it’s better.
Do you agree with everything they said?
Not sure how he came to the conclusion that Frivo is supposed to be a QC clone beyond the fact that they’re both slice-of-life comics.
Being American-born-Chinese, whenever someone asks me what I am, i’m just going to say “awesome” (thanks to Sette Frummagem from Unsounded webcomic).