• Brave Little Hitachi Wand@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    The word problematic is kind of weasely used this way. The pen name had an in-universe rationale that made sense and was funny because of the incongruity. Merely alluding to the existence of ethnicity isn’t “problematic” in itself.

    • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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      6 hours ago

      I’m not the on who brought the word problematic into this conversation. But I bet you if I put a poll on, say, tumblr, asking about different potentially problematic things, “pretending to be asian” would score highly on the problematic scale.

      • NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world
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        9 minutes ago

        He wasn’t pretending to be asian, though, the book John Dies at The End makes that very clear and gives a silly in universe reason for the now dead pseudonym. It really was not problematic, even at the time of it being used.