soulsoaker:

The neon kanji billboards. Neander Wallace’s yukata, and Joi’s cheongsam. The busy Chinatown. The interactive wall of anime apps. K’s rice-filled bento box. The dual Japanese-English text on everything. All signs that point to a vibrant, multicultural city, but somehow devoid of non-white characters.

If Asians shaped this cyberpunk future, where are they?

Blade Runner and 2049 are like Orientalist art. Gorgeous, albeit skewed, depictions of “other” cultures meant to justify colonialism with their backwardness. Only, in these inverted futures, the colonists are invisible megacorps—Japanese, Chinese, Korean—whose temples we see looming over Los Angeles. The reason why signs are bilingual; a future so outlandish that Japanese could be a lingua franca. Where communities are ghettoized beneath Asian-branded skyscrapers, and the enslaved population, Replicants, are overwhelmingly white.

This article veers into the “PoC get sad if they can’t see themselves” lane but if anything, the fusion of orientalism and cyberpunk speaks more to the anxiety and horror that white people feel when confronted with the existence of people that don’t fit nicely into established definitions of white or nonwhite. A racial uncanny valley, essentially.

(Source: reverseweeb)