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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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But aren't Asians also good at vibe-cultivation? Some of those very same successful black entertainers are also really into anime and video games, even if, as RandomRanger notes below, they may tend to be less-represented in nerdier media where there are less barriers to entry. Now, granted, Asian-Americans haven't been quite as successful at injecting contributions to the global-culture-public-consciousness as Asian-Asians, but still.

Asians can make good content, but their lack of personal charisma puts them at a distinct disadvantage in an American setting. This seems to be what Harvard's "personality scores" were trying to get at and what people mean when they complain about Asians being a bunch of boring interchangeable nerds. In my experience this is mostly a product of cultural differences and will start to disappear as the proportion of recent immigrants in the Asian-American population goes down.

I think they've just made different contributions. Bruce Lee was the introduction of martial arts into mainstream western society. Even Dana White and other big figures in the UFC have paid homage to him as the 'father' of their sport. But today his legacy remains niche and his long-term contributions have bled away into obscurity to the people who don't follow that stuff closely. I think their contributions are slowly making inroads over time, with anime for instance, as indicated above. It hasn't received broad, widespread acceptance yet, but undoubtedly has more popular and common cultural market share than it did say 20 years ago.

I think anime has long since been made mainstream. Most people have at least heard of anime, and could probably name at least a couple of franchises in the genre. Their merch is pretty mainstream and available everywhere down to Target and Walmart. Korean and Chinese dramas are much more niche, as most people haven’t ever heard of them and couldn’t name a single show.