this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Vaguely off topic, but a couple years ago I learned that crackers used to use "celestial" to refer to Chinese people.
Can this become a thing again? It's very whimsical and cute. Out of all the slurs for us, this was the best. Imagine trying to offend the Chinese by calling them "celestials" in the 21st century.
Oh referring to the Chinese president as a yellow bear, cool, I guess. "Celestial president Xi Jinping" sounds like a weird compliment on the Chinese space program.
"I don't trust those celestials" also makes the bigot who said it sound like a D&D NPC.
I think Chinese people still sometimes use it, but in a sarcastic way. They'll call China the 天朝 (Celestial Empire) as a joke when something bad in the news happens.
Huh, never made that connection despite seeing 天朝
I wonder if that's the origin of the very racist, but comedic phrasing "moonrunes" for various written Asian languages.
That term initially was a reference to the anime Turn A Gundam, where Earth and the moon have developed distinct populations after a cataclysmic war. The moon race is highly advanced, Earth has gone back to steam engines and subsistence farming. The moon language is presented as highly complex and completely incomprehensible to Earth people. I remember being on 4chan's /a/ when they first started using the term.
That's actually really surprising. So is it.... not racist?
I mean context is everything, isn't it? I don't think moonrunes is necessarily racist. It can be used as a phrase like "it's all Greek to me." But it can be used in racist ways depending on how it's said, yeah. Moonrunes often refers to any language that doesn't use Latin script, so anything from Thai to ancient Egyptian is moonrunes/moonspeak
A much more racist thing that weebs can say might be calling Japanese people "Elevens." It's a reference to the anime Code Geass, where Japan has long since been conquered and colonized by the British Empire. Japan is renamed Area 11, and characters in the show use the derogatory term Eleven to refer to native Japanese people. It's presented as racist in the context of the show, so I always felt weird when anime forums would use it unironically.
Sorry I guess I meant the origin, ie the "ricing" argument over on the lemmy unixporn comm.
It definitely became racist outside its origin.
I also did not know that Code Geass thing. Anime fans, man. Jeez.
I believe it was a reference to the whole “heavenly dynasty” name. It was definitely a pejorative but no need to conflate
Those glorious godlike beings took our jobs!
I mean... I guess it sounds better than calling us "soulless bug men", which is their other name for us.
...The highest rank in Mahjong Soul is just Chinese?
I remember that as being a pretty common term to mock sinophobia on the old sub, like framing liberal soft-phrenology as "raving about the devious celestials," or the like.