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Wishing all the weirdos who irrationally hate Yasuke a very just say the n-word and leave

I am at my limit

9 min readMay 2, 2021

Hey all, Mo here.

I wanted to put out this quick essay. Hopefully one of my last ones before Bullshit no Yuusha is ready to go. I’m sorry I’m late on that by the way, I’m really trying.

But I just needed to write this piece about Yasuke in particular. Because it’s got me pressed in a way that I have not been pressed in quite a while.

So a couple nights ago on our Discord server, which you should join if you want to talk to me and stuff, we binged Yasuke, the new Netflix anime by LeSean Thomas and MAPPA. And I was chiefly interested in it because the protagonist is Black. Not just a Black dude but Yasuke, right? One of Japan’s few foreign samurai. Yasuke’s presence in Japan in the 16th century is actually one of the more significant proofs of a much larger concept: that Black people and civilizations were an active part of history. They were not passive agents to be discovered and tamed by Europeans.

So while my initial interest was to see one of the few anime with a Black protagonist, I came away from the viewing rather pleased. The first three episodes slapped. The last three maybe less so. There were definitely some weird off model things and animation issues towards the end that suggested production was rushed as they got closer to deadline.

It had its historical inaccuracies, and the giant fights between huge robots and astral projection warriors felt a bit… much for a historical drama at times.

It’s a very politically liberal show, interested more in minorities rising up to higher stations within society than an overthrow of hierarchy itself. But it worked in a lot of neat moments where it used real history to make the case that not only can you find Black people in history in places you don’t expect, but women and gay people and all sorts of other people some pretend didn’t exist until 1960.

So Yasuke, isn’t perfect, but it’s a fun time.

After having seen it, I wanted to know how bad the My Anime List reviews were. Y’know, cuz I hate myself.

So the way MAL reviews work, for those that don’t know, is that, in practice, a 7.00/10 is usually the dividing line between an anime being more good or more bad. You usually don’t break 8.00/10 unless you’re really popular or really good. And only a handful of anime ever break 9.00/10. A six point something usually means isn’t really worth watching, and a five point something or below usually means something actively and uniquely terrible took place.

You got your Conceptions, shows that are just not well animated or drawn by amateurs, etc.

I’m checking MAL, and I’m thinking, if Yasuke was about a light-skinned Japanese dude, or a Dutch sailor turned Samurai, this would probably gain like a clean 7.4 or 7.5 out of 10? It’s got character moments and cool fights, but people who were expecting a grounded historical drama will probably be disappointed.

Then we gotta factor in the anti Blackness inherent to anime fandom. SSSS.Dynazenon is another show this season that’s really good. (My editor wants you to know that Dynazenon is excellent, they’ve watched every episode like five times now). It’s not heavy on dark skinned characters or anything, but it’s got a 6.92 on MAL for not really being animated as much as you’d expect for a TRIGGER show, not being its predecessor SSSS.Gridman, and just not being a typical action romp.

So I’m thinking, knock that 7.4/10 down to a 6.9–7.1 just to counter all the people going blah blah SJW Netflix agenda.

Ready for the actual score? Drumroll please…

A 6.30 out of 10.

A 6.3 let me contextualize just how low this is, okay?

Sword Art Online, the anime that spent the better part of the last decade maligned as the worst anime ever made and the reason isekai is so terrible, is currently sitting at a cool 7.23 out of 10.

The Misfit at Demon King Academy is a show I talked about at the beginning of this year. It’s got an overcentralizing male lead, nothing female characters, and a really sloppy race allegory that presents all the characters that are supposed to represent Japan’s mixed race population as passive elements to the majority. There’s a scene in it where the protagonist picks up a building and spins it around on his finger.

A nice 7.33 outta 10 on MAL.

Okay so now here’s where it gets irritating.

Redo of Healer. The “controversial” anime from last season. In which the protagonist has magic healing cum (not an exaggeration he has magic fucking cum) that he uses to rape women into being his slaves. 6.3

6.31 outta 10.

Terra Formars, the anime in which Black people are compared to bloodthirsty, ultra violent, primitive cockroaches who infest a planet and need to be exterminated through genocide by our heroes. An anime which presents the pinnacle of human evolution, created in God’s image through selective breeding to be a blond, Aryan man. An anime which revels in the pure satisfaction of dismembering Black bodies on screen for shits and giggles.

Easy 7.03 outta 10.

And of course, my favorite anime, The Rising of the Shield Hero. The show that started it all for me. The anime that justifies the actual institution of slavery, even using arguments that were popular in the American South before the Civil War. Not even for political reasons, you see, but to sell you a stupid racoon child slave waifu anime figurine.

Eight point zero zero on MAL.

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An 8/10!

This would be bad enough, except for the fact that between the time I wrote this script and the time I got it ready for publication on Medium, Yasuke’s score on My Anime List slipped further to an unthinkable 6.09/10, which would be funny if I wasn’t so depressed.

So to a good section of the average anime fan, comparing Black people to cockroaches and announcing your desire to purge them from this world as Terra Formars does. Defending the actual institution of slavery as Redo of Healer and Shield Hero do. None of these are as offensive as, like, having a Black protagonist in your anime and being proud of it.

Art made by Black people, in part for Black people, about how being Black is pretty cool actually, is apparently the most offensive thing to weebs. Just, period. You can do a rape, a genocide, a sexism, a misgendering. But put a Black person in front of my face? Disgusting!

And at this point, you realize that some people legitimately would rather not Black people exist. And some of those people use anime as a fantasy world to escape to where they can pretend Black people do not exist.

The idea that some people don’t want me to exist isn’t new to me. My parents had multiple escalating talks when I was a kid about how some of my peers would never see me as good as them. I’ve experienced racism personally. You get over it. And it’s probably not new to a lot of people in my audience. Especially if you’re gay or trans or a different person of color.

But every once in a while you’re reminded of it in a way that reignites a child-like confusion and anger. In a “what the fuck did I ever do to you!?” sorta way.

There are going to be people who take this essay and go “oh Mo aren’t you taking this too far? People just didn’t like it because it wasn’t well written.”

Okay but written worse than The Misfit of Demon King Academy? Written worse than Sword Art Online? Worse than Shield Hero? These were not really the pinnacle of writing prowess y’know.

“But Mo it’s bad because it’s not historically accurate!”

Oh so like Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (8.01/10)? Like Gintama (8.96/10)? Like Baccano! (8.41/10)? Like Moriarty the Patriot (8.04/10)? None of those shows are historically accurate and, weirdly, they do fine.

“They don’t like how it devolved into big fantasy fights at the end!”

Oh so like how Darling in the Franxx (7.31/10) and how devolves into a giant space robot vs alien fight at the end, before all the girls get pregnant with like 10 babies? You mean how even though the ending goes off the wall it’s still one of the most popular anime in the fandom?

“Oh but Mo you see we just don’t want Netflix forcing their agenda into anime.”

What agenda?

What fucking agenda?

Specify it!

So say it

What agenda is an anime promoting by just having a Black protagonist and making a story about him and his Blackness? Treating him in the same way that light skinned anime characters have been treated for years? What agenda are we promoting by just letting Black people exist?

If you’re against this “agenda” you just don’t want Black to exist. Which brings me back to my point.

And just, last thing, you know. Cherry on top of all the things that bother me. I hate it when people act like Black people interacting with, and making anime and anime-adjacent content for ourselves is some sort of outside introduction to the fandom. Black anime fans have basically been a thing since anime has been available to consume outside of Japan. There’s an entire generation of Black anime fans who’ve grown up on Sailor Moon, on Dragon Ball, on Naruto, that are now old enough to start making their own things. It’s not “pandering to leftist identity politics” when people who have always been around make things. That’s just you being a weird little failson creep with a blindspot.

Anyway, watch Yasuke, it’s good. It’s not good because Yasuke is Black. Rather, because the anime wants to tell a story about a different kind of person, and makes an earnest attempt in doing so, and because of that you get subtle little moments that stand out above every other seasonal.

Seriously, stop watching Nagatoro or whatever. Do yourself a solid. Jesus Christ.

And yeah I promise very very soon we’ll be back to having actual essays and not just short ones like this and podcasts.

Credits

Thank you to Raghava Kovvali for giving this the ole once over, as usual.

You can support me on Patreon, I guess, or join our Discord server.

Edits

Read this ANN interview with LeSean Thomas, who goes into a lot of the philosophy behind why he made the decisions he did, and a clear understanding of some of the reception his show would get from certain parts of anime fandom.
Getting a lot of replies, mainly on Reddit, that basically amount to “well I didn’t like Yasuke and I’m not racist to ha!” or, a little less commonly, “the score is low because it’s bad”. I don’t really feel like responding to these because they just tell me that the commenter didn’t read this piece. The second complaint is literally several paragraphs of text. But, I guess to clarify , the point of this piece is not that one one person has to like Yasuke. The point is that it’s regrettable that people unfairly hold Yasuke to a higher standard than they do other anime, a lot of which are explicitly anti-black. Regardless of what you think about it, the level of negativity we’ve seen around the show is demonstrably a form of anti-blackness, because other anime that have made the same mistakes Yasuke has still get to be praised for their strengths.
“I didn’t think the show would have mechs, therefore it’s bad” isn’t really an argument. Why did Yasuke have to be a biopic to be good? Ask yourself if you’ve ever applied this standard to any other anime, and then think about what’s different about Yasuke that you’re super eager to criticize it based on something that has never really bothered you in the past.