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You're Right, But You Shouldn't Say It
I wrote a short review of Ngozi Ukazu's new graphic novel Bunt that I posted on Goodreads and then took down five minutes later. Here it is:
I enjoyed this graphic novel, but parts of it made me uncomfortable. Other people have praised this book extensively, so I hope I can be forgiven for focusing on my criticisms of the story. Specifically, some of the humor and broad characterizations didn’t work for me.
One member of the art school softball team is coded as being on the autism spectrum, while another is coded as nonbinary and transmasculine. The character on the autism spectrum is consistently portrayed as obnoxious and borderline antisocial, while the transmasculine character’s artistic fascination with idealized male bodies is consistently portrayed as weird and gross.
The inclusive message of the book seems to be that important acts of social justice – such as fighting a hostile private university that doesn’t care about its students – can be achieved by working together in community solidarity, and this solidarity needs to include everyone, even the strange and disgusting autistic and transmasculine people whom no one really likes. I know this humor is grounded in deep experience with internet subcultures, but it still feels a bit meanspirited. I get the impression that, if one were to assemble a visual collage of negative reaction faces included in the jokes made at the expense of the autistic and transmasculine characters, the tone of the humor would become painfully apparent.
The portrayal of the international student Kwon feels strange as well, especially considering that so many American art colleges (such as SCAD and MICA, on which the fictional school in the story seems to be based) are supported by the tuition of international students from East Asia. The closing suggestion that Kwon didn’t really care about the other people on the team but was just engineering an “authentically American” experience to mine for his mass-market creative work left a bad taste in my mouth. Again, I understand that this is supposed to be a joke, but it didn’t really land with me.
On top of that, something I would liked to have seen was a willingness to humanize the university president, who is a clear villain of the story. I hate the way private colleges exploit their students, and I’m happy to see this character portrayed as a villain. Still, what’s missing from the background conflict of the story is any explanation regarding why a school like SCAD or MICA would behave in the way that it does, especially regarding its appropriation of local community resources.
The truth about the precarious financial insecurity of American art colleges is too complicated to outline in this review, but it’s not so complicated that the university president couldn’t have delivered something like a villain speech explaining that these schools are constantly, from year to year, on the verge of closure. In real life, it’s this precarity that results in the staffing shortages and lowest-bidder outsourcing issues that contribute to the (all too common) situation faced by the story’s protagonist. With no background information concerning what’s going on, her tuition crisis comes off as little more than a comedy of errors.
Bunt has many of the elements I love to see in a story, from weirdos working together to fight capitalism to healthy queer relationships to colorful art that practically explodes from the page. Despite everything, this is still a 4/5 book in my eyes. Unfortunately, Bunt’s broad humor and lack of nuance prevents it from addressing its themes on a meaningful level. Bunt seems to shy away from the larger questions it asks about what it means to be an artist in the 2020s, and its refusal to suggest answers or potential solutions results in an ending that's happy for the characters yet unsatisfying for the reader.
So that's the review.
I can feel myself pulling my punches here, because I found the humor of this book to be extremely distressing. To address just one aspect of this, there's a mean stereotype about nonbinary people that, like, "she claims to be nonbinary because she's too fat and ugly to be female," and there's a mean stereotype about transmen that "she loves her big anime men so much that she's deluded herself into thinking she's trans." I see this all the time in normcore spaces, and I see traces of it in offline creative spaces as well. It's especially painful to see those sorts of transphobic attitudes uncritically reproduced in a "wholesome" book about social justice and inclusivity.
But who is it going to benefit if I say any of this in public, you know? The potential benefits just don't outweigh the potential backlash.
ETA: If it seems as though I'm taking the negative portrayals of these characters personally, that's because I am. I feel like these characters are my students. As someone who teaches classes about Japan, I definitely have autism spectrum students who wear furry ears to class and transgender students who ask for make-up quizzes because their "family thing" is an anime convention and international students who don't speak 100% "proper" English. So what if they come off as weird. They're just kids. Let them be.
I enjoyed this graphic novel, but parts of it made me uncomfortable. Other people have praised this book extensively, so I hope I can be forgiven for focusing on my criticisms of the story. Specifically, some of the humor and broad characterizations didn’t work for me.
One member of the art school softball team is coded as being on the autism spectrum, while another is coded as nonbinary and transmasculine. The character on the autism spectrum is consistently portrayed as obnoxious and borderline antisocial, while the transmasculine character’s artistic fascination with idealized male bodies is consistently portrayed as weird and gross.
The inclusive message of the book seems to be that important acts of social justice – such as fighting a hostile private university that doesn’t care about its students – can be achieved by working together in community solidarity, and this solidarity needs to include everyone, even the strange and disgusting autistic and transmasculine people whom no one really likes. I know this humor is grounded in deep experience with internet subcultures, but it still feels a bit meanspirited. I get the impression that, if one were to assemble a visual collage of negative reaction faces included in the jokes made at the expense of the autistic and transmasculine characters, the tone of the humor would become painfully apparent.
The portrayal of the international student Kwon feels strange as well, especially considering that so many American art colleges (such as SCAD and MICA, on which the fictional school in the story seems to be based) are supported by the tuition of international students from East Asia. The closing suggestion that Kwon didn’t really care about the other people on the team but was just engineering an “authentically American” experience to mine for his mass-market creative work left a bad taste in my mouth. Again, I understand that this is supposed to be a joke, but it didn’t really land with me.
On top of that, something I would liked to have seen was a willingness to humanize the university president, who is a clear villain of the story. I hate the way private colleges exploit their students, and I’m happy to see this character portrayed as a villain. Still, what’s missing from the background conflict of the story is any explanation regarding why a school like SCAD or MICA would behave in the way that it does, especially regarding its appropriation of local community resources.
The truth about the precarious financial insecurity of American art colleges is too complicated to outline in this review, but it’s not so complicated that the university president couldn’t have delivered something like a villain speech explaining that these schools are constantly, from year to year, on the verge of closure. In real life, it’s this precarity that results in the staffing shortages and lowest-bidder outsourcing issues that contribute to the (all too common) situation faced by the story’s protagonist. With no background information concerning what’s going on, her tuition crisis comes off as little more than a comedy of errors.
Bunt has many of the elements I love to see in a story, from weirdos working together to fight capitalism to healthy queer relationships to colorful art that practically explodes from the page. Despite everything, this is still a 4/5 book in my eyes. Unfortunately, Bunt’s broad humor and lack of nuance prevents it from addressing its themes on a meaningful level. Bunt seems to shy away from the larger questions it asks about what it means to be an artist in the 2020s, and its refusal to suggest answers or potential solutions results in an ending that's happy for the characters yet unsatisfying for the reader.
So that's the review.
I can feel myself pulling my punches here, because I found the humor of this book to be extremely distressing. To address just one aspect of this, there's a mean stereotype about nonbinary people that, like, "she claims to be nonbinary because she's too fat and ugly to be female," and there's a mean stereotype about transmen that "she loves her big anime men so much that she's deluded herself into thinking she's trans." I see this all the time in normcore spaces, and I see traces of it in offline creative spaces as well. It's especially painful to see those sorts of transphobic attitudes uncritically reproduced in a "wholesome" book about social justice and inclusivity.
But who is it going to benefit if I say any of this in public, you know? The potential benefits just don't outweigh the potential backlash.
ETA: If it seems as though I'm taking the negative portrayals of these characters personally, that's because I am. I feel like these characters are my students. As someone who teaches classes about Japan, I definitely have autism spectrum students who wear furry ears to class and transgender students who ask for make-up quizzes because their "family thing" is an anime convention and international students who don't speak 100% "proper" English. So what if they come off as weird. They're just kids. Let them be.