Discussion What’s the most racist thing you’ve seen in a novel?

One time I read a Chinese novel that made all Japanese people impotent. The mc drugged them all so they couldn’t get sexually stimulated. Then Chinese guys started marrying all the Japanese woman. The mc has a bunch of Japanese slave girls.

I also read about an mc making Godzilla attack Japan. Him and all of China was laughing and celebrating about it. The USA went to help Japan and then Godzilla attacked New York.

 

That's scary.

 

in my opinion, Solo Leveling is pretty racist. The author is very cruel to the Japanese characters. Especially on the Jeju island arc ... It may have seemed to me that way, but I felt bad for the Japanese. Also, in my opinion, most Korean novels are racist.

 

the irony is a lot of solo leveling fans keep begging japanese anime studio to animated it
like lmao what

yikes that's going to far and digusting

 

Honestly, this was one of the first novels with a female protagonist who was both physically and mentally strong with all the characteristics that are often seen in an OP male protagonist. I am talking about, It is too hard to be a man after travelling in the future. I love the female protag and all the characters. Their specs and personality over all is good. But the author treated anyone who is not from Chinese Federation as either dumb or cruel or both. And any refugees who came to their nation were treated worse than animals and that was normalized. It was truly sickening. The initial chapters (i mean like 200 or so lol, it is a very long novel and i read it a long back so the timeline is a bit hazy but it was around those chapters) focused on the personal growth of important characters. But the moment our MC stepped into the world stage and started going for military expeditions, racism was dripping everywhere. It was to the point where I took a break from the novel to handle the bs written by author.

After so many novels, I have come to a conclusion that authors, regardless of them being Chinese, Korean or Japanese, they tend to show racism towards other nationalities. And it sucks. It often ruins a good novel. I wish authors could remove their bias. A person is not automatically bad just because they are not from your nation or not affiliated to your race... It is even more ridiculous to have this setting in survival-type novels where humanity is literally dying. Race would be the least of our concerns when there is a bigger enemy uniting us.

 

Beastmen slaves being butchered and eaten in Gate.

Elven slaves getting raped and tortured to death in a variety of novels.

Mind you, most stories have non-humans like elves, beastmen, and dwarves able to have fertile children with humans, thus they are races and not species.

 

Ita china, nothing new. Its mostly korean and chinese that are pretty racist towards people of other nationalities. Japanese? They arent as racist as korean and japanese, but japanese tends to brag about how their culture is the best like food and nature and i have no problem with that since its mostly true. Not all culture are equal after all, that applies for my nation's culture, heck i think we don't even have culture anymore since our culture got wiped out by some random religion from the desert

I haven't been reading any chinese novel this year but what novel is it tho?

 

They were both untranslated novels that I read. I don’t remember what the first one was from. The second one was about an mc with a system that could warp reality. He could create anything that he could imagine as long as he had enough points. He got points from people’s emotions or something like that. He created cultivators, vampires, espers, secret organizations, Iron Man armor, revived Qin Shi Huang and a bunch of other stuff.

 

I've forgotten the novel but it was a character reflecting on their time as a member of the Nazi regime and the thing was based on a supposedly true tale. Which is why it stuck with me. It was about the person peeling the skin off of people alive just for the fun of it in front of the women's kid and then the individuals were used to make something else and no one in the group at the time complained because the female he was doing it to was a Russian. Then he went on and joined some group in the Nazi military and helped in mass executions of the Russians, Poles and other ethnicities in that region.

At the end of the man's story he was asked if he regretted it and said no he did not and if he had the chance he'd make sure he could do it all again. The man exited the story after that point with no repercussions for his actions.

 

This is nothing like what’s been asked to discuss here...

This is talking about racism towards real life countries/people even if it’s in ‘fiction’.

Racism towards non-humans is common but also used as a theme to drive the story or certain characters. What’s been discussed here is just authors writing awful things that almost never actually contribute to the plot or character progression in any meaningful way other than playing on the ‘my country is better than yours’ mentality.



As to my experiences racism wise it usually goes Chinese > Korean > Japanese in terms of racism quantity both in number of different novels and number of times per novel. Not to say it isn’t there in the latter two, but the former definitely takes the cake. I can count on one hand the number of modern Chinese novels I’ve read that don’t have racism whenever anything outside of China is mentioned. The worst are those set in other countries. While each instance in those might not be as awful as the ones OP mentioned, the constant ignorance and self superiority is very grinding.

And speaking of Godzilla, Tales of Reincarnated Serpent has America and Japan constantly being shat on by Kaiju. While it’s not overt laughing at them, it’s pretty annoying,

 

I'm having difficulty remembering anything too out there in the japanese stuff. All large organizations were pretty underhanded and vulnerable compared to the MC. He flat out blatantly murdered a man in coldblood of another country, and they let him go to avoid conflict.

The government's are all self serving, and everyone is in over their heads other than the mc.

Not going to say it's well designed, but it doesn't seem racist. Obviously has a few superiority tones, but you will never find a successful asian novel that mentions any asian country as superior to their own.

The international relations of asian countries is a clusterfuck of "righteous fury". They all hate each other, they all think they have good reason to, and most of the world just ignores it until something goes to far. As such, I don't think solo leveling ever did anything I'd classify as too far.

 

Just accept that ALL asian countries are racist towards each other, no point for the pot to call the kettle black.
Not sure why everyone keeps pretending and try to be all PC-like.


JP novels and manga are plenty racist. They just disguise it under isekai tropes or different naming conventions (other races are given different names, but you know who they were subtly/unsubtly referring to).

There's "award winning" work like 86.
Or the trash known as Terroformars.

 

That's top qyality shitposting right there dude. Please give me the names of the series...

 

I remembered reading a chinese e-sport novel which describing the Europe team as inhumane or real bastard cause they tend to messed up their rival mind before the competition by cursing them dying or something and in the competition, the Europe team also used a sh*tty attack plan. Since I'm not much a gamer and I don't really know about e-sport, I sincerely wondered if in real life the E-sport teams also do that or it's just racism from the author?!! Because if it is like that in real life, e-sport is really sucks! The image of e-sport is really bad and toxic for all human mentality that make me wanna curse something or for the worst situation, puke from it

 

Japanese novels don't tend to shove their racism down your throat. But when you do notice, it's pretty savage.

There was this one work in which an offhand comment mentioned how Chinese and Korean women deserved to be raped during WWII. Everyone implicitly agreed.

 

In my opinion, the overt racism in many of the novels on NovelUpdates is:
1) Just a cultural thing. Every Asian hates all other Asians & China especially is a xenophobic country with an elitist & nationalist mentality far exceeding a certain Austrian's German Reich.

And 2) Plain old lazy writing. Why bother coming up with "good" reasons to hate a person, guild or whatever other group, if racism can automatically make an MC mortal enemies with a new antagonist.

 

i don't know.....99% of what i read that have anything related to "earth", have racism somehow even when they trasmigrate/reincarnate in other "fantasy" worlds....so there isn't any point into discussing wich is more racist, because imho any form of racism it's the same, irrelevant from the quantity.

 

In the Jeju Island arc, practically all Japanese characters were just cannon fodder.

And in the Japan Crisis arc:

Spoiler

1 million people in Japan have died. In total 29 giants appear, all S-Ranked, and began destroying Japan. Japan attempted to get Korea to help but Korea releases the black box evidence and everyone understands Japan is to blame so no one says anything when Korea refuses to help. However, Sung Jin-Woo volunteers to resolve the crisis.

As I said, it might just seem like that to me.

 

I disagree. The title is racism. All I see is nationalism labeled as racism. If you throw out language, can you tell the difference between English, French, and German people? I sure as shit can't. Same deal with Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

And really, aside from kaiju, is anything you guys listed not something China isn't already doing irl? Slave labor, sterilization of a people, live organ harvesting, taking women and forcing them to marry or sleep with CCP supporters. You know, generally hitting every genocide check box and getting mad when called out on it.

Then there's the absolute shit Imperial JP did to China and Korean from WWI to WWII. In retaliation kr is known to have kidnapped jp women. While the CCP constantly uses jp's past for it's current propaganda so they can get local support for attempts at taking jp islands.

Basically all three have bad blood, so it's not surprising.

 

I've read a novel where MC school got visited by Japan school. When the representative give speech the author just write this.

(Author's Note: Japanese is too complicated, I'm not going to write it out. Everyone, just treat it as if there's a duck quacking…)

That maybe not most racist out there but definitely dumbest kind of racist.