Aw, Gaiman, why you gotta play like that?
Neil Gaiman is scripting the James Cameron-assisted movie version of Journey to the West.

I feel really kinda queasy about this. There are no few Asian writers for whom this story came with their milk teeth, like Cinderella does to an English-speaker, and Gaiman has been...bad...about stuff relating to other cultures before. I really doubt that having been for a visit to China is enough to justify his treatment of the script.

(And let's not talk about James Cameron. Ick.)

Mercredigirl over at Dreamwidth has more to say.

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Not to beat a dead horse, but...

nifflet
2011-03-28 09:02 pm UTC (link)

As a classicist, the "Odyssey is not really Greek!" comment made me go "Buh-whaaaa?" I mean, maybe I'm just ~biased because I read the damn thing in Ancient Greek but...wow, that right there is a whole lot of fail. There are a LOT of sub-textual puns in Greek that literally cannot be translated into English, never mind the cultural background that permeates the entire epic. The language, the setting, the characters...they're all fucking GREEK. You can't get the story on anything other than a superficial level unless you know GREEK CULTURE. HOW THE FUCK IS THE ODYSSEY "NOT GREEK" AND OH MY BLOOD PRESSURE.

In fact, that whole spiel could just as easily be applied to a white dude writing a Chinese story. I don't care how much you admire the culture or how many times you've eaten dim sum, there are deep-seated cultural things that a born and raised Chinese person just knows better than you. Period. Let them have their own damn story and tell it their own damn way.

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