Alright, I know I just made a post about Turning Red, but I just wanted to say. What is with the obsession of reviewers over “relatability”?? In terms of representation and relatability, I feel like it is important that when realistically portraying a certain group of people, in this case middle school Chinese Canadian girls, these portrayals should be relatable to a degree within this demographic because, again, they are the group being portrayed — if Chinese Canadian girls and women can’t relate, then the representation may be superficial/disingenuous at best and racist and caricatured at worst.
However, just because an East Asian girl is being portrayed does not mean that every single Asian person and every single girl will relate to her perfectly — Asians aren’t a monolith, and as such, every Asian will have a different experience! This does not make Mei Lee a bad character — it just means that she is just one facet of the Chinese diasporic experience.
But I don’t think that “relating” to a media should be the sole criteria for enjoying something. There is such a thing as sympathizing with characters and enjoying a narrative. There is also watching something to gain some insight into a community you’re not a part of. There is no such thing as a universal narrative or experience that can “relate” to as many people as possible. Trying to make things “objective” or “universal” just creates soulless, boring media that often panders to a Eurocentric audience because that is Western society’s idea of objectivity. Also, by Pixar standards, the jokes were still funny and the story was still something that I feel a lot of middle schoolers could empathize with, with themes of conflicts between parents and puberty hitting hard. I truly don’t get why relatability is one of the things that I hear is wrong with this film when relatability was never something that I ever considered was a legitimate criteria for thinking something was good or not. But that’s just me; I’m curious if others feel relatability of story/characters is very important to them when deciding the quality of something.
