Reviews by domiri | The StoryGraph

1.24k reviews by:

domiri

Waves

Ingrid Chabbert

5.0

emotional sad fast-paced

Antisocial

Heidi Cullinan

3.0

emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I have complicated feelings about this books.

On the one side, the depiction of Skylar's sexuality is amazing.

Skylar identifies as being on the ace spectrum. The term grey sexual is suggested to him, but he doesn't claim it.</spoilers> I could write a paper about how wonderful the relationship between Skylar and Xander. I love how respectful Xander is of Skylar's feelings and boundaries. I also love how it isn't always Skylar stopping things, and that Xander also has times when he isn't ready to take certain steps; and how Xander wants to help Skylar accept himself but isn't trying to "fix" him, because his sexuality isn't something broken. I adore the way Cullinan writes about sexual acts and intimacy and how they can be the same things but how they can also be different things.

However I'm not sure if the wonderful representation on Skylar's part can cancel out how gross the book gets about Japanese culture.

To be sure there is some really great cultural appreciation. Xander talking about the impact of Hokusai's woodblock prints on art globally was impassioned and informative, and fanning out over manga (especially Hiromu Arakawa's Fullmetal Alchemist) is completely relatable.

However, there is also a lot of fetishization and objectification of Japanese culture. The worst example is regarding the founding of Benten College, which is the main setting of Antisocial. The story goes that some rich white boys went to Japan and fell in love with the culture. So when they came back to the USA they decided to start a home wave of the Japanese cultural revolution by founding a college where they could teach and gather like minded people. This included things like giving all the buildings Japanese names, and using their half-baked understanding of the Shinto religion to hide shrines around campus. But the rich kids ran out of money and so the school became more typical small college and the majority of the student population are rich kids who couldn't make it into an ivy league school.

Literally, why?