It’s Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, and for many people, this means taking extra time to appreciate our cultural history, highlight Asian work, and call attention to issues in the community. For people who love video games, that second part might involve playing the huge amount of Asian-made and sadly less ubiquitous Asian-starring games that have impacted video game history and aesthetics, like Japanese-made Super Mario Bros. and Shenmue.
For some white people, though, Asian appreciation tends to crawl past appreciation and into something more damaging. Recently, some white e-girls have been catching criticism online for “asianfishing,” a term predated by “blackfishing” and “catfishing,” all of which refer to people that significantly alter their appearance online. For asianfishers, this usually means engaging in the highly-criticized “fox eye” trend of pulling eyes back to make them look slanted, taping their eyes back, or using makeup to significantly change their facial features to look “Asian,” most typically East Asian.
