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I am going to watch the fuck out of Elementary.
While I love Sherlock, you can’t say that as an Asian woman I didn’t cringe during the Blind Banker when Soo Lin Yao appeared—and, overall, I do have issues with Sherlock’s depictions (or lack thereof) of people of color.
(My gripes with Soo Lin—besides the fact that I’m still trying to figure out what Soo correlates to in Chinese—is that for someone who’s been in England since her teens, her english is so terrible it borders on racist. Many of my friends have been in the States since they were her age and I promise you that fluent English is possible.
Plus, although I defer to the show and understand that it’s part of the plot, it really annoys me when Chinese characters are pigeonholed into being part of the Mafia/Triads/Yakuza/whatever the fuck Koreans have. I promise you we’re not all out to smuggle stuff/assassinate people.
TL;DR Soo Lin = Orientalizing.)
Plus, can we talk about how uncomfortable a lot of the furor over Lucy Liu playing Watson has made me? I mean, that infamous buzzfeed editor said that he wasn’t trying to be racist, but if he really wanted to make the point he claims he was trying to make, he should have contrasted a picture of Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller instead.
So yeah, even if Elementary is terrible (which I hear it isn’t) or isn’t as good as Sherlock (which I hear it is), I am going to watch it.
