As a creative, stick to your guns

Did anyone read Christopher Nolan’s response to the backlash surrounding his latest film?

Put aside the culture war nonsense. We saw a plethora of history enthusiasts who felt like Nolan was disrespectful for refusing to adhere to the culture and traditions of the source material (Homer’s The Odyssey).

YouTube is choked with videos of experts ridiculing everything from the language in Nolan’s adaptation (too modern for some people’s tastes) to the armour. When quizzed on these visceral reactions in an interview, Nolan was not bothered, insisting that The Odyssey 2026 was not a recreation of the source material but rather his vision of an ancient story.

That response matters, because it speaks to a topic we have discussed before regarding creative integrity, specifically the idea that audiences don’t know what they want. As such, as a creative force, you should stick to your guns.

Tell the story you want to tell, how you want to tell it, because giving audiences what they think they want will only lead to disappointment. I highlight this conversation because the medium of anime and manga is struggling under a similar burden.

With anime/manga, you have Japanese people telling stories for a Japanese audience with a common language and familiar attitudes. Guess what has happened in the last decade? Anime/manga has become a global sensation, gaining a foothold in Europe and the United States.

Hollywood keeps investing in live-action adaptations of popular anime because the West has embraced Japanese storytelling like never before. Unfortunately, that development has produced unexpected consequences.

The author of Mushoku Tensei recently published an Instagram post reacting to viewers who keep asking him to change the supposedly problematic aspects of his story, the most notable being the protagonist’s polygamy, which has rubbed Western fans the wrong way.

Kei Urana, who wrote Gachiakuta, had no idea that Western viewers would mistake one of her characters for a transgender person. She was even more surprised when they started asking her to validate their assumptions, reacting poorly when she did the opposite and insisted that neither the character nor the author were non-binary.

And then there’s Syundei, who left X (formerly Twitter) after audiences took offense with the steep age gap between the characters in some of his romance stories. I could list more examples, but you get the point.

And to be fair, if you dig into some of these controversies, you may eventually agree with the backlash. For instance, the Syundei/age-gap issue attracted criticism because the romantic scenes in question involved a teenage student and an adult teacher.

However, that does not change the crux of this conversation: these authors wrote for a specific audience, trusting them to understand and embrace their content because they all originate from the same culture.

Problems only arose when voices from outside that culture consumed and then reinterpreted that content through a foreign lens, hence the chaos unfolding online. To the credit of these authors, they won’t budge.

They have stated publicly that they will stay true to the original vision of their work, regardless of what foreign critics say. You also have experts in the Japanese anime/manga industry who have warned Japanese creators against compromising their vision to appease Western audiences.

But ultimately, this brings us to an unsavoury conclusion. Maybe this concept of globalization that everyone keeps pushing is untenable. Maybe some cultures are at such odds with one another that attempting to blend them will only create friction. Maybe we are all better off staying in our corners of the world, only occasionally peeking out to see what everyone else is up to.

katmic200@gmail.com

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