Aster (stella azurea)

stella-azurea.comRegarding my current health status, hiatus, and future plans - stella azureaHello! I don't know how many people may be reading this right now, but since the last time I seriously posted something coherent about this in public was sometime back in 2022 on the old version of th...

6 Aug

Regarding my current health status, hiatus, and future plans stella-azurea.com/blog/2026/08...

It's the members of K-Pop group BTS... ...and Sanji

My parents immigrated to the US in the 70s, so my tastes in Korean food are a little old-fashioned, and restaurant bulgogi in Korea or the US tends to be too sweet for me. Most of the time, we make it at home in bulk (with, uh, Trader Joe's beef), freeze it, and save it for later

Of course, I don't eat Korean food every day, it just happened to be a timely day when I was cooking a package, so here you go. This is probably too undignified of a frozen meal for tanuki* summoning, though... *This is related to a Twitter ongoing meme in Japan at the moment

"It's funny how the most famous KPop Demon Hunters song is Golden because it's the one that feels most Korean" "In what way?" "It's in triple meter" (Things that only make sense to my own skewed priorities)

Went to go hang out with two friends, both Mexican-American. One is deep enough into anime and industry to follow seasonals, the other is more casual. We talk ambiently about industry and culture, and not just about anime, but also things like "I work in electronics and we have -

And my friends can distinguish different kinds of Asians, but a lot of people can't, and the point of the discussion is that in the end, all of this is going to affect how Asians get perceived *as a whole* whether anyone likes it or not.

Incidentally, this kind of thing also means I get to hear a lot about anime and manga's reception in Mexico and other LatAm countries, and it drives in even further how short-sighted the typical framing of "Asian content vs. Western values" is.

- reps from China, Korea, and Japan come in to negotiate, and I notice the Chinese stance is usually X, the Korean one Y, and the Japanese ones Z" And this is just a normal conversation, and we have ones like these almost every day.

So here's your random cultural factoid of the day: "galbi" as it's known outside Korea is actually the result of Korean-American immigrants using beef cuts from Latin-American butchers because the traditional style was infeasible. It's called "LA galbi" in Korea for this reason.

(Incidentally, this is obviously a much better cut in its original Latin-American context, so this is absolutely not a dig against that. It's the marinade style that specifically messes things up)

Also, specifically to be clear: Los Angeles is home to one of the most significant Korean-American population enclaves in the US and *also* happens to be the largest site of cultural interaction with the Latin-American diaspora, so it got associated with Los Angeles = LA galbi.

Fundamentally, it's an adaptation made out of necessity, and the way galbi has to be marinated and prepared is actually a rather incompatible pain... ...so the fact I sometimes see it sold in Korea as a premium galbi cut is like "we didn't do this because we had a choice, you know!!"

Thinking about it, maybe I'll start talking ambiently about the daily life of an Asian-American otaku in LA, because I think people don't realize how much of a role the AAPI community plays (and how much of a stake we have) in Asian media's reception here bsky.app/profile/stel...

Aster (stella azurea)@stella-azurea.com

I don't want the algorithm to penalize me if I stop posting regularly again (mainly Twitter but I crosspost), but if I keep getting caught up in the cross-cultural drama of the week my doctor will have words for me during my next blood draw, so I need to figure out something else. Any ideas?

This is normally something I very rarely talk about online because I usually try to separate my online and offline lives, but the reality is that this "daily life" is critical to understanding that we absolutely do not have a neutral stake in how well Asian stuff is accepted here

so I'll try to keep it laid-back and fun, but hopefully people will understand that we weren't just sitting back here twiddling our thumbs while Asian media from different countries just *happened* to catch on. So look forward to that, I guess?

Oh right, also, it depends on the location, but Trader Joe's is selling Halloween themed tote bags and it's funny because they make me think of Eva. (Please don't scalp them, though!!)

"Why am I writing about Trader Joe's tote bags" If you know, you know.

Oh yeah, I guess I have this to say: to people here for the cancelled Uma Musume concert, please go check out Fugetsu-do in Little Tokyo. It's a small Japanese-American wagashi shop that's been doing business since 1903 so I always want them to get more support

(Of course in LA there are tons of things I want to see supported, but I'm guessing a lot of people here for a Japanese media concert will probably be frequenting LT at least once and that's always the first thing I make a point of recommending there)

Incidentally, the actual heart of the Japanese-American communities is the Torrance/Gardena area, so while it's somewhat further out of the way for a lot of people, please consider supporting some businesses there if you happen to go there on the way back to LAX

I feel like being Asian-American and having to witness a cross-cultural fight online is always a special level of hell because you know *exactly* where the cultural gap is coming from, and also that all of the "explanations" suck and fixing it requires a Ted Talk-level seminar

-- community, it's like "yeah, sorry, we have to follow industry issues because it affects all of us. Politically. Must be nice for you to think we actually have a choice."

Just to be clear, this is not about multicultural background in general. This is "being AAPI means constantly running armchair economics and analysis on each Asian country's soft power export strategy is a survival skill when it determines what ends up on your grocery shelf."

If your sole image of "Westerners" is of those whose only interest is in anime for the media and fandom, you can pass them off as being nosy and about other people's affairs for their entertainment (and you'll be right in a lot of cases), but for me in an entire local AAPI --

My heart goes out to everyone who's going to be stuck in Los Angeles, I'm sorry that we have to simultaneously be the most otaku event friendly city in the US and (structurally) one of the worst to be in as a tourist

I really will defend our local *culture* that makes this kind of event possible with tooth and nail but I unfortunately have absolutely nothing good to say about our city planning, structure, or traffic problems. I'm so sorry

Honestly, if you ask me what I think is the most valuable thing Western vocalsynth fans can do right now, the answer is "documentation". I think this is the biggest advantage we have over most international sectors of the community, and it's more important than ever right now.

In TCG terms, the Japanese side is disadvantaged because they're stuck with a C tier deck and an opponent with an S tier one. The stereotype is that overseas folks are the last line of defense because we're able to cheat, but the actual advantage is that we're used to using *every* deck in the meta.

*Correction: I accidentally pulled the number that comes from the generic KAITO entry, but once V3 is included the number goes over 20,000.

Of course, the fact we have such a solid foundation with this also why we tend towards having the luxury of resting easy and thinking "this culture is too strong to be killed this easily." But the way things are going, I think this will be more important than ever.

I do wholeheartedly believe we have an important role to play, but it's not in the raw firepower "war" sense I saw it being framed as. It's all in the things that you "can't see". We have *so much* more than you think, to the point we have the luxury of not worrying at all.

For instance, if you have any proficiency in English at all (you don't even need to be fluent), VocaDB currently has 14676 KAITO songs logged as of this writing, with the help of everyone who created the system and pitched in to keep track. Of course, it's not perfect, and it --

-- covers audio work more than all of the other branches, but the point I'm making is that it's the *most* comprehensive thing we have. We have wikis with software development history, organized tutorials, you name it.

The biggest reason the issue felt so downright existential was that Vocaloid culture is so diffuse and spreads over so many things that it's hard to keep track of, so once a major entity with power takes action against it, the foundation becomes vague. However, Western Vocaloid -

- fandom was structurally forced to get by with stuff across a ton of different unreliable areas in different languages over the years, so we actually managed to solve many of the historical and creative documentation problems that are present in more isolated communities.

I'm cooling down by collecting data about my background, and one interesting thing is that I used to say I started Vocaloid work in 2012, but now that there's no status difference between Vocaloid and other software anymore, I can shift that back to 2010, which is pretty cool.

I used to be in the "don't lump UTAU in with Vocaloid" camp, but that was because the status difference meant it would be devoured, and things have changed, so I'm now "don't get pedantic about engine differences when it's not relevant." Power and status dynamics are everything.