The Asiatic and the Anti-Asian Pandemic: On Paradise Killer
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Published:April 2024
Christopher B. Patterson, 2024. "The Asiatic and the Anti-Asian Pandemic: On Paradise Killer", Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) about Us, Christopher B. Patterson, Tara Fickle
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Chapter 2 explores the game Paradise Killer as a vehicle to revisit and reshape the term Asiatic, a troubled term that the author attempted to reanimate in his previous book as “a style rather than substance, a technology rather than an essence,” and a politically charged aesthetic. The author examines this term within its unexpected capacity to spread across disciplines during the reemergence of yellow peril anti-Asian racism within the COVID-19 pandemic. Is Asiatic appropriate only to games? How is the term divided from orientalism? Is the Asiatic always queer and/or nonserious and/or racist? Paradise Killer offers a sideways gaze into these inquiries that allows the author to explore these questions lowly, as in, to voice how this term emerged from particular circumstances and experiences and has continued to grow in the present.