In trying to reach its outrage quota, NBC News has decided to complain about Batman saving an Asian man from being assaulted.
The NBC News piece, written by Angela Yang, is a cookie-cutter, outrage-farming piece. Yang starts by noting that “critics on Twitter” (i.e., nobody important) are calling a scene when a group of men follows an Asian man to attempt to assault him “triggering” and “insensitive.” We are told that “some are tweeting content warnings” about the scene and that “several people” think making an Asian man a possible assault victim was an “oversight.”
Of course, we are told “users” criticized the scene “as seemingly the only form of Asian representation in the film.” The only thing missing from the piece is the classic “experts say” framing, although Yang makes up for this omission by citing a podcast host who declares the scene to be triggering.
There are two possible real explanations for the scene. The first is acknowledged by Yang herself: The Batman was filmed during a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes, many of which took place in New York City — the real-world analog to the fictional Gotham City where Batman resides. In that case, Yang is presumably hoping to farm outrage because a film reminded people that real-world hate crimes took place.
An equally plausible scenario is that the film was simply depicting a crime, and the race of the victim was completely irrelevant. This, of course, is impossible in our racialized age. Race is the primary, and often only, thing that matters at outlets like NBC.
Either way, Yang’s piece and the Twitter users she highlights only serve to paint Asian Americans as children who must be coddled. They must be protected from seeing a fictional character of the same race almost assaulted before being saved by a man in a bat costume.
The only thing offensive about this whole ordeal is the idea that Asian Americans are too fragile to handle a movie scene without a trigger warning.
This is an embarrassing way to view the world. It’s also an embarrassing piece designed to capitalize off film hype for a few clicks. That a supposedly serious outlet like NBC News would deem this worthy of a story speaks to the sorry state of legacy media and its pathetic need to inject race into every single aspect of life.
