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East of West is a genuinely fantastic book and I especially love the Endless Nation a lot, but this just kills me. It's the most frustrating thing in the world.
1/8
1/8
Narsimha is the leader of the Endless Nation, the united nation of all the Native Americans, sometimes called Indians.
Narsimha is named after an Indian myth of a god that turned into a mix of a man and lion.
The catch? Not that kind of Indian.
2/8
Narsimha is named after an Indian myth of a god that turned into a mix of a man and lion.
The catch? Not that kind of Indian.
2/8
Narasimha is a distinctly Hindu myth. The name comes from the Sanskrit words Nara - meaning man - and Simha - meaning lion. The myth is part of the central mythology of Hinduism, about the 10 reincarnations of the god Vishnu.
3/8
3/8
There's a fairly obvious reason this happened - Hickman looked up "Indian myths" and found the name Narsimha and thought it sounded awesome. Because it is awesome! But he didn't do the most basic verification of checking where the myth originated from.
4/8
4/8
I love Jonathan Hickman's writing a lot. I just finished East of West and thought it was fantastic. But this is something that just really rubbed me wrong, and is part of a much larger trend that's immensely frustrating to me.
5/8
5/8
Indians seldom get any representation in comics. Aside from those published in India, there's incredibly few comics by Indian creators. Ram V, Sumit Kumar, Aditya Bidikar, and other newer talents are a fantastic change from that status quo, but are very much the exception.
6/8
6/8
So it really, really sucks when one of the only times I got to see a name I recognized from my own mythology in American comics was due to an error on the writer's part. It's something I still never get to see done right, and it sucks.
7/8
7/8
This isn't meant to be an indictment of East of West or its creators, I'm just incredibly frustrated with the pattern on display. I don't know how to change it. I try to still hope we can.
8/8
8/8
