Nickelodeon Grooms Them Early

Nickelodeon’s Make it Pop is an example of how the entertainment industry goes the extra mile in beginning the conditioning early. Make it Pop is a kid’s show, a musical comedy about an American K-pop (Korean pop) band.

According to Wikipedia, “Make It Pop follows three girls in boarding school – media star Sun Hi Song, fashionista Jodi Mappa, and bookworm Corki Chang -who, with the help of Caleb Davis, form a high school K-Pop-inspired band called XO-IQ and find music, mischief, love, and friendship.”

Nickelodeon performs the trifecta of exclusion of Asian males, depicting Asian women as hopelessly infatuated with white males, and the motif of white men treating relationships with Asian women as frivolous and disposable. All in a show aimed at kids who are at their most impressionable.

K-Pop features three Asian girls and one white guy. The male love interests and infatuations of these girls are white males. There is no Asian male in the cast or as a main recurring character.

The show makes it clear that Asian women belong in American society (granted in a specific role); they are featured and central. K-Pop stands for Korean pop music. In real life K-Pop, all the band members are Asian, female and male. In this TV version, all the girls are Asian and the one male is white. Nickelodeon intentionally excludes Asian males from the band. This is a kind of gender-specific whitewashing by Hollywood executives that is en vogue in casting decisions.

Whites are depicted as the ideal – high in social status and top in appearance. “Jared Anderson is the student president, football quarterback, and ruler of the school. Jared’s the most popular, confident, and amazing kid at Mackendrick,….Although every girl in school crushes over him, Jared knows his heart can only go to one person at a time.”

Naturally the only suitable kind of guy for the Asian girls in the band to fall for are white. In Season 1, Episode 2, Corki and Jared “have a moment”.

However, the key theme this show brings across is that white males don’t take Asian females seriously. In a later episode, Jared admits that he only hooked up with Corki “on a bet”. After this, he tells Corki he only “wants to be friends”. Corki is okay with it.

Hollywood repeats this theme so often, it is not unreasonable that this trend is now normal in our actual real life. Asian girl pines for white guy. Due to a preference for white males, driven by Hollywood, she forsakes other options (often abandoning her current boyfriend) for a chance with a white guy. But the white male only sees the Asian girl as a temporary thing. It is questionable whether they even respect the Asian girl or see them as compatible long-term, whatever they may say.

After Jared is intimate with the Asian girl, he has no issue at all leaving. The Asian girl is told by media like Make it Pop that this is to be expected and that being led along with false promises only to be discarded is nothing to be upset about. In fact, it is represented as an accomplishment. The real-life psychological scars of this kind of thing never comes across on TV.

This theme of white guys being the only romantic interest of the girls on the show is repeated over and again:

The message sent about Asian males to Asian females is: your Asian guy friends are all just unattractive clowns who aren’t good enough for you. They are incapable of love, romance, attraction. They are not cool.

Romantic preferences form early, even before puberty. Nickelodeon and Make it Pop have gone to extreme lengths to keep Asian boys off the show. The producer of the show at a private gathering during the Q&A was asked “Will there be an Asian guy in it?”. He said “Nope! Never! Asian guys in my show, not gonna happen!?, which drew laughter from the crowd.

So you see what we are up against, and the kind of person we are up against.

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