“Oriental”, for folks resembling this world’s East Asians (Chinese, Pacific Rim) is… problematic, at best. It’s not an outright slur, obviously, but it’s got a bit of a negative history to it (not the least being that the term originally referred to what’s now the Middle East).

Of course, most of the other terms that might be chosen tend to have the same issue as “East Asian”–they’re based on geographic and historic features that don’t exist in Akarra (“Mongolian”, for instance). I suppose I’d just bite the bullet and default to ‘yellow’ or even ‘golden’, to contrast with white/black/brown. If there were a race consonant with the indigenous American tribes, I’d opt for ‘russet’, for what I think are obvious reasons.

And Oriental, if you look it up, generally refers to the countries – as in, those societies organized under the governments of the region – and therefore only indirectly refers to the people living there, who are not, by any stretch of the imagination, all one ethnicity or culture.

Given that the term falls short of even meeting that standard, it’s definitely not useful for delineating a particular stereotype you want to evoke, unless it’s a specious, racist one.

Which makes it still not a highly respectful way to refer to a person, and therefore bad practice to use it.

We had thankfully few issues like this, and I’d say most of the reason why comes down to the fact that we didn’t get tired of re-reading our old work. To be honest, we had a lot of arguments in GA’s middle period, so keeping that old work in our memories was partly a way to one-up each other when things got tense between us. “Look, dufus, we CAN’T have that character do that here because on page 22 of this chapter, he SPECIFICALLY SAYS…” etc.

Over at Menage a 3 and related series, my willingness to traipse through the archives makes me the series’ unofficial continuity cop. Today’s installment includes a nickname I corrected slightly because either Dave or Gisele remembered it as hyphenated.