Why Are Asian Chicks so Weird?
Oriental Inscrutability and the trope of Weird Asian Girls
You’ve heard of Dragon Ladies, China Dolls, and ABGs, but have you heard of WAACs? I’m coining it now. Weird Ass Asian Chicks.1
They’re everywhere.
Pitch Perfect’s Lilly/Esther, who “set[s] fires to feel joy”; Mantis, from Guardians of the Galaxy, with her off-putting bug-eyes; and, most recently, Severance’s Miss Casey, who exists purely to list facts about other people’s lives.
Key features of these women include: a lack of social awareness, an emotional inscrutability, and a penchant for jarringly odd, out-of-place statements that throw viewers off beat.
Fat Amy: "How sexy and mysterious."
Lilly: "Like how all my teeth are from other people."
Lilly: [Cracks a smile].
- Pitch Perfect 2
Ms. Casey: "Upon request, I can also perform a hug."
- Severance, S1 Ep5
These WAACs function to provide comic relief by virtue of their sheer strangeness. Their uncanny one-liners elicit both surprise and amusement from the audience. The structure of their sentences, the content of their speech; both are so off-kilter that one can’t help but chuckle.
Notably, for these jokes to land, all three women are cast as visibly East Asian. Part of the humor’s effectiveness lies in the WAACs’ unnamed foreignness. Their awkwardness, incoherence, and social faux passes are not full jokes in themselves. They’re the punchlines to an unspoken set-up; that of failed cultural assimilation.
Mantis: I am Mantis.
Drax: What are you doing?
M: Smiling. I hear it is the thing to do to make people like you.
D: Not if you do it like that.
M: Oh. I was raised alone on Ego’s planet. I do not understand the intricacies of social interaction.
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Unlike that of Manic Pixie Dream Girls, who are almost definitionally white, WAACs’ weirdness is not sexy, mysterious, nor a synecdoche for great depth. It’s just weird. Sometimes gross, sometimes laughable, but ultimately straightforward and shallow. It does not profess to be hiding a rich inner world, nor is it an indicator of mental illness, nor is it a clue to a dark, complicated past. WAACs are meant to be taken at face value: odd, eerie women that don’t fit into society, and who lack the required intrigue to be a central character, or even a desirable love interest.
Mantis: "Drax, Drax. Drax! Drax! We need to talk."
Drax: "I’m sorry. But I like a woman with some meat on her bones."
M: "What?"
D: "I tried to let you down easily by telling you I found you disgusting."
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Take, as another example, S1 E5 of Severance. The episode follows its central romantic pairing, Mark S. (Adam Scott) and Helly R. (Britt Lower), both of whom are white, as they evade the comically oblivious, emotionally detached Miss Casey (Dichen Lachman). It’s suggested, three episodes on [SPOILERS AHEAD], that Miss Casey has feelings for Mark S. (which Lower later confirms in a behind-the-scenes interview), but that she realizes her affection could never be returned; for, in her own words, “I know I'm... strange" (S1 E8).
While this stereotype seems a far-cry from the more common culprits of harmful Asian-femme caricatures (e.g. exotic sex-dolls, submissive pets, heartless femme fatales, etc.), the WAAC nonetheless has roots in an old, xenophobic cliché: that of the inscrutable Oriental.
Harking back to the late 1870s, when the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act was first proposed, Senator John F. Miller accused the Chinese of being “perfectly unimpressible” (read: emotionless); as “changeless, fixed, and unalterable”; as “machine-like in every physical characteristic”; and “as different from all other peoples in their characteristics, habits, methods, and appearance as if they were the inhabitants of another planet” (qtd. in Disaffected, p. 175-176, emphasis mine).
(Granted, the “alien” metaphor for racial minorities is nothing new to my readers. We saw it with the “Alien Enemies Act,” used to incarcerate Japanese Americans during WW2, and we see it today being deployed against innocent Venezuelans.)
This inscrutability was conveyed, by politicians like Miller, as a great threat to white Americans; who, unlike Asian immigrants, felt and expressed their emotions in a “normative,” predictable, and thus culturally acceptable way. Miller, among others, worried that Oriental inscrutability would spread like contagion (an earlier iteration of the “Kung Flu”) and incapacitate White citizens. As Xin Yao puts it:
Oriental inscrutability stands out as the primary expression (or lack of it) of the treacherous inhumanity of the Yellow Peril that threatens the good white American family and its health, its labor, and the foundation of its way of life.
- Xin Yao, Disaffected (2022), p. 175.
And this racial construction didn’t end with the Exclusion Act. As Kyla Schuller and Cathy Park Hong have shown, it was continually deployed to bolster the narrative that Asians were biologically inferior to white people, as well as to justify the exploitation of Asian workers. After all, if Asians are unfeeling machines, then there’s no harm in their being overworked and underpaid.
Notably, we see this unsettling perception well and alive today in New York City, where – as of 2025 – the CPC have stolen 80 million dollars in wages from their Asian home workers.
And we might see it reflected in the fictional case of Miss Casey, whose entire life – in keeping with the overarching theme of Severance – is constituted, down to every last second, by labor.
Unlike her non-Asian counterparts, Miss Casey does not get to experience friendship, romance, or any other kind of relational fulfillment. Her whole world is limited to the 30-minute “therapy” sessions she provides to a rotating door of employees, who are required to mirror her stoic, immovable demeanor for the duration of each conversation. There is no element of human interaction across her cold, sanitary existence, in part because she, as a automaton Oriental, seems incapable of genuine warmth.
Thus, until the end of Season 1, Miss Casey exists purely as an extension of her employers’ insidious projects, and as a comedic prop to the “main storyline” unfolding several rooms away. She’s denied empathy from either the audience or her fellow characters, until – as Season 2 shows – it’s almost too late.
And therein lies the key danger of being perceived as a WAAC: its inherent dehumanization.
Once you’re assigned the role of WAAC, it becomes impossible to take you seriously. Your words are pre-emptively undermined by virtue of who you are. They’re dismissed in a variety of ways, ranging from full alienation (“She creeps us out”), to infantilization (“Oh! How kooky and random!”), to overt sexualization.
In real life, these tropes act to reproduce the boundaries of social acceptability, cultural relevance, and political authority, from which WAACs are permanently excluded. In order to be read as a legible person, one must either be either fully, successfully assimilated, and culturally articulate (think Severance’s Gemma, whose PhD in Russian Literature provides a stark contrast to her innie’s grammatical awkwardness; but also real-life figures, like Mayor Michelle Wu, who’s recently made headlines for her sharp, Harvard-educated rebuttal of the president), or entirely foreign and deliberately unreachable (think White Lotus’ Mook, but also our newfound adoration for K-Pop stars like Jennie and aespa, who were both featured in Billboard’s Women of 2025).
While these latter celebrities are, perhaps, not revered in quite the same light as Western-ized stars like Sandra Oh, Michelle Yeoh, or Greta Lee, they’re nevertheless afforded a dignity that hybrid Asian/Western artists aren’t. Their opacity is a deliberate product of their foreignness; not, as with Miss Casey, Mantis, or Lilly, an indicator of failed assimilation.
In other words, if you can’t succeed at Westernization, it’s best not to attempt it at all. For if you fail and fall, you’ll end up in the zone of WAAC. Weird Ass Asian Chicks, straddling the uncanny valley of a cultural in-between; consigned to being misunderstood, try-hards, and uncomfortably strange.
As a real-life example, consider the amount of hate that Japanese-American artist Yoko Ono received (and still receives) for her transnationally inspired avant garde work. Just a quick google search leads to page after page of (mostly white) people calling her talentless, uncreative, and strange.
Or, as a more modern counterpart, the response received by Japanese-American Mitski, who pivots between being constantly misunderstood, flattened out and oversimplified, or simply (if kindly) dubbed strange and cryptic.
It’s in this way that the WAAC stereotype bleeds out to obscure our vision of real, flesh-and-blood Asian femmes, whose genius and depth is overwritten by the oddity of their presentation, mannerisms, and speech. Oriental inscrutability (or, in my terms, Weirdness) thus becomes a way to capture and ridicule a foreignness that exceeds the bounds of Western predictability.
Against this minimization, what might it mean to reclaim our own weirdness, our own inscrutability, as a form of Asiatic fugitivity; to exploit this illegibility as a form of concealment for radical, political ends? This and more will be the topic of my next essay in this series, so subscribe and stay tuned 😉
This originally said Freaky Asian Girls, before I quickly realized why the acronym wouldn’t work.
You're absolutely correct that such tropes only reinforce what is socially acceptable and culturally relevant. Reducing Asian-American female fictional characters to such narrow clichés ultimately hurts us. Unfortunately, I was an Asian girl who *did* grow up feeling odd and eerie, an angsty and misunderstood poet and novelist, whom nobody ever crushed on at the height of teenage puppy-love politics. I wanted to literally *be* Luna Lovegood, which is hard when you're Korean-American in a bumfuck Midwest suburb of about 4,000 people.
If I may, I'd like to gently push back against your point on how WAACs can never be read as "legible people". Nobody is raised the exact same way, and maybe this is solely the product of my own upbringing, but "succeeding" at Westernization has never been worth anything to me. I relished being Korean, and if anyone laughed at my food or made a North Korea joke (more Asian diaspora clichés!) I would bristle defiantly, or strike back if provoked. But I also dealt with it by leaning into my own strangeness, my potential for capriciousness. I loved movies like "Amelie" and "I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK". For me, the traits of these main characters were a vehicle to imagine, then approach, a version of myself that was closer to my ideal– which was a girl with creative ideas and unique thoughts, who always had something fascinating to say.
I cringe when I think about how annoying, theatrical, and self-absorbed I must have been. I see all the ways that it backfired on me. Despite that, I think the "quirkiness" I strived to recreate, helped people (classmates and teachers alike) to witness and understand that I had depth, that I possessed creative ideas and interesting viewpoints, that I was a person beyond my race and not some blank slate for some broad sense of Asianness. Being inscrutable actually freed me, because the people around me were required to know me and figure me out, or at least compelled to try.
The key danger in this trope is dehumanization, so maybe my experience is not quite the same as what you write about. I'm unfamiliar with Mantis since I'm not a Marvel fan. Lilly's character is so one-dimensional and lacks the subtlety to be even slightly funny. Miss Casey is hardly even a person. Also, I don't mean this to be a "gotcha!", but artists like Regina Spektor, Bjork, FKA twigs, and Lady Gaga when they first came on the scene were subject to similar mischaracterizations. I'm not sure this is strictly limited to Asian-American artists; most art created outside the confines of whatever cultural wave is trendy will receive this attitude from general audiences.
Okay, now can I blame my lack of Substack notoriety on how my "genius and depth" is masked by the "oddity of [my] presentation, mannerisms, and speech"? Looking forward to your next post!
It’s interesting because black women want to break free of the sassiness trope and be seen as weird. Being in these kind of roles would be praised. It’s interesting what is oppressive for some of us, is freedom to others.