Voadam
Legend
I watched the whole 2 hour first episode of the Asians Represent series of reading 1e OA. The factually inaccurate 1 hour discussion of comeliness mechanics as being created for OA to play up sexualized stereotypes of sexy dragon lady Asian women and unattractive or desexualized Asian men was very offputting. The comeliness mechanics can feed into those stereotypes, but it was factually not created for OA to sexualize and otherize Asians by being only applicable to Asian characters.I am loathe to re-enter this conversation given that this was thoroughly hashed out before. However, I think that it is important to note several of the overarching criticisms of OA used in the series were .... shall we say exceptionally similar to the 2016 article in Analog Game Studios. And as @Alzrius and others pointed out, many of the specific criticisms in that article that were later used in the Asians Represent series were pointed out to be incorrect at that time (in 2016). Flagrantly so.
The most famous example is, of course, comeliness. This was not some attempt to "exoticize" the other or make Asian men seem effeminate (??), instead it was a new statistic that was driven by Gygax and previously included in Unearthed Arcana to be applicable to all D&D games.
Comeliness was a terrible sexualized mechanic but prior to OA it was developed and published for generic 1e AD&D in Dragon Magazine issue 67 (November '82), The World of Greyhawk Campaign Setting Boxed Set (October '83) and Unearthed Arcana (June '85) all before Oriental Adventures (October '85). OA was a full player's handbook type book with all the player rules for a complete 1e game using the new OA classes and such and so included comeliness as part of that.
I had heard Asians represent was a good explanation of criticisms of OA. It was mostly not an explanation, I found it was mostly looking at things and then shaking their heads about how things were self-evidently problematic.
I did not find their criticisms or discussion persuasive or informative. I did not watch any more episodes.