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crystaldawn July 24 2010, 19:32:06 UTC
The Asian stereotypes are one of the things that Just Bugs Me about that series. Knives is randomly Chinese, yet knows... ninjitsu? When there are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more Chinese martial arts out there? And her dad carries a katana? Did he get it at the Generic Asian Import store? And the funny part is that apparently O'Malley is... half-Korean. Which makes it even more mind-boggling.

Well, obviously that's the only reason anyone would ever be vegan, dude. I can't remember, but didn't he still have his powers, even after eating gellato? Shouldn't the gellato itself have caused him to lose them? But it was only when the Vegan Police stomped in and TOOK his powers that he lost them? (I just realized how clinically insane the paragraph I just typed was)

I'm all for racial diversity in casting, because Hollywood DOES have a serious problem with it. But uhh.... if you're licensing a movie based on a property that doesn't have any non-white cast in it, then you're either going to have to 1. change the characters to fit or 2. suck it up and deal with it. It's more understandable when the cast of the original story had no diversity, but in something like Avatar? That was MADE to represent different Asian cultures? Yeah, it's pretty inexcusable. When the casting was announced, it was just one big flashing neon sign that Shaymalamadingdong didn't 'get it'.

SURPRISINGLY ENOUGH, HE IS THE VILLAIN. I KNOW YOU ARE SHOCKED. He's also the most hilarious person in that movie - I think at some point he just realized everything was dildos and decided to be as big of a ham as possible. Dev Patil (I think I spelled that right) played the OTHER main 'bad guy', who is actually important outside of season one.

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shiroyuki_kun July 24 2010, 19:42:00 UTC
And after Scott dumps her she starts dating their groupie or whatever that sort of looks like Scott and you're just like "uuuuh, okay yeah no"

Yeah exactly what you said. Envy also mentioned that he ate stir fry or an omelet I think, or something, and the Vegan Police were like "...IS that allowed? I don't remember..."

Isn't Shaymalayamading also like some form of Asian? Or am I just confused by his appearance. It's weird how he fucks up that badly...then again he isn't KNOWN for having good movies anymore. If only Avatar came out in the 90s, then he might have had a shot based on people's shitty expectations for greatness back then.

Was Zuko's uncle asian?

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crystaldawn July 24 2010, 19:56:22 UTC
Well, she couldn't be a proper Crazy Stalker Bitch stereotype without dating a guy who looks JUST LIKE SCOTT!

I want to say he's Indian, but I honestly don't know for sure. Doesn't matter, as he pretty obviously failed any kind of self-check on the casting for that movie. And he actually was asked why his movies suck now by a reporter (in so many words) and he told them to kill themselves:

http://www.journalfen.net/community/unfunnybusiness/276026.html#cutid1

He's such a charming fella.

Oh, Uncle Iroh? Nope, white (as far as I could tell - I was too busy boggling at how he wasn't really old OR portly). He kind of looked like Nicholas Cage, actually. Uhh, that's... not a good thing, either, in this case.

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shiroyuki_kun July 24 2010, 20:14:32 UTC
I just checked wikipedia, yeah he's Indian. As in INDIA Indian, not Native American like he's trying to say he is. Also, his name is so confusing that even Google had no idea what I was trying for. I just put in 'M. Night Sh' and let it figure it out.

WOW. WOOOOOOW. You know what, if I ever go to jail, it's going to be for shooting M. Night and Stephanie Meyer, and when asked why I did it, I will say FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND.
No seriously, I refuse to believe that anyone could like a movie, where in the big dramatic climax, people run from THE WIND. And not a tornado or something that could actually devastate you, but just A SUMMER'S BREEZE.

....RRRRRRRRRRRREHDTQWHAEITGQEATGFQWAETOGUASUFSFASGQIAF *foams at the mouth*

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crystaldawn July 24 2010, 21:14:43 UTC
According to IMDB, he just made his middle name up anyway, so it's not like he actually knows anything about the Lakota tribe.

HEY, I like SMeyer for entertainment value. She's awesome, even if she's a bit sensitive about some things. But yeah, Shaymalan is a douchebag, through and through. Nothing of value would be lost.

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shiroyuki_kun July 24 2010, 21:23:57 UTC
She may be entertaining, but I mean for the sake of humanities intelligence and the long run, so when the apocalypse inevitably comes and most forms of life are wiped out, the last woman should not know anything of Twilight...EVER. Standards of romance and sanity, it is not.

M. Night is a gigantic twatmonkey who doesn't care about anything but money, that's why he thinks he's successful, because his movies get him cash off people SEEING THEM TO SEE HOW BAD THEY ARE.

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crystaldawn July 24 2010, 21:32:47 UTC
Then you're going to have to wipe out every romance novel and every shoujo manga ever written, because Twilight is basically the exact same thing. The only real reason it got popular was because you didn't often see Vampire Romance marketed to teenage girls before it came along (usually because it contains a lot of sex - looking at you, Laura K. Hamilton).

Not saying it's NOT a hilariously bad series, but I also think it has its merits culturally. In example, how many movies, books, or tv series have you seen make it really big in the mainstream American media with a female main character written by a woman for an audience of women? That WASN'T a chick flick or romantic comedy that everyone forgets in six months? Twilight might suck, but because it's been successful, it's opened the door to more women writers and for more series to be made about women in general. Hollywood has seen that we're a viable market and will make more stuff to cater to us, hopefully made BY WOMEN who know what women actually want to see.

Best example I can think of is the new Avatar series having a female lead. When was the last time you saw a mainstream, popular young adult action series with a female main character? The fact that we can even *have* that means that we've moved forward with our entertainment options and that women are being acknowledged as a viable market now. (lest we forget, just ten years ago, a female lead in a children's action show was unthinkable - remember the Cardcaptors debacle?)

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shiroyuki_kun July 24 2010, 21:59:07 UTC
Yeah except you're forgetting something. 1) it's not vampire romance, it's SPARKLE romance. 2) It should not be a role model at all because IT'S WRITTEN IN FIRST PERSON. 3) Shoujo manga actually entertains me, because the characters have depth over a series of events, even if the romantic aspect to make them a couple comes in soon or it's obvious. Such examples as Ouran or Sailor Moon or Vampire Knight(which you may think is a bad example except the only really bland characters are the main boy love interests and the background characters you don't give a shit about).
Where as in Twilight Bella is boring as fuck and one dimensional and retarded and selfish and doesn't ever develop past this, and so are half the other characters. Honestly if it's opened the door for women writers it's for them to write shit that's BETTER to prove they can do it and show how it's done, instead of just submitting their final project journal entry wet dream fanfiction from college.

....Yes I remember Cardcaptors, do you remember Sailor Moon, who despite it's heavy dubbing and edits she is still a popular and nostalgic "children's action show heroine"? You may see it as advancement, but I just see it as uncommon but not unheard of.

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crystaldawn July 24 2010, 22:52:04 UTC
I can't tell if your first two points are serious or not (you're not SERIOUSLY dismissing first person story-telling as crap out of hand, are you? Please say 'no', because otherwise you're dismissing Slayers as crap, and that's kind of really counter-productive to your argument altogether), but as for the third... have you actually read Twilight? It's got about the same level of depth as your typical shoujo romance. And I actually read a lot of shoujo, so I'm not just pulling the comparison out of my ass. They're both entertaining, but I'm not going to hold either up as a great example of 'depth' in characterization. The characters in Sailor Moon, as much as I love the series, are pretty much cookie-cutter stereotypes based on astrology (the characters match their star sign PERFECTLY) and often take a backseat to the love story between Usagi and Mamoru.

do you remember Sailor Moon, who despite it's heavy dubbing and edits she is still a popular and nostalgic "children's action show heroine"?

It's only remembered that way to anime fans. And I watched Sailor Moon when it was first being dubbed on UPN and had a godforsaken 6am timeslot - it opened the door for more anime in general to come out over here and the interest basically got Toonami off the ground. It also got a whole boatload of girls to start buying manga (Sailor Moon was what MADE TokyoPop the publisher it is today) and showed that shoujo is a profitable genre to publishers.

Cardcaptor Sakura, on the other hand, was licensed by Nelvana, who wanted to show it on Saturday morning cartoons on one of the major networks. They decided that their target audience wouldn't watch an action cartoon about a girl (the thinking goes that girls will watch whatever boys watch, but boys won't watch a series about a girl), so they deleted a bunch of episodes and scenes to make it look like Syaoran was the main character. They then dropped the series when it became patently evident that it wouldn't be possible to maintain the series in that vein after airing a couple episodes.

But the sad fact is that anime =/= mainstream media. Take, for instance, DC Comic's recent abject failure to dive into the girls comics market. They saw manga publishers making money hand-over-fist off of girls and decided to give it a go and fucked it up from start to finish. They hired a bunch of men to write stories they *thought* women wanted to read (mostly boring high school romance), had them drawn and edited by men, had them shipped to comic book stores instead of the bookstores that girls usually buy manga at, and then couldn't figure out why on earth they didn't sell!

The point is, you can sit there and point out shoujo manga all day long, but shoujo manga aren't movies made in Hollywood. They're comic books made in a culture that considers comic books a literary ghetto, so it's okay for women to write them (see: The Tale of Genji - it was written by a woman because prose was considered 'trash' back in the Heian Era. Real literature was poetry and women weren't allowed to write it). Those comics are then brought to America because publishers realized girls would buy them. Yes, we have more than our fair share in the manga and anime community, but we have nothing but Lifetime and Julia Roberts movies in the Hollywood establishment because that's what men think we want to watch. It'd be like a grown-ass man having his mom pick out everything he was able to watch on TV or at the movies.

And yes, Twilight's success has already spawned a whole host of imitations and opened the door for series like True Blood and The Vampire Diaries to get made. So yes, it HAS engendered successors that were better than the original, which was my point to begin with. Yes, Twilight sucks, but at least it's opened the door for more media to follow it that doesn't suck.

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terpzilla July 24 2010, 23:12:43 UTC
To add on what CD said, yes, just because other literary freaks look down on Twilight because of the lack of depth, doesn't mean it shouldn't be as successful as it is. There's no point harping about the horrible message it sends out or whatever because lots of other series do the same damn thing. Something doesn't have to have depth to be popular and make money, which is really all the industry cares about. Sailor Moon, Twilight, Pokemon, most fighting games, and plenty of comic books have the depth of a blow-up kiddie pool. It's the fans who look for what they want in it.

One could probably write an essay about psyches of the characters in Sesame Street, but all the children care about are brightly-colored puppets, adults the fact that their children are being entertained (and probably quiet) and educated, and the industry that they're still making millions of dollars off of the merchandise. That's really all that matters.

tl;dr: Just because Twilight sounds ridiculous to us doesn't mean it has any less entertainment value, or a cultural impact. It's no more harmless than girls playing with Barbies, and people will grow out of it. And Cardcaptor Sakura/Sailor Moon/Vampire Knight/whatever shojo title being Japanese-made doesn't mean they have more depth than Twilight. Hell, all through reading Vk all I thought was "Well, shit, it's the manga version of Twilight, with incest!"

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crystaldawn July 24 2010, 23:19:17 UTC
That's exactly what I'm saying, yeah - it's not about 'depth' or value as a story, it's about marketability, making money, and presence. Women have been written off as "They'll see whatever their man is seeing" for way too long, so ANYTHING written by women, for women is a step forward.

That's why I'll always support efforts to bring yaoi out over here, even though I don't like yaoi and the product and fandom itself is often full of the worst misogyny you can imagine - because at least it's women being recognized as a valid consumer base.

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shiroyuki_kun July 25 2010, 01:43:32 UTC
okay you know what.

I'm done. I don't have the mental ability to keep arguing over shit.

And I don't like the Slayers novels either since you bothered to bring it up. I read one, for a book report that was due IN A DAY. I don't give a damn about marketability, I care about quality. Which was what the entire discussion was about to begin with before until I said JESUS MEYER's name.

I mean if we're going to go blah blah blahdy blah about how Twilight opening up doors, you may as well say that Mega Tokyo opened up doors for Scott Pilgrim and so will Scott Pilgrim open up other doors, and the entire discussion we're having is voided to hell.

AND NO, I HAVEN'T READ TWILIGHT, BUT I'VE HEARD ENOUGH ABOUT IT AND SEEN IT'S FANBASE ENOUGH TO KNOW I DON'T WANT TO.

So discussion over, I'm taking my ball and going home.

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crystaldawn July 25 2010, 01:59:20 UTC
Umm, this whole conversation came about because you randomly brought up SMeyer when we weren't even talking about her, in a context that wasn't related to the quality of the work AT ALL, said you'd shoot her to do humanity a service I guess because you can't stand romance novels and don't want women reading them (guess what, I hate them too! But I don't get to tell people what to read and enjoy, either), and expected me to agree with it. Sadly, I DON'T agree with it and have some pretty good reasons not to (least of which being that shooting authors of series you haven't even read because they're 'bad' isn't a great idea in the first place).

So I'm sorry I can't agree with you that Twilight Sucks and SMeyer Needs To Die, but I've never agreed with the last part of that statement and never will.

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shiroyuki_kun July 25 2010, 02:12:45 UTC
Alternatively you just could have ignored that part, since if you read any of my journal entries ever you know I'm a fickle dumb ass, and let me live in denial and we could have just kept talking about how Shyamalan is a shit lick.

And secondly, I never said women shouldn't read romance novels IN GENERAL, I said Twilight was made of suck and is a glorified first person fanfiction and nobody with a sane mind should read it. I will go far enough to say it isn't a romance novel, or my mom would like it too, and she doesn't, so standing by that fact

And no amount of what you say will make me ever read it. There's only one good part of Twilight I've seen from the movies via clips and I'm sure it was AD-LIBBED. So I'm going to continue to be a fickle judgemental ass about things I haven't seen because I am a tool and a sheep and I believe reviewers over fucking Hot Topic going 13 year olds that is Twilight's audience.

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crystaldawn July 25 2010, 02:24:17 UTC
Guy, I'm not obligated to just bite my tongue if I disagree with you or if I think you just said something stupid (which you should probably take as a sign that I actually respect you, because otherwise I probably wouldn't bother arguing with you). And at this point, mindless Twilight Hate is just as dumb as the fangirling Twihards that inspired it in the first place. Although the TV Tropes article on it will forever be a thing of joy and beauty.

Dude, you get mad at bad fanfics, why would I even *want* you to read Twilight? Your entire stomach would become an ulcer by the end of chapter three.

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shiroyuki_kun July 25 2010, 02:27:51 UTC
Whatever.

Fucking werewolf pedophiles and vampire c-section and Mormon porn and grumble grumble.

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