Rhydderch said:
ROFL! Except the guy dressed as Sailor Moon part. THAT was unnecessary
My only regret is being unable to find a picture with a shorter skirt.
Rhydderch said:
Karkadinn said:
I don't care how 'light' a story is, there is no excuse for Bishounen Script Immunity.
Uhh... whats that?
Bishounen = A character that conforms to the Japanese ideal of male beauty (IOW, slender, smooth, agile) while also being inhumanly confident and competent in serious situations. Such a character can only be significantly harmed in a serious situation due to dishonorable trickery, his own will for it to be so, or by facing an opposing bishounen. 99% of the time you can tell who the cast bishounen is simply by looking for the most handsome-but-unsmiling person in the cast. Really big, unusual, gravity-defying hair is a bonus.
Kenshin is a bishounen. Other examples include Alucard from the later Castlevania games, Sephiroth of Final Fantasy, Kunzite of Sailor Moon, Zechs of Gundam Wing, and pretty much the entire cast of Heroic Legend of Arslan. In addition, there's at least one
female bishounen that I know of, the Major from Ghost in the Shell SAC. I believe she was presented as such to contrast the 'submissive doll' character type that tends to dominate the female gender in anime/manga. But IMHO, going from one extreme to the other doesn't fix anything. Moderation is always the key.
I dislike bishounen as heroic figures because they, like the Superman of American comics, are heroic primarily because of an impossible innate perfection that can't be achieved in the real world, thus reducing any moral or philosophical messages within the story to irrelevance. I don't mind them so much as antagonistic figures, but they're still overused by lazy writers as ways to present credible threats without having to add any real depth to the character.
Rhydderch said:
That explains a lot of your choices for best anime and schlock anime then. You picked all the "weird"
P) anime because its harder to predict. Hehe. Actually I enjoyed a lot of the odd anime although I never did get to finish Boogiepop. Also I have a non-anime question for you: what do you think of HP Lovecraft? Most of his stories are incredibly predictable but I personally think his strength comes in the presentation of the predictable, in the style of the reveal, even if you already know what the reveal will be. Since you despise predictability I'm definitely interested in how you feel about his work.
I own a Cthulhu plushie.
I do consider unpredictability to be the chief virtue of modern storytelling, and predictability to be the chief sin. However, I grant significant leniency towards
older storytelling, such as the works of Lovecraft, Tolkien, and Dickens, because what is cliche now was not necessarily cliche then, when the art of storytelling through non-oral presentation was much younger and newer to the world. For instance, I'm sick to death of Tolkien style elves, but I don't hate the Lord of the Rings because they were invented there. I'm just tired of everyone
copying LOTR without even throwing in a decent parody or metacommentary or anything.
So yeah, what Lovecraft writes of is cliche now, but it wasn't when he was writing it, so I can read his stuff with all due enjoyment, keeping that in mind. In particular, I enjoy his grotesque and imaginative descriptions for monster aesthetics. And there's no denying his prose style really draws you in if you let it, same as with Dickens. Verbose, but very vivid for being so.