I found a living anime character.

Circle lenses and all. :P

CHINESE AND JAPANESE SOUND NOTHING ALIKE

I'm so sick of people acting like all Northeast Asian languages sound the same when they CLEARLY DON'T. People who say this are just being flat-out IGNORANT and aren't paying attention to how the languages actually sound! Case in point: I had a German/Turkish friend in middle school who listened to a J-Rock song and at first thought it was Italian because she thought "Japanese sounded like 'ching chong ching.'"

Even putting aside the fact that Chinese has tons of syllables that Japanese doesn't, Chinese is a fucking TONAL LANGUAGE and Japanese ISN'T! THAT'S A HUGE MOTHERFUCKING DIFFERENCE. I don't understand why anyone would honestly have difficulty distinguishing the two???

Let me be perfectly blunt here: if someone asserted that French and German sound the same, they would be humiliated because EVERYONE knows those two languages sound completely different. And Japanese and Chinese sound JUST AS different. The only reason why this isn't publicly acknowledged is because Americans RESPECT Western European languages but DON'T respect Asian languages.

Honestly even Asians don't respect Asian languages! I've lost count of how many times my relatives have overheard me watching anime and done the stereotypical "ching chong ling long" bullshit! I had an argument with my mom about this recently, who said, "Korean, Japanese, Chinese--it really all sounds the same to my ears!" THAT'S BECAUSE YOU AREN'T REALLY LISTENING!

ASHDAKJDHAKFHKFHKDK *flips a table over*

EDIT: Just looked it up, and Chinese is apparently generally considered to be part of a different language family than Japanese and Korean, so yeah.

I don't know which summer movies to watch

There are too many and I don't have the money to see all of them! @_@

I'm interested in seeing Iron Man 3, but I think I might hold off and see what people think of Star Trek 2 before making a decision. To people who have seen Iron Man 3, out of curiosity, how does it stack up in comparison to Iron Man 1 and 2?

Other movies I'm interested in this summer:

- After Earth (BIG maybe)
- Monster University (BIG maybe)
- Man of Steel (Maybe)
- This is the End (Maybe)
- The Purge (BIG Maybe)
- You're Next (Probably not, but I'm interested)
- Pacific Rim (Probably will, unless it gets really horrible reviews)
- Elysium

lol, I guess in the end Elysium is the only movie this summer that I have complete faith in. I watched District 9 when it was in theaters and my appreciation of the film has only grown over time (and especially after I spent time in South Africa). I love that Blomkamp pretty blatantly uses sci-fi concepts as metaphors for present-day social issues and not in a totally shallow way either. Earlier today, I actually found the short film that served as a prototype for District 9, which really elaborates on the whole "this is a metaphor for Apartheid" theme.

It's times like this that I wished I lived in LA so I could just attend free advanced movie screenings and not have to pay to see all this shit. ._.

Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test

Yeah, I'll just let the article speak for itself:

...I had to understand that the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads. I was assured that as long as I made the white, straight men in my scripts prominent, I could still offer groundbreaking characters of other descriptions (fascinating, significant women, men of color, etc.) – as long as they didn’t distract the audience from the white men they really paid their money to see.

...My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men. That, they explained nervously, was not okay. I asked why...

At first I got several tentative murmurings about how it distracted from the flow or point of the story. I went through this with more than one professor, more than one industry professional. Finally, I got one blessedly telling explanation from an industry pro: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.”

“Not even if it advances the story?” I asked. That’s rule number one in screenwriting, though you’d never know it from watching most movies: every moment in a script should reveal another chunk of the story and keep it moving.

He just looked embarrassed and said, “I mean, that’s not how I see it, that’s how they see it.”

Right. A bunch of self-back-slapping professed liberals wouldn’t want you to think they routinely dismiss women in between writing checks to Greenpeace. Gosh, no – it was they. The audience. Those unsophisticated jackasses we effectively worked for when we made films. They were making us do this awful thing. They, the man behind the screen. They, the six-foot-tall invisible rabbit. We knew they existed because there were spreadsheets with numbers, and no matter how the numbers computed, they never added up to, “Oh, hey, look – men and boys are totally watching Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley like it’s no big deal they’re chicks instead of guys.” They always somehow added up to “Oh, hey, look – those effects/that Arnold’s so awesome, men and boys saw this movie despite some chick in a lead role.”

Monster TV show AND swimming anime??

Is this real life????

Okay, so I'm taking the news about Monster with a grain of salt because who knows if a project of that scale is ever really going to get off the ground. But damn do I hope it really happens! Even though it all sounds too good to be true. An HBO live action adaptation of my favorite anime directed by the guy who made one of my favorite movies?? Who would be a good fit to play Johan? And if Tenma is actually played by an Asian actor, I will cry tears of joy.

Also, this weekend was a good time to be a fujoshi. DRAMAtical Murder Eng patch was released, Eva 3.0: The Return of Kawoshin is out w/ English subs, and of course, swimming anime got greenlit. I have the feeling that it's probably going to be pretty shitty and thrown together in terms of story, but honestly? Cute swimming boys doing cute things is fine by me at this point. >_>;

And I honestly think this is quite encouraging because if anything, stuff like this proves that the anime industry is willing to acknowledge the female fanbase in a way that other "geek" industries generally do not. (i.e. the Western video game industry)

On that note, /a/'s reaction to swimming anime, set to the OP theme of Shingeki no Kyojin. :P (Warning for language. It's 4chan, you know what to expect.)