#dont mind their names; i just picked japanese characters at random | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

tumblunni · 5 years

Text

Today’s weirdass yokai watch fact I have learned: Agent X is Injun Joe. He’s just.. Injun Joe. His japanese name is goddamn Injun Joe.

“Hey what’s an american thing? Men In Black and uhhhh RACISM”

His entire design is just fuckin Injun Joe, the version from a very particular tv show in japan, just fuckin recoloured purple. I never would have even known!!

So uhh yeah, good on you dub team for removing all that loaded roulette of a thing, holy fuckin shit...

I feel kinda bad for the japanese developers though because there’s no indication they really uhh.. KNEW anything about the whole native american situation at all. Apparantly the tales of tom sawyer was one of a few classic american books that got a kids show in japan, so the thought process behind this was probably just “this was my first childhood impression of what america is like, i should give it an affectionate reference”.

Which is uh.. its the same reason we have Jynx. Seriously! “Little Black Sambo” was another “classic western franchise” that japanese kids read in the 50s and 60s. Taking it completely out of context like that, the racist stereotype design of the earliest illustrations became seen as an iconic cartoon character and the japanese audience had no idea of its origins in anything negative.

This is why i really hate that whole “its a classic, so you’re not allowed to complain about the racism”. like there’s a big ol fat difference between simply understanding that the racism is a product of its time, vs YOURE NOT ALLOWED TO BE SAD ABOUT IT. Teaching friggin “classics” in this atmosphere of out of context dancing-around-the-elephant-in-the-room is how we get situations like this where people who don’t already know the context can just pick up the racism accidentally. Also seriously if we even had the slightest fuckin warning or even ACTUALLY TAUGHT KIDS that the racism is bad and its only here because this is an old book, then maybe itd be less goddamn traumatizing for the actual non white kids in the damn class...

I can still remember how my high school did this with of Mice Of Men, regarding ableism. Like it was friggin HIGH SCHOOL, there’s less of an excuse of ‘oh we cant explain, its too complicated for kids’! (Which is dumb anyway cos kids not already knowing about racism is like THE BIGGEST REASON you should tell them the thing is wrong/take the thing out when you talk about the book, otherwise it just goes into their brain unquestioned) Anyway, if you didnt already know, Of Mice And Men is a story all about a Scary Developmentally Disabled Man who is Just Like A Big Adult Child and is Big Scary Murderer and Too Dangerous To Live and The Only Way For Him To Be Happy Is To Die and Everyone He Ever Loved Is Finally Free Of The Burden of Him And He Would Be Happy That They Can Finally Be Happy. Yeah. Its fucked up and I hate it and I hate that it was just taught unchallenged and unquestioned. I didnt know I was autistic until i was an adult and this sort of message was the only perspective i was ever being given on what mental disabilities were, which probably contributed a whole lot to why i never got diagnosed and why i was goddamn terrified when i did finally find out. I’m so fuckin glad that being autistic is just.. like.. exactly the same as how I fuckin think, instead of this ridiculous gross fatalistic stereotype. And I hate looking back on how i blindly believed it and how i was rude to other autistic kids cos i fuckin DIDNT KNOW I WAS ONE OF THEM and thought it was a goddamn death sentence i had to avoid by being Aggressively Neurotypical At All Times.

But yeah this was indeed a book made in an older time where autism hadnt even been properly investigated by medical science and didnt even have a name. And by the standards of the time it’s comparatively progressive, because the story does indeed say this mentally ill man isnt actually evil, he’s just ACCIDENTALLY dangerous, and you’re supposed to feel sad that he has to die. But that doesn’t mean its goddamn true, it doesnt mean it should be taught as true, and it doesnt mean its not harmful to real people with real disabilities who are very likely sitting right there in this classroom listening to this tripe. I’m not saying don’t read any “classics” in class, just itd be nice if the teacher remotely aknowledged the problematic shit instead of reading it out as-is and not discussing a single thing. Like seriously it could flesh out the curriculum quite a bit if you added some essays like “explain why this thing is bigoted and the cultural context as to why it happened”. Or even just a goddamn warning at the beginning of the lesson that this chapter is gonna contain emotionally harrowing stuff! And its not even like its JUST “classics” that do this, the book directly after this in that same year of highschool was a modern thing about “oooh the scary inner mind of an autistic”, full of loads of stereotypes and weirdass child abuse apologism cos ~oh the kid was such a burden~ :/

So yeah. That stuff. Its bad.

It can lead to super outdated horrible stereotypes getting reintroduced into the brains of kids who dont know any better, or in this case foreign audiences who arent familiar with the cultural context. So that’s why I don’t blame nintendo for making a random villain named after the really insensitive name of an old not-exactly-well-portrayed villain from a “classic”. Instead I blame the people in the west who act so flippant about racism/other bigotries as long as its “classic”, its our fault that we’re sending this impression out to other countries.

Also its super depressing imagining this dude is meant to be the ghost of a guy with the same backstory as that dude from tom sawyer, aka a half native american mixed race man who only turned evil because he was treated like shit by racist bastards. Seriously it sucks how unsympathetically and scarily ‘ol IJ is portrayed in tom sawyer, but i guess again its a ‘for its time it was ahead of the curve’ sort of thing. Still not good though. The only thing more not gooder than that is if after he died with no sympathy from anyone forever he also came back as a weird purple slime ghost and continued suffering for more centuries :(

Man i usually love learning development trivia about games but this was really one of those facts thats more of a cursed thing :(

Aaaand ending with a random piece of trivia his japanese name is Injaneno which is a goddamn pun on That Damned Name mixed with a stereotypical italian mafia speak version of “dontcha know”. Or, well, the japanese stereotype of what italian mafia speak sounds like in japanese. Apparantly hokkaido accent is their equivelant of the ‘this character is foreign’ accent! Like how texas accents are for america and literally-everywhere-except-england accents are for britain. Its such a dumb trope, isnt it? “How do we know this character isn’t from this country? Cos they speak a very specific local accent of this country.” Its just the dumb stereotype of certain accents being uncultured or stupid or whatever so its a shorthand for ‘not fluent in the language’ even though being not fluent in the language sounds entirely fuckin different.

So yeh. Facts. Some of them kinda cursed. Also even more reasons to cry for goddamn MIB slime man...

oh and also his slime form in japanese is just “Demon Injaneno” instead of “The Executor”. which is an added layer of pun thats just like ‘dontcha know’ with an even more heavy accent. So i’m glad they kept the idea of scary alien blobman doom agent having goofy cute puns, and the whole X obsession is a nice way of punning without all them layers of weirdness.

#agent x #injaneno #weirdass fuckin game of telephone with racism #also i remember they still used to call telephone 'chinese whispers' instead when i was in that school #where did that name even come from honestly? is it just meant to be some rude 'chinese people are bad at english' joke?

0 notes

mister13eyond · 7 years

Note

for the fandom ask thingos--- B, G, K , L and O v-v)b

B - A pairing–platonic, romantic or sexual–that you initially didn’t consider, but someone changed your mind.

there are a couple, but I think as of recent it’s probably been some overwatch ships- in particular, I’ve gotten interested in Symmarah and SpiderByte and Zarya x Sombra (I don’t know the portmanteau) because of my dash and a couple friends being into them!

G - Have you ever had an OTP? If so, do you remember your first one? Who was in it?

oh maaaanlmao, i think my Very First ship that I can remember was... idk, I think it was either Seto Kaiba x Joey Wheeler (or junoichi, i legit dont remember his japanese name, i watched the english dub) or Bakura x Malik

Probably Bakura x Malik, I was SUPER into bakura in general

K - What character has your favorite development arc/the best development arc?

Hmmmm, that’s hard to say.... overall I’m always attracted to characters with arcs/development or characters who change over time.... I guess to date, my favorite arc/development has been Will Graham of NBC’s Hannibal?? He slowly shifts from sort of a worn-down, world-weary, terrified guy to someone who sort of owns himself and his world- even if that world is dark or unusual or outside the realm of the acceptable. It was a really fun journey watching him get there over three seasons, honestly.

L - Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves. (Characters you’re neutral about are fair game, as are characters you merely dislike. Characters that you absolutely loathe with the fire of ten thousand suns are exempt, as there is no point in giving yourself an aneurysm over a character that you hate.)

So Sorry’s design is pretty cute, and the music for his battle is pretty cute too!

O - Choose a song at random. Which ship or character does it remind you of?

augh i don’t have a music library so i have to pick at random from my youtube faves, so.....i came up with this (tbh you can never go wrong with Hozier)TBH this is absolutely something I associate with my longest-running trashboy ship from Deathnote - Mello x Beyond. Just.... i have SO many old feelings around it, I’ll never completely be over it

#i dont have any strong feelings about so sorry and i think the hate is unjustified #but i do think the battle is slightly eh #so its like a neutral feeling #fandom asks #fel-fisk #askins

2 notes · View notes

mattgambler · 6 years

Text

Dark Souls versus Nioh

TLDR: I played Dark Souls 1-3 about 18 months ago and yesterday I abandoned my first ever Nioh playthrough halfway through. I compare my experiences and declare them both winner and loser at the end of the day.

Today after waking up I was greeted on Discord by a public message of one of my mods which had me typing frantically in a matter of seconds: so Nioh went the same path as every other soulslike game ? Final call on it matt? ( wich mechanics where new wich ones where even more frustrating and wich ones where a welcome change from the other soulslike games?) I wanna clarify that I played a couple of “soulslike” games over the past 2 years and rarely left one of them unbeaten, so his first line had me somewhat confused about what exactly he meant, given that I had abandoned my Nioh playthrough halfway through only the day before. The games I had played (and I am aware of the fact that some rather important ones are missing) were the three Dark Souls games, Salt and Sanctuary, Dead Cells, Titan Souls and now Nioh. I usually want to beat these sort of games even if I don’t enjoy them, and be it only so I an criticize them without sounding like a whiner who simply didn’t git gud enough. Useless gamer pride, I know. But while I sat there, talking about how I had beaten all the other games before this one, I knew what he was probably talking about - which was me not liking the game. I also didn’t like DarkSouls 1-3 that much, and back when I streamed them it was usually me versus my chat as I tried to win the unwinnable argument of convincing fans of a game why it was clearly and “objectively” bad. Or at least not as good as everyone wanted me to believe. But let’s look at Ashtaks actual question. At first glance, Nioh does a couple of things which had me praising it as soon as I encountered them. Inventory indicators for what you had picked up since you last looked into your inventory. A clear path to follow. Storytelling that looked like actual storytelling for a change. I was sure I would like this one! But the longer I played, the more I noticed the glaring flaws that were worked deep into the games core, and which became even more apparent given how those flaws were mostly absent from the soulsgames I had worked my way through back then. The linear progression was nice in comparison to the at times random and unintuitive nature of Dark Souls, where I only managed to find the painted world of Ariamis after my chat had given me step by step instructions on how to find and enter it. But at the same time the missions soon started to feel same-ish, another temple, another batch of yokai that had corrupted something vengeful spirits something save that village something hope you dont mind taking a look at my yard while you are there Anjin Sama please make sure I didnt leave the window open. The storytelling had me intrigued for about as long as it took me to realize that the narrative was meaningless and bland and that it didnt make much sense up to the point I had reached in my playthrough. There’s a villain and he wants to gather that ressource Amrita that the game had introduced you moments before, now he stole your guardian spirit which you apparently had all along and that seems to be the only spirit in the world that can detect that Amrita stuff even though you are collecting it left and right as quickly as you can because the next levelup will require another 78 000 units of it because, hell, gotta keep you grinding, am I rita? The inventory indicators were good at least. Sorely needed in the trash collecting simulator that both Nioh and the games in the Souls Franchise are, too! But while it made sifting through trash a lot easier and more practical, it didn’t really change the fact that I was collecting trash 99% of the time. At least in Dark Souls you didnt feel like losing out if you left that stuff lying on the ground because you couldn’t exchange it for souls as easily, if at all. (I don’t exactly remember.) But while I’m listing pros here just to pluck them apart right afterwards, I wanna say that weirdly enough I felt like I enjoyed Nioh more, on a surface level. Sure, the story was weirdly uninteresting, but at least it was there, right? The game was reusing the same enemies for mission after mission, but at least it didn’t give me bullshit like the Anor Londo archers or the Tomb of the Giants, or that fucking disgusting curse mechanic in the canalisation of dontaskmewhatthatareawascalled. At least I had my sense of where to go and my inventory indicators for newly picked up equipment, right? And finally some proper tutorials! Yes and no.

While Nioh comes with a metric shitton of improvements that Dark Souls would have desperately needed back then, while it looks great and plays smooth and overall does everything I wanted Dark Souls to do back then, it lacks the inspiration and credibility to actually make it all work for me. On day 6 I encountered a bossfight that was somewhat similar in tone to the Sif encounter in DarkSouls. You know, sad music, the boss was kind of a good guy, this time it was a cat spirit instead of a giant wolf, but yeah, you get it. All it accomplished was making me realize that I never cared much for that feline companion of mine in the first place. Sif, in comparison, had never been my companion. He(?) had never tried to be loyal or helpful to me. Weird how I still ended up caring so much more for him than for my own weird cat buddy that I had never really gotten to know all too well, but... at least he was around? I guess? Must have been the missing limping animation. Another thing that always struck me as unpleasant about the Souls games was that there were no proper tutorials. Here, you are in a cell, now go die. Again, Nioh delivers where Dark Souls fell short, several nicely spaced out tutorials to show you the ropes, how to switch stances, how to use skills, how to take a dump behind a tree. But while Dark Souls would have had me confused about many things if not for my chat, Nioh locks tutorials behind mission progress and usually ended up teaching me things only after I had figured them out on my own. And weirdly enough, those tutorials managed to both make me feel as if they were holding my hand too much as well as(!) if they weren’t clear enough on things. How do you even pull that off? Sure I’m learning in detail what I already know, but I still need to do the tutorials for the rewards and it has me standing there unsure about why it is not continuing because I already did what it wanted me to... I think.

And then there is all the stuff that is missing, at least up to the point that I reached in the game. While Nioh does a somewhat good job of fixing DarkSouls’ flaws (Seriously, that inventory indicator, how could you not have that, Dark Souls. I mean what the actual fuck.) it took things that were good and working and just left them out. Basic stuff, like leaving messages for other players, complex and intriguing things like covenants, boss weapons. Incredibly vital stuff like secrets! Dark Souls is full of them and while I was sometimes annoyed by a bonfire being too well hidden, or another entire area being hidden behind a random wall segment in an even more random wall, Nioh feels like it is incredibly afraid to hide anything, or give you a glimpse of a later boss in the distance, or leave any sort of mystery as the story progresses. The bad guy? Yeah, he stole that spirit to collect amrita. That spirit? Yeah, it has been with William since he was a child. That mission? Yeah, seemingly the kids were turned into yokai, or the shogun (or whatever he was) blew up his castle but he also broke his teaset and that teasets name was “flat spider” in japanese and because he broke it the boss of this level is a giant spider. Oh, that character you didn’t really care for? Here is an entire page of exposition for you if you wanna learn his role in all of this. Considering all of this and more (incredibly uninspired and therefore often confusing leveldesign, to name one of several things I’m not gonna go into too much detail here) I would already come to the conclusion that Dark Souls is a way more interesting and mysterious game than Nioh. Wild, reckless, interesting. Stupid at times, and fuck the tomb of the giants, what an embarrassing fuckup of modern game design, but still, a wondrous and intriguing journey overall. Personally I liked Dark Souls 2 best. But still I would have considered calling Nioh the more solid game, in a casual, gamey way. It plays well, you progress through it, you probably have somewhat of a good time anyway. I’ve always considered Dark Souls, especially the first and probably most iconic one, as more of a weird art piece than an actual good game. But Nioh was too hard for me. Yes, harder than Dark Souls, and not in a good way as far as I’m concerned. The sheer number of times I was literally oneshot with full hp because I didnt dodge this attack or that combo in time is just too damn high. Many deaths in Dark Souls came from intricate traps or simply stupidly falling to my death (because fuck swimming or holding on to ledges, right?) but while Nioh does that sometimes as well, the sheer damage that enemies deal with each attack and your characters morbid fetish for being stunlocked made what could have been at least casual fun into a frustrating mess over time. And I used a spear, the only weapon that scales with the hp stat anyway. I might just be bad, or not patient enough to die through yet another 20 bossfights until I figure out how to dodge enough attacks to barely succeed. But then again, I might just have had more fun dying in Dark Souls than I had dying in Nioh.

#dark souls #nioh #gaming #high difficulty

0 notes

allurascastle · 7 years

Note

i didnt understand like half of that im apparently having a stupid day. or week. wait so people dont switch between languages usually? my stepmum who is chinese, i dont think she does this anymore, i havent heard her do it since she came to australia, but when i was in china with her, one time she accidentally started speaking chinese to me and english to the store clerk we were talking to. is that sorta what you mean??

Yeah! But let me add onto that, because I want to make sure that, like, I’m clear. Though somehow I think I may just end up more confusing.

Like, if my Spanish teacher said something in Spanish, I’d respond in Spanish (or try to; words I didn’t know or remember, it was fair to substitute bc it was a beginners class - but only at first. She wanted us speaking in ONLY Spanish, even if it was bad Spanish, eventually). If a classmate spoke to me directly after in English, it was natural to respond in English, like it was my reaction to speak in Spanish (though, speaking in Spanish took more effort bc I wasn’t fluent).

So, using them both is often, but - and here’s what I’m trying to say - Lance and other characters who are fluent in multiple languages wouldn’t have problems switching between languages the way a lot of White Writers (and I’ve been guilty of this in the past) like to portray it. (The word here is portray. We’ll get more to that.)

And the whole littering of dialogue (any English fanfic that still uses Japanese suffixes is a fair example of this, given they never explain why Japanese suffixes are being used in the place of English prefixes (like the dubs do; Mr. and Ms./Mrs. instead of -sensei/-san, Lord/Prince and Lady/Princess instead of -sama, and there’s not really a suffix equivalent of -kun or -chan. For someone younger “Little [name]” would be the equivalent, but otherwise - nicknames - Soul Eater fanfic is the most prominent culprit of Japanese suffix abuse in awkward places that I’ve ever seen bc it’s not even consistent on whether or not they’re using the suffixes or prefixes) even though the characters may not even know Japanese and are fluent in English, but that’s a convo for another time. Back to Spanish and dual-languages)…

Littering of sentences randomly with Spanish when speaking English doesn’t happen unless you a) forget a bunch of words and are speaking w another person who speaks Spanish/English (more likely, you’re stopping your sentence to ask “wait, what was the word for example?”), b) there’s no equivalent (the Korean concept of kibun comes to mind, our closest equivalents in English being “pride, dignity, honor” - if you hurt someone’s kibun, you hurt their pride, damage their dignity. Also, mistranslations caused by improper localization - Japanese express “I love you” with the (translated) phrase “the moon is beautiful” (with the implication that it is beautiful bc you are there with them), or c) you’re trolling or making a pun (which is very common, but mostly done w someone who can truly appreciate it), d) those are the actual names of stuff and not, in fact, random words at all (implication that they have no name in English. Quesadillas, for example).

So, there’s context for switching languages.

Like, me speaking Spanish with my Spanish teacher, practicing Spanish with classmates - but speaking English with my family. Like, Lance would use English (fluently, mind you) with the Paladins, because English was what they all spoke, and have very little reason to use Spanish unless he was teaching them Spanish or they knew it.

He wouldn’t just slip into Spanish talking w people he usually talks to in English anymore than I’d have used English talking to my Spanish teacher (noob exceptions aside).

Which is where I get back to the portrayal bit.

It is so painfully common in Voltron fics for Lance to just slip into Spanish for no discernible reason, whether it be phrases (90% of the time google translated), random words (and I do mean random), or just, you know, the author wanting to throw in more (google-translated) Spanish bc…? fuck if I know??

When writing a character who’s bilingual, it’s good to know the context in which they’d use a different language (Lance is Cuban, so if you told me he speaks to his mom in all Spanish, I’d believe you, but if you told me he just starts slipping into Spanish with, say, Pidge who doesn’t (for our purposes) know Spanish at all with only the excuse “sorry, it’s hard to switch (to English)” and no context as to why he’d suddenly start doing so when he never has before…? No event or special train of thought?? Just opens his mouth in middle of conversation that was all-English and starts using Spanish (I’m going to once more emphasize google translate Spanish because this has been such a common phenomena of White Writers being completely fuck-all with Lance and Language, L&L, and this isn’t even getting into Lance talking dirty in Spanish, but I will mention the phrase “pass the queso” which was an official “add some dirty Spanish to vocab” thing from forever ago, I don’t even remember if it was on a book, magazine, or an add anymore - ‘queso’ meaning cheese, so, fail there) for literally no discernible reason than the author felt like it and had no understanding of the kind of context that’d prompt someone fluent in two languages to switch languages.

(Another note: I do, personally, say no bueno when something really bad or cringey happens. I picked up the habit from a friend from Arizona - but there is the context, huh? No bueno as a response to something cringey.)

Shockingly, I haven’t seen as much of the (well, if I got into the attempts about Lance’s dirty talking, I wouldn’t hesitate to call it fetishizing, because that also happens a lot and the same writers who throw in random bits of other language, google translated 90% of the time (because the people who ask for an actual speaker of the language to help them usually don’t do this randomly and then the use of the second language feels, you know, like the person actually cares about the language and isn’t using it as a throwaway in an awkward spot - but I’m not getting into the dirty talk bc that means getting into a ship that I’d rather not bc it’s since been ruined for me by it’s fandom, so we’ll go with a gentle) misuse of language with Shiro or Keith? Eh, I’ve probably just missed it.

I forgot my original point here, so,

tl;dr I think I was trying to say people do use multiple languages, but not randomly. There’s usually a reason they use one language over another. A native Spanish speaker might speak Spanish with their family and English at the work place and French with a friend who’s learning French and German with someone else in private (or not), and they might mix up the rules (understandable and not unusual) or forget a word and substitute OR get mixed up when Spanish Mom and French Friend both talk to them (,, it can be HARD to keep conversations straight I send people the wrong message all the time when it was meant for someone else, so, like, UNDERSTANDABLE) if that makes sense

edit: and that there are Voltron writers who should probably do a little more research and ask themselves if there’s an actual reason for inserting Spanish (or Japanese, or Korean), or if it’s just there so they can say they have Spanish in their fic even if its use doesn’t make a lot of sense at all.

edit 2: but it’s almost 2am so anything else that makes me feel like I need a more in-depth answer (even if partially for my own sanity and not bc I think the other person actually *needs* it, fine line there - what I do for myself and what I do for others/based on my opinion of others) will have to wait until tomorrow. Maybe even after I get off work in the evening

#language stuff #my aunt tara speaks like 9 languages #it's really hardcore #RUSSIAN IS ONE OF THEM AND IT INTIMIDATES ME #i only ever here her speak English to me tho bc I'm an English Person #so it's her response to speak English w me unless there's a special circumstance

1 note · View note