anime, j-dorama, nihongo ga wakarimasen

So, this is some blather about anime and Japanese drama shows and my inability to speak Japanese and something to do with Twilight Dreams, but it's mainly blather, so feel free to skip it.

I actually have fairly picky tastes in anime. Despite what I'm doing, mahou shoujo (magical girl) anime is generally not what I'm into. Shoujo in general (there's non-magical girl shoujo, yes; the 'shoujo' means 'girl', more or less) is aimed towards pre-teens and teens, tends to be heavily romanticized in a way I don't really connect with, plus the characters are generally pretty heavily archetypical, which can be done well but often bugs me. (The irony of this given what I'm writing has not escaped me.) There are things that qualify as shoujo I like (Utena comes to mind), but most of my favorites are more in the realm of drama, horror, or comedy.

Some years ago, I started trying to learn Japanese, though, in part because of anime, which at the time was just starting to be adequately dubbed (these days dubs are usually pretty darn good). Not wholly so; I'd actually been interested in Japanese culture since I was a kid. You can blame Shougun for that (yes, that's a legitimate transliteration; I don't know how to do macrons easily). But since I was watching a bit more anime I did pick up some books and start teaching myself. Note the operative words in this description are "trying" and "started". I don't speak Japanese (that's what that bit in the subject means, more or less), and I'm not sure I ever will, though there are a number of common phrases and some individual words here and there that I recognize in dialogue, and while I don't need a lot of hands to count the number of kanji I know, I do need more than I personally possess.

Since I was living in California at the time, I had access to one good tool for trying to get a handle on spoken Japanese: on the weekends, one of the local channels broadcast Japanese drama (j-dorama), some of which had subtitles. One of those shows was a high school drama called Kinpachi Sensei, which I really, really love. Unfortunately Japanese networks don't seem interested in releasing American DVDs of their shows with English subtitles even though they broadcast them here that way (in California and in Hawaii at least), or otherwise I would definitely buy it. Teh intarwebs have, however, disgorged both the season I originally watched (season 6) and the one released a few years later (it's an intermittent, not continuous, show), which I just finished watching with my sweetie, who is about the same as me as regards Japanese though a bit further along. (Incidentally, seasons 6 and 7 are available respectively on dailymotion and youtube, at least until they're taken down. I highly recommend 6 as it contains, among other things, one of the best-portrayed transgender stories you're likely to ever see in a TV show. 7's good, but 6 is a lot better.)

Interestingly, if Kinpachi Sensei were an anime, it'd probably qualify as a shoujo drama, so obviously there's something in the genre that speaks to me. I suspect it's the dramatic element, and the fact that in the case of both it and the anime I like, there's a lot greater character development than in the shows I don't like. Sure, you've got your archetypes (bully, kid with home problems, person with something they're hiding, overly-studious type, flirty type, etc.) but they're really handled well, and honestly, you can boil nearly any character from any genre down to an archetype if you try. What makes them interesting is the details.

When I was working on the characters for, well, for Twilight World, not Twilight Dreams, back before I figured out what I was really doing, I also borrowed heavily from archetypes. Miho is definitely the studious kid from high school drama/shoujo anime. She's shy, and uncertain, and fits very well into the Knowledge Sim thing as well (and in-game, that's what she is, though it doesn't really matter much since I don't play her per se). In the opening theme for Twilight World you can probably guess what the archetypes are to some extent. Nori (Noriko, blue-black hair, "Void/Heaven") the leader; she's shown on the phone because she's the popular girl (aspiration Popularity). Hi (Hinata, the orange-haired girl, "Fire") is the tomboy (aspiration Popularity as well). Nami (Honami, the blue-haired girl, "Water") is the flirt (and yes, Romance). And Chi (Chinatsu, the green-haired girl, "Earth") is the protective type, the one who stands up for her friends and people she doesn't know alike, and is a Family Sim. (Miho is "Wind". Yes, I know that seems active for her, but... what she shows people and what she's really like are different sometimes.)

All of these archetypes are findable in some form in American and European fiction as well, but I've tried to give them their Japanese spins because I do like the culture, and while my understanding of it is decidedly imperfect (partly because, well, I don't speak the language, and most of my exposure to it has been through fiction), I did try to use what they present as the basis for making my characters for the story.

On a more amusing note, I was trying to see if anyone had the prior series of Kinpachi online, and couldn't find anything, but the official site does have synopses of the shows. Of course, they're in Japanese, which kinda makes it difficult for me to read them, but I can get the general sense through babelfish. On the other hand, the literal translations are side-achingly funny, especially since babelfish likes to render names as their literal translations, so that, for instance, "Kinpachi" becomes "gold eight" because that's the standard reading for the kanji in his character name. One actress's name became "saw grass island beauty". At least I figured out that meant her first name ended in -mi (a common part of girls' names, the "beauty" in the odd phrase above), but still.

I thought about trying to (manually) translate one of the scripts into Japanese, but I don't know what the point would be. Running it through a translator and then back into English, though? That's fun:

"I have known I why is rear. But it is the people how concerning the life of your secret? How because important matter was done concerning you you could not investigate?"

"Because when each us has power in our families, the power which can be awakened among us with the protection instrument it was chosen. Each us resonated the element, our powers reflected that element."

"As for me concerning who you do not think of that it can know everything."

Etc.