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Driving, books, manga
Jul. 21st, 2003 11:02 amAd Mundo Exteriore,
My driving lecturer is a male chauvinist. He also shows us films where they sadistically put teenagers through a brainwashing routine so that they may never drink for the rest of their lives. All right, personally, I think drinking and driving is a problem, and I understand the need to address "reckless teenage behavior", but making kids attend their own mock funeral, after "dying" in a drunk driving accident is going to the extreme. They even put handcuffs on the boy whom they randomly chose to be the drunk driver. I think that's going a little too far.
In other news, I've read The Order of the Phoenix in a bootleg PDF form, and due to the scanner's awful OCR program, it felt like reading something from FF.net, with the most atrocious typos on every page. I also had a headache because Harry was so angry for most of the story. And Rowling is a terrible tease. After all the false deaths that didn't turn out to be real, it took me several pages to realize at the end that, um, the person who dies in book five was really dead. It's a good book, I admit, but still too formulaic. I don't like having my emotional state be manipulated so unsubtly.
I also read through several manga scans, as well as the third volume of Shaman King. (Aw, Bokutou no Ryu as the sappy gangster. Who would have believed it?) Oh, and I swear that Hanazakari no Kimitachi e has used all the Gundam Wing shounen ai fanfiction clichés, which proves that 1x2 fics really are Mary Sues in disguise. But HanaKimi is awfully cute, nevertheless, and I'm kind of annoyed that some of the scans are really poor quality. (Even more annoyed that I have so many missing chapters in between. ;_;) Good Morning Call was also cute, though HanaKimi is much more prettily drawn in my opinion. But unfortunately, I can't stand Parfait Tic. I understand that shoujo manga have the strange need to have the typical stupid heroine, but I can only tolerate a limited amount of stupidity. (Oniichan, I can't possibly understand why they made you be Fuuko. There's no comparison here; the girl's just...dumb.) Honestly, why can't there be an intelligent heroine for once? I'm not talking about emotional intelligence, just why does the male romantic lead get to be at the top of the class academically, while the female is always mediocre? Okay, making gross generalizations here, considering there's probably a huge number of exceptions, like KareKano. Still, after a week of reading shoujo, that's the general impression I received.
Another note on HanaKimi: maybe Mizuki's just better with languages than I am, but if I went to a Korean high school (regardless of whether it was all-boys or not), I'd fail out of every single class. I can communicate in Korean of course, but I don't have the academic vocabulary for schoolwork. I'll pull through fine in elementary school, I'm sure, and maybe I'll manage middle school, but high school level is far beyond my reach at this point. I'd even fail English in a Korean school, because I wouldn't be able to translate anything beyond the simplest sentences. I suppose you would adapt really quickly, but I'm still flabbergasted by the fact that an American-born Japanese girl would be able to easily chat with her peers. (I'm also flabbergasted that Mizuki's able to read all those Japanese magazine articles on Sano. It takes patience to constantly rifle through the dictionary like that.) Admittedly, I haven't attended Korean school, so my reading and writing skills may be more deficient than yisei (or in Mizuki's case, nisei) but I speak Korean pretty well for a second-generation. This fad of making characters come "back to the home country" from America is terribly unrealistic. I see it in dramas a lot too, and I always end up ranting about it.
Okay, enough's enough. I should go look at that friends list of mine.
...Tari
My driving lecturer is a male chauvinist. He also shows us films where they sadistically put teenagers through a brainwashing routine so that they may never drink for the rest of their lives. All right, personally, I think drinking and driving is a problem, and I understand the need to address "reckless teenage behavior", but making kids attend their own mock funeral, after "dying" in a drunk driving accident is going to the extreme. They even put handcuffs on the boy whom they randomly chose to be the drunk driver. I think that's going a little too far.
In other news, I've read The Order of the Phoenix in a bootleg PDF form, and due to the scanner's awful OCR program, it felt like reading something from FF.net, with the most atrocious typos on every page. I also had a headache because Harry was so angry for most of the story. And Rowling is a terrible tease. After all the false deaths that didn't turn out to be real, it took me several pages to realize at the end that, um, the person who dies in book five was really dead. It's a good book, I admit, but still too formulaic. I don't like having my emotional state be manipulated so unsubtly.
I also read through several manga scans, as well as the third volume of Shaman King. (Aw, Bokutou no Ryu as the sappy gangster. Who would have believed it?) Oh, and I swear that Hanazakari no Kimitachi e has used all the Gundam Wing shounen ai fanfiction clichés, which proves that 1x2 fics really are Mary Sues in disguise. But HanaKimi is awfully cute, nevertheless, and I'm kind of annoyed that some of the scans are really poor quality. (Even more annoyed that I have so many missing chapters in between. ;_;) Good Morning Call was also cute, though HanaKimi is much more prettily drawn in my opinion. But unfortunately, I can't stand Parfait Tic. I understand that shoujo manga have the strange need to have the typical stupid heroine, but I can only tolerate a limited amount of stupidity. (Oniichan, I can't possibly understand why they made you be Fuuko. There's no comparison here; the girl's just...dumb.) Honestly, why can't there be an intelligent heroine for once? I'm not talking about emotional intelligence, just why does the male romantic lead get to be at the top of the class academically, while the female is always mediocre? Okay, making gross generalizations here, considering there's probably a huge number of exceptions, like KareKano. Still, after a week of reading shoujo, that's the general impression I received.
Another note on HanaKimi: maybe Mizuki's just better with languages than I am, but if I went to a Korean high school (regardless of whether it was all-boys or not), I'd fail out of every single class. I can communicate in Korean of course, but I don't have the academic vocabulary for schoolwork. I'll pull through fine in elementary school, I'm sure, and maybe I'll manage middle school, but high school level is far beyond my reach at this point. I'd even fail English in a Korean school, because I wouldn't be able to translate anything beyond the simplest sentences. I suppose you would adapt really quickly, but I'm still flabbergasted by the fact that an American-born Japanese girl would be able to easily chat with her peers. (I'm also flabbergasted that Mizuki's able to read all those Japanese magazine articles on Sano. It takes patience to constantly rifle through the dictionary like that.) Admittedly, I haven't attended Korean school, so my reading and writing skills may be more deficient than yisei (or in Mizuki's case, nisei) but I speak Korean pretty well for a second-generation. This fad of making characters come "back to the home country" from America is terribly unrealistic. I see it in dramas a lot too, and I always end up ranting about it.
Okay, enough's enough. I should go look at that friends list of mine.
...Tari
