Hey oh y’all,
YES! FINALLY FINISHED WITH THE QUARTER!
AND BY FINISHED WITH THE QUARTER I MEAN FINISHED WITH AN
ACADEMIC FINAL PAPER ON POKÉMON!
Yes, you read that “write” – an academic paper on Pokémon! I
have completed my academic goal of proving that Pokémon is worth studying! See
in my “Why do I want to go to Stanford” plan, I specifically put Pokémon! So
yes! Thank you Stanford study abroad!
See – this quarter I took a class called Japanese Popular
Culture.
We got to discuss the cultural significance of awesomeness –
see soft power in Pokémon; gender roles in Takarazuka, AKB48, and maid cafes;
food in food media; and more!
For our final presentations – we were given basically an
open prompt so we all chose really interesting and unique presentations from
smoking in ads, to AKB48, to BL manga. One of the interesting catches though
was that each presentation had to fit in the Japanese Pecha-kucha format (“blah- blah” loosely translated).
Each presentation must be exactly 400 seconds – with 20 slides each
automatically timed for 20 seconds. Yes, it’s short. And yes, it’s unusual to
get used to. But you can make for really unique presentations.
Special shout-out to Mariko for showing us how it’s done –
linguistic grad student giving us a perfectly polished and timed presentation
(with timed audio clips)! Also shout-out to Jacob…for being so post-modern,
even his presentation on post-modern was post-modern (and if that doesn’t make
sense, it’s because it’s post-modern).
Of course I did mine on Pokémon! But I did a pretty fun
analysis on Pokémon translated – what stays the same, what is different. Anyone
ever heard of rice-ball shaped “jelly donuts”? Look it up on YouTube…4Kids made
some unusual edit changes.
And for my final 5-unit paper, I also wrote on Pokémon! My
title was: “A Radical
Revisit: Localization of Gender and Sexuality Revealed Through Abridged Anime.” I took
a look at how gender and sexuality are constructed through derivative works of
translated anime. So when anime is brought to the US, some of the gender and
sexuality roles are changed or edited to adjust to US “standards” – for
example, one episode of Pokémon was banned for featuring Misty and a
cross-dressing James in a bikini beauty pageant. Abridged Pokémon, being a
fan-made parody, was a main source to reveal this edit to US audiences since it
was never officially released. Abridged Pokémon had to construct a completely
new narrative to both introduce the episode and make fun of it (usually parody
requires audience knowledge of the parodied work). However, another issue is
whether this infringes on copyright, since it uses scenes from an “unreleased”
work (among using scenes from the show itself). If you would like to read or
discuss more, please let me know. I can even send you my paper if you so like.
For more reading I suggest Pikachu's Global Adventure, a great media studies book (actually academic essays on Pokémon - I'm not the only in academia who thinks about this), and everyone's favorite fan-made wiki: bulbapedia.com.
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| Who's that cool guy in the orange shirt? |
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| Did you know that Pikachu has the same name and voice actor across all translations? Also, I highly recommend this book. |
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| Did you also know Pikachu likes ketchup? Ketchup is apparently international. |
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| But rice balls apparently are not. Brock (not Takeshi) and his "jelly donuts" - Seriously, look it up! |
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| With imported anime, a lot of things are localized -sometimes for the better, sometimes for the pointless, sometimes (as in the jelly donuts) for the questionable |
Long
story short – yes Pokémon has a lot to teach us about our world, and I
encourage you to explore it with an open eye! I look forward to talking with
you!
-DC
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