Well everyone, I just discovered something great: Todd In The Shadows. Todd has very quickly become one of my favorite internet viewers.
Now, people may've noticed that I don't have any pop music from the last 6 or so years in my collection. One glance at my MP3 player and you'll find that that is not true; I do have pop music from the last half-decade; it's just that all the newer pop songs from my collection are Japanese pop songs. Sure, go ahead, make fun of me for that, "You can't understand most of the lyrics!" "You're just a weeaboo in denial!" "You're too lazy to buy albums from Amazon, so you just download songs you've heard from various animes instead!" but I'll tell you right now that "Beautiful World" sounds about a 1000 times better than most of the shit Todd has reviewed. Okay, sure, I like Taylor Swift, but honestly, the American music industry has hit a new low. I didn't think it could get worse than the songs my colleagues back in my graduating class of 2004 wouldn't shut up about, but I can see now that I was tempting fate; it got worse. DO PEOPLE EVEN HAVE ANY FUCKING STANDARDS FOR MUSIC ANYMORE!?!?!? Well, they must; I have amassed a bunch of Touhou remixes, my parents have LPs from the 1960s, (the Sixties had groovy music, man, like, nuthin' like the chickenscratch sellin' today, dude.) one of my friends goes to Metallica concerts whenever possible, and one of my cousins collects obscure yet good jazz albums. But enough of that.
---------------
I once claimed that I was writing a Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction that sadly will never see the light of day. In Troper terms, it is an Old Shame that I thankfully never released to the internet, even though admittingly, it wasn't a complete waste of text. However, I also claimed that I used to be very verbose when describing things. Since the text is lost, I can't post what I wrote, but, I have attempted that again. In my Touhou Fanfic About Nothing series, some of the descriptions are like the ones I used to give for Sonic characters. Indeed, my description of Kaguya was over-the-top, but you wanna know how crazy I got when I described my favorite Touhou character Youmu? Just look:
"Outside of the mansion, but within the walls of Hakugyokurou was a girl. She was sitting on her knees. A dying sakura tree was right in front of her."
You mean cherry blossom tree, not "sakura." No one outside of Japanese people and students of the Japanese language are gonna get that.
"She was short, lacked developed breasts, and petite. She appeared no older than a 12 year old girl, yet in fact was closer to 60 years of age."
I haven't decided Youmu's exact age yet, but based on what I've seen in the Touhou wiki, ZUN places her around the 50-to-60s range. If that's the case, I should've just said, "She was a loli."
"She wore a white shirt with short poofy sleeves underneath a green button-up dress, one that reached to her thighs. Her dress was adored with the insignias of ghosts along the edges and breast pocket, as well as a white belt around her waist, and a black ribbon on her chest."
A Victorian get-up. She was dressed like a girl from a Victorian period piece. Why am I so over-descriptive?
"Her skin was very fair, almost as much as her short silver hair which reached to just above the top of her slender shoulders. A black ribbon was placed off-center on the top of her hair. She wore black shoes with white socks that didn't go very high up her ankles. She carried the sheath of a katana in her left hand. The end of the sheath had a pink flower attached to it, while the handle of the katana was adorned with the insignia of sakura petals."
Most non-Japanese don't know what a katana is; it should say, "sabre" 'cause that's what it is, and again with the printing of sakura in Romanji!
"Most curious of all was the white, formless entity floating just above her. It appeared to be a ghost, or maybe a being of magic. It appeared no larger than her head."
Her ghost-half form. There, simple as that.
"During this time, her eyes were closed, and her hands rested on her thighs. It appeared as though she was meditating."
She sat Japanese-style. Come on, it's obvious by this point.
"Suddenly, her sharp midnight blue eyes opened."
As opposed to what, her cobalt blue eyes? Her ocean blue eyes? Her RC Cola can eyes? At least I didn't print "Cerulean Oculars" like a romance author.
"Within one moment, she had opened her eyes. The next moment, the dying tree was cut in two, toppling down to the earth. The girl, as well as the formless spirit, were several meters ahead."
Hey, I'll give myself credit here; I described the distance in metrics, since Gensokyo is, or rather, was a part of Japan, I figured they use metrics.
"She stood on her feet, with the sheath in her left hand, and her unsheathed katana in her right hand. Amazingly, both instruments were as tall as her, yet she could wield both without encumbrance."
In my character profile page that I haven't published, I listed Youmu's height as being around 4'10'', or 145 cm. Her longer sword is nearly that tall, and she looks like a girl who is at the onset of puberty; she must have oni-like strength.
"Her eyes were straightforward and focused, and her face showed no signs of emotion."
Just so you know that Youmu is the most stereotypically Japanese character in the entire series. The only other description I forgot was:
"Her voice sounds exactly like Stephanie Sheh's whenever she's voicing Excel from Kurokami or Natalia from Tales of the Abyss."
Then again, this is coming from a guy who pictures a character from Fate sounding like Vincent Price. Make of that what you will.
But yes, nearly every Sonic character that I included in my fanfic got such a lengthy introduction. Nowadays, trying to describe something in such excruciating detail usually leaves my mind wasted, but I can still do it.
