The Shrine

I'm curious what you think about the recent strip that was all in Japanese that actually required Piro to write a separate thing explaining he wasn't just showing off his leet Japanese skills.

To me, if it's not showing off, then there's no other explanation other than stupidity. There is no tone or voice or motion due to the medium chosen. There isn't any previous things to base from since all previous 'Japanese' dialogue gets magically translated to English. There isn't even any action in the frames involved to deduce anything other than that the Kimiko girl is probably trying to help. There are things to transcend language, and Megatokyo is none of those.

I don't read MegaTokyo, but because of your post, I just went and read his explanation. It's clear to me from looking at the comic and reading his explanation that his intent is for the reader to be as confused about what's happening as the character. I can't recall specific examples, but movies sometimes do the same thing. I'm not claiming it's effective, but I think the intent is clear.

He also clearly states that he can't understand that text without help.

He said the point was that even though it is confusing you can get a feel of what's going on because there are things that transcend the language barrier. But there's absolutely nothing in that scene that'd give you a remote idea of what's being said other than the very basic fact that Kimiko was trying to help which, incidentally, was explained in English the strip before anyway.

For example in Blizzard games they toss out random bits of their own language but because of the way it's used consistently (e.g. En Taro Adun) you can infer what's going on. Like I said if it's not meant to be as a showoff (would be better if it was really) then it is a very pathetic example. It'd be if I typed this post in Swahli and you're supposed to 'get it' because my writing transcends the language barrier, except in this case at least you can base on my previous posts here that I will probably say something negative to Megatokyo. In Megatokyo's case you can't even infer that much.

I never got Megatokyo. I have a strong suspiction that people read it more because it carries some odd form of geek cred with it (see: Slashdot readers and User Friendly) than due to it being worth the effort to follow.

I think that it was pretty obvious that you were supposed to view the situation from Largo's POV... What's wrong with that? It worked for me. I don't know what the hell she was saying.

Try babelfish if you want to understand what she said.

The only persons who speak English in that comic is Piro, Erika, and the zombie girl and Largo is in plenty scenes with people talking in Japanese. He even manages to teach a class of Japanese students with all their dialogue magically translated to English for the convenience of the reader(obviously he doesn't have any idea what the students are saying).

Megatokyo is as much fan-induced self-pity as any dating sim game. One kind of manga draws its appeal by having people cooler than you, while the draw of dating sim is people who are more pathetic than you can still get all these girls. It's actually quite sad I think. There's nothing particular wrong with this idea except people don't want to admit that's what attracts them to it. There's a manga called Magical Teacher Megane (or something) that actually has pretty positive reviews from even very cynical guys because it makes absolutely no attempt to hide it's just indulging in typical male fantasy (1 main character with 30+ female characters around him).

Tortolia wrote:I never got Megatokyo. I have a strong suspiction that people read it more because it carries some odd form of geek cred with it (see: Slashdot readers and User Friendly) than due to it being worth the effort to follow.

Aye. I tried reading UF for a while, but it just ended up being so geeky that it wasn't very funny.

Don Wang wrote:Megatokyo is as much fan-induced self-pity as any dating sim game. One kind of manga draws its appeal by having people cooler than you, while the draw of dating sim is people who are more pathetic than you can still get all these girls. It's actually quite sad I think. There's nothing particular wrong with this idea except people don't want to admit that's what attracts them to it. There's a manga called Magical Teacher Megane (or something) that actually has pretty positive reviews from even very cynical guys because it makes absolutely no attempt to hide it's just indulging in typical male fantasy (1 main character with 30+ female characters around him).

Actually, I like Megatokyo because I think that it's funny... I just got my fiance into the comic actually. She loves it. She's gone through almost all of the 700+ comics in the past few days.

Wang, I don't quite understand your hostility toward the comic.

Megatokyo is what you'd call as a self-insertion in the world of fanfiction. While every creative work is probably self-serving to the author in some way, it is rather blatant in Megatokyo but not enough so that you can call it a parody. I'm pretty sure Piro does think he's somehow championing the cause of the Anime nerds by showing how you can be a dating sim playing guy and still end up with beautiful girl. Of course you can find that kind of plot in about 150 different Shonen mangas (minus the dating sim part). As for the humor, it's okay, but every webcomic guy out there seems to think if what they do is remotely funny it gives them the right to ignore everything else (Penny Arcade comes to mind). Slapstick comedy isn't particularly hard. If that's the only motivation you could get say, Inuyasha, and it comes with professional drawing in a very timely manner (maybe too timely).

Maybe I'm not enough of an "Otaku" to see where you're coming from...

The arc where the voice actress girl talks about how otakus are people too actually explains the situaition pretty well. Otakus use a combination of self-pity and self-humilation to try to somehow make the fact that what they like is certainly considered non-mainstream. Of course if Piro actually believes in what he has the voice actress girl said MT wouldn't be too bad, but obviously he does not.