Brief thoughts on A:TLA Book One: Water

[starlady]

# One of the little things I love is all the fauna and how they're remixed rather than copied straight from our world. Turtle-seals FTW!

# Star Trek actors doing voices so far: George Takei, Rene Auberjonois (twice!). Did I miss anyone?

# I don't think it's possible to get any more Daoist than the Ocean and Moon spirits giving up their immortality to become fish. Zhuangzi would be pleased.

# Can we all take a minute to appreciate the flying Cat Bus homage of awesomeness that is Appa? Also, in the last episode of this season, the Mononoke-hime shoutout that is Aang in his "Avenging the Moon spirit" form? I have to say, I enjoy these Ghibli homages, they show that the A:TLA showrunners have done their homework (obviously).

# On the other hand, apparently whoever directed the voice actors was incapable of teaching them the proper way to pronounce characters' names. Case in point: everyone's favorite villain, Zhao. Even his own voice actor can't say his name correctly! Yes, this is me in my corner being pedantic, I am getting hung up on a tree, but it niggles.

# However, I am not missing the forest of awesome that is this show for that tree. This show is the best! ♥ ♥ ♥

Comments

[torachan]

Well, all the names are very Americanised. The Japanese-y ones are super cringeworthy, so I can only imagine the other-language-based ones must be as well.

[starlady]

I suppose that's true. I haven't really noticed any Japanese-style names (except Avatar Kiyoshi, I suppose?), but the Chinese (i.e. Mandarin) ones stick out to me, since there's hanzi all over the place and they're used properly, as far as I can tell.

[lilacsigil]

I decided to fanwank that everyone has strong regional accents, so the different pronunciation is all just part of the rich tapestry of a fantasy world that really does have a lot of different cultures.

[noldo]

It seems terribly meet to link you to the following: um --!

Also, the name pronunciation issue reminds that there's perhaps some interesting meta to be had re. why all of the Avatar-verse speaks the same language with approximately the same accent, and I really must prevent myself from working through it if I want to do useful things ever again.

[yifu]

Suki? The treatment for that one isn't too bad, considering.

[starlady]

I have seen the Cat Bus/Appa thing, though not for a while. I think it primed me to see the connection? But Appa looks like the Cat Bus!

*nods* I can explain the same language thing as a result of some past historical contingency reenforced by everyone traveling around a lot, but the lack of accent is kind of baffling. Unless we take lilacsigil's suggestion above and see the variant pronunciations as remnants of distinct accents?

[unjapanologist]

The pronunciation for that Avatar was a bit wonky -her name is usually romanized as Kyoshi, and you can see the character kyo (same kyo as in Kyoto) on some Kyoshi Warrior parafernalia. Although one painting in the episode "Avatar Day" wrote her name as 虛子. Most voice actors do seem to say Kiyoshi.

Er. I mean, I like Avatar too! Hurrah :)

[starlady]

Ah, that makes sense. It's been a while since I watched that episode (I've been going so slowly, augh!), and I was thinking it was "kyo" like in Kiyomizu-dera, which has been a weird semi-elided diphthong since the Heian period at least. Thanks, bungo!

I love this show too! I need more icons for it.

[unjapanologist]

Bungo was never one of my strong points, I'm afraid. I'm better at random trivia ;)

[cofax7]

Korra icon! I gotta get me one of them. I can't wait!

OTOH, you will enjoy watching the rest of ATLA. I keep getting sucked into rewatching, because it's on Netflix streaming, even though I've seen it all twice through...

[rushthatspeaks]

As far as I can tell, Appa is what happens when the Catbus has a fling with that one thing from Where The Wild Things Are, you know, the one with the horns.

I love this show so much and season two is even better.

[holyschist]

There are more Japanese-ish names in the Fire Nation, and yeah, they are pretty Americanized in pronunciation. They weren't really going for specific cultures, although I think some of the nations are predominantly influenced by X.

[holyschist]

Appa is the BEST. That is all.

[lnhammer]

*sports coffee on screen*

Dang you!

---L.

[glass_icarus]

YAY A:TLA!! *\o/* &hearts

Also, YES re: Ghibli homages, ahahaha! I didn't think Appa looked that much like the Cat Bus, but it has been a while since I've watched Totoro...

[recessional]

The language-thing is one of the few items of this world that I just write off to "fantasy story conventions obeyed by people who didn't want to deal with all the narrative quirks that come from trying to wrangle more than one language, especially without a magical McGuffin to make all the main chars understand each other."

[(Anonymous)]

I think that was explicitly the intention of the creators of the show, just like the moon spirit.

They also instructed their animators to go for FLCL animation style.

[starlady]

Interesting. I haven't noticed any huge FLCL similarities yet, but on the other hand it's been years since I've watched FLCL, and that anime has about a dozen different styles in it.

[epershand]

Yay Avatar!

They aren't Star Trek actors, but General Zhao is Jason Isaacs (aka Lucius Malfoy from the HP movies and Captain Hook from the Peter Pan remake that happened about six years ago) and Fire Lord Ozai is Mark Hamill. :)

[starlady]

I knew Mark Hamill would be in there at some point, but I failed to watch the credits for 1x20, which I think is the first time Ozai has a speaking line. Excellent.

[aliettedb.livejournal.com]

I loooove that show to bits (and yes, there are problems with pronunciations, but the awesomeness far outweighs the missed bits). The little details regularly made me go "oooohhh", and that doesn't happen very often.