I'm alive, yes! (I'm also supposed to be studying for my five-hour long exam I have in two weeks... *whistling innocently*) Thanks, btw, for linking me here! I wanted to thank you in your post, but was somehow unable to find it again. (I'm seriously dyslexic when it comes to posts - I recently discovered that a friend who I thought hadn't updated in ages had, in fact, posted at least twice a month... but for some reason, I never saw her posts! And it wasn't that she'd taken me from her friendslist or they'd been private, or anything, because I could see them just fine in her journal. Me and LJ posts just seem to have a really weird relationship.)
Btw, I read your stuff too, and it was SO interesting to see how differently we viewed some of the stuff, or just how different a focus we put on things! You'd thought of things that I hadn't even considered. (The awesome female characters in Japanese anime/manga/drama, for example - I'd totally forgotten them! Possibly because I haven't really watched/read any of those three in ages and I used to read/watch shonen shows more than shojo, but still, that's really somewhat embarrassing. ^^")
And I'm completely with you on the (Arashi-based) tsukkomi/boke stuff! "Snark and wit works across cultures for me", indeed: I just recently started watching the British motor show "Top Gear" and really, the first thing I thought when I saw the three presenters interacting was "OMG THESE THREE MIDDLE-AGED BRITISH GUYS ACT LIKE ARASHI! O_O", because they have exactly the same kind of "showing their friendship through snarking, being horrible to each other and then turning around and being somewhat sweet towards each other" that Arashi have. (Seriously, in one of the vids I watched they were in Africa and one of them fell in love with the car - and old Opel Kadett - he was driving. Cue endless mocking from the other, culminating in them playing sad love songs through their ipods at him when his car broke down. I honestly sat there and thought "...this is exactly what the Arashi members would do...") I wonder which this has more to do with: Similar concepts of humour, or similar concepts of friendship?
Answering here, because it's ...about culture? At least somewhat!
Btw, I read your stuff too, and it was SO interesting to see how differently we viewed some of the stuff, or just how different a focus we put on things! You'd thought of things that I hadn't even considered. (The awesome female characters in Japanese anime/manga/drama, for example - I'd totally forgotten them! Possibly because I haven't really watched/read any of those three in ages and I used to read/watch shonen shows more than shojo, but still, that's really somewhat embarrassing. ^^")
And I'm completely with you on the (Arashi-based) tsukkomi/boke stuff! "Snark and wit works across cultures for me", indeed: I just recently started watching the British motor show "Top Gear" and really, the first thing I thought when I saw the three presenters interacting was "OMG THESE THREE MIDDLE-AGED BRITISH GUYS ACT LIKE ARASHI! O_O", because they have exactly the same kind of "showing their friendship through snarking, being horrible to each other and then turning around and being somewhat sweet towards each other" that Arashi have. (Seriously, in one of the vids I watched they were in Africa and one of them fell in love with the car - and old Opel Kadett - he was driving. Cue endless mocking from the other, culminating in them playing sad love songs through their ipods at him when his car broke down. I honestly sat there and thought "...this is exactly what the Arashi members would do...")
I wonder which this has more to do with: Similar concepts of humour, or similar concepts of friendship?