Frownland

I've seen a lot of episodes and never ran into a nonsensical one. What does watching the whole series open up apart from nostalgia?

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Exo

Kind of has that "Arrested Development" thing where callbacks happen without giving a lot of exposition to what they mean, except they're not "inside jokes", they're important pieces of story context that make what's happening in the episode mean much more than it leads on.

For example there are lots of flashbacks and set pieces where Finn has a robotic right arm. You learn later in the season what that means and the context of where you saw him without an arm in previous episodes makes that reveal mean much more than just "Oh, Finn has a robot arm now".

There's also subtle clues that dive into the relationships of certain characters multiple seasons before you learn the answers to them.

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LastFM

SUPREME POO BAH MODERATOR EXTRAORDINAIRE

The Batlord

Next entry will probably be about Dino-Riders so way ahead of you.

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windsock

I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts on The Thief and the Cobbler, Richard Williams' 30-year long passion project.

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RYM
Last.fm

The Batlord

I've been rewatching Vision of Escaflowne cause it's fantastic and I'd love to do an entry about it but in the first few episodes I came across an old thing I'd forgotten about that interests me on a language level. English and Japanese have different pronunciation norms. Duh. For instance the Japanese have that thing I'm not qualified to comment on where they add "u"s to the end of a lot of their consonants at the end of words and I don't really know why, but that's not what this is about. This is about a quirk in English pronunciation I just realized that I find cool.

Many names in the show are Western influenced (such as "Van" and "Allen") and "Merle" is pretty clearly so when you consider just how difficult it is for Japanese voice actors to pronounce her name without sounding like they're trying to swallow a particularly uncooperative squid. "Merulu" obviously is not what they're trying to say, but I think the transition from the "r" to the "l", at least at the end of a word, might be a bitch for anyone who isn't fluent in a language that does this.

Try it. Go "rrrrrrrrrrrrr" and then quickly go to "L". See if you notice that in-between you involuntarily exhale because the tip of your tongue moving to your top teeth naturally flexes your throat muscles just a bit. Now imagine if you were a native speaker of a language that didn't do this and see if "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrulu" doesn't make a bit more sense. Kind of a next level pronunciation technique tbh.

There's no real reason to this post. I just thought of that and it was fun to me.

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MicShazam

All of those weird Japanese pronunciations of non-Japanese words and names make sense when you know how their alphabet works. If I recall correctly, the only stand alone consonant they've got is an "n" sound. Hence the need to cram in vowels where they don't belong into foreign words.

windsock

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RYM
Last.fm

The Batlord

Yeah people talk about Spanish and rolling "r"s, but when I listen to Japanese I realize that Westerners roll all of their consonants to transition into vowels in a way that's kind of neato. Like if you do it slowly and imagine how your mouth looks while you're doing it you feel smarmy and kind of like a super villain and I swear to god this is why the West conquered the world.

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MicShazam

In Danish, the "r" is clearly still there, but it's always a very short, clipped sound compared to something like Spanish, French. But I've got no difficulties rolling r's like a Spaniard.

It's funny how easy it is to learn to pronounce Japanese, considering how hard it is for them to do the same for other languages. Their words are very simple in structure and there's not a lot of vowel and consonant variety. Oppositely, I believe I read somewhere that Danish is the language in the world with the largest variety of vowel sounds, so a Japanese person would probably need 50 years to learn to sound like a native.

The Batlord

lol I don't know why I said "roll". I think I was visualizing a consonant casually "rolling" into a vowel and was too party time to worry about saying smart things. I mean everyone knows what rolling an R is and I was not talking about that.

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