Those eyes! Those horrible eyes!

[elfs]

And I thought Dora The Explorer was bad.

I stopped by Kinokuniya on the way home and picked up a volume of Maria-sama ga Miteru (I'm not going to bother pulling up the Kanji-enabled editor right about now). Not the comic book, the novel, which was the original. The drawings are about right (you can see the character designs here) but inside the book were a couple of drop-out flyers advertising the DVDs, the manga, and the dolls. Those dolls you see to the left. Oh, my, gods those are creepy-looking. It's as if Maria-sama ga Miteru was put into Tim Burton's hands. Not a healthy thing to think.

And while I was looking around, I found a rather cute example of cosplay (probably safe for work). Kawaii!

Comments

[featheredfrog.livejournal.com]

Holy Hannahs!

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

I don't believe in the uncanny valley, but if I did, I'd use these pics as an example.

[dhydra.livejournal.com]

All dollfie stuff looks weird. Whenever my kids find them in their anime/manga explorations, I feel like I'm feeding some future fetish of theirs.

Hey, Elf, you're probably the person I need to ask this to: My teen daughter wants to decipher her Layers magazine -- so she would need a Kanji-enabled editor? Any advice, I'd greatly appreciate.

And if anyone knows where I can find a Sheena/Tales of Symphonia costume pattern, please, please, please tell me. I don't want to help her design one from scratch -- I'm still burned out from doing Shrek's Puss n Boots from Halloween past.

Much thanks!

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Layers is a costuming magazine, I see (I guess I should have been able to tell that from the rest of your comment by context, but I haven't had my coffee yet this morning). I guess the question is: how much does she need to decipher? This is only vaguely cryptography, in that the information is coded in a language she doesn't know.

There are three alphabets in Japanese, and one of them, Katakana, is directly translatable into English (indeed, it is mostly made up of borrowed English words). You can recognize it by the blocky square quality (http://www.genki-online.com/kyozai/katakana.html) of the letters. Hiragana (http://www.tokyowithkids.com/fyi/hiragana_chart.html) is the traditional "spell it like it sounds" alphabet of Japanese.

Looking at the covers of a few issues of Layers, it seems to be mostly aimed at middle-school kids, so it has the simpler 2000-character Kanji sometimes, but is mostly in Hirigana or Katakana. That's just the covers; I can't see the content.

If there's Kanji, there's no way around it: you need a SKIP dictionary. It's the easiest "look it up" dictionary for Japanese, because it lets you figure out which of the 2000 Kanji you could be looking at just by counting the number of strokes that make up the word.

[mistie710.livejournal.com]

OK. I agree. Those are pretty creepy. They remind me of a range of goth dolls they had in at my local shop last year.