Quoran Answer Transplant: Scarlett Johansson as Major Motoko Kusanagi?

How do Ghost in the Shell fans feel about Scarlett Johansson as Major Motoko Kusanagi?

I'm angry and disappointed.

Again and again and again we see roles that could/should go to Asian actors/actresses get passed on to beautiful whites. If there was ever a AAA Hollywood movie where the monstrous gamble of casting an Asian American woman to play the lead might have good odds, it's a fucking adaptation of a popular anime franchise. There is a fan base already built in!

One of the arguments I see supporting Johansson's casting is, "Motoko Kusanagi doesn't HAVE to be played by a Japanese or even an Asian looking person because the character has an artificial body that also doesn't even look Asian". 

This is irrelevant and the reasoning is specious.

This isn't about Johansson's acting ability (she has it, that isn't under contention). This isn't about "looking like the character from the manga or the anime". 

"Anime characters never really look Asian any way, ya know?" 

Sure, but they don't really look like white people, or even real humans either. This is a drawn medium, the characters you see are representations of human beings, and usually not photo-realistic ones, either.

Tell me this looks like an actual white person you've ever met.

 If you actually want to argue that Lisa Simpson's ethnicity isn't white, you can stop reading now and go fuck yourself. In the Simpsons universe, this art style of human represents a white person.

This represents an Asian person.

 If you really don't think Asian-ness has anything at all to do with the character of Motoko Kusanagi then what was that whole CGI facial alteration thing about? It amazes me, the lengths to which Hollywood will go to avoid having to ACTUALLY use an Asian. They were seriously about to give Johansson the Sergeant Lincoln Osiris treatment. Do the guys in Hollywood even realize that the movie Tropic Thunder [2008] was a satirical piece aimed at them?

"They had one good part in here for a black man and they gave it to Crocodile Dundee."

Quoran Answer Transplant: Hotness - Good or Bad?

I'm still alive, everyone.

I'm sorry I haven't been very loyal to Blogger as a platform. All of my recent writing has been spent on answering questions on Quora instead. If it makes you feel better, I'm not all that prolific there either so you haven't missed out on too much. Nevertheless, in the interest of synchronization, from now on I'll endeavour to post any answers I write there to my personal blog here as well. To catch up this will begin a series of transplanted posts from Quora to Blogger.

Anime Again

In 2008 I realized that I'd lost contact with the anime world in the time between graduating high school and entering university. I attended Otakon that year and as I looked around I noticed large posters (and plenty of cosplay) for a show called Code Geass I'd never heard of. I had totally missed out on it.

2015 now, I am currently sorting my music collection, cleaning up ID3 tags and such and I started watching some YouTube videos of Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky. I ended up on this video here:


It's from a show currently airing called "Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso". Once again, in a single moment of clarity, I am rocked with the sensation that I've let anime drift away from me. Maybe this doesn't seem like a big deal to you but anime is one of my favorite mediums of entertainment. What I'm feeling right now is akin to a guy (or girl, maybe) who considered him/herself to be an avid football fan who has woken up one day and discovered that all the players s/he used to know have retired and all the current players and up-and-coming stars are people s/he doesn't recognize.

Father & Son

Real summer weather has finally started to come around this past week. In the face of the ominous approaching heat I've taken it upon myself to clean out the dust in all the family computers currently in use (3). And these things haven't been dusted... ever.

So as I was dusting the interior my dad walked past and came over to give me some unsolicited and (in my opinion) unnecessary cautionary advice about static electricity. He was an electrical engineer so he knows what he's talking about on this topic but this ain't my first rodeo for something so simple as dusting electronic components, I'll have you know. In addition, I'm more than familiar with the evils of static electricity. The main thing though: I think that was the first time we ever had what I imagine to be "normal" father/son conversation, complete with banter and laughter. I've never been close with my father and I don't believe we ever will be but I caught a glimpse of what might be in another universe, perhaps.

Farewell to Another Old Chum

It's been a little over a year since last time and I've just retired the second Gmail account I ever made. This should be the last major event of this type as I don't intend to do another open-one/close-one email account renovation.

The address was darkrahnoehk@gmail.com. Yes, the [rahnoehk] naming convention was a trio of Gmail accounts. As you know, regular rahnoehk retired in March 2014. I used that account for business matters like job and education-related material. I used dark rahnoehk for... everything else. If I needed an email address for something, anything at all, that didn't fit into "job stuff" or "school stuff" darkrahnoehk rolled out. Unfortunately, dark has gotten old and riddled with spammy disease because of its promiscuous ways. It was young. It was foolish. It didn't know about disposable email addresses back then. Gmail filters out all spam with ease but I think it's time to just start fresh. (Besides, it doesn't fit the new naming convention I use.)

(￣___￣)7

P.S. Check out the dead link to Grooveshark in that other post, eh? Damn, I mean, I'm not super surprised they shut down because of copyright difficulties, but they'd been around for a couple of years so I figured they'd somehow slipped notice successfully. Guess not.

P.P.S. You might be saying, "Hey, if there was a regular rahnoehk and a dark rahnoehk then where was/is light rahnoehk?" Well, good on you for paying attention. That's the address/account I use for this blog/Google+ profile. I've looked into migrating this entire blog over to another account but it turns out it would break all the images in all past posts. That's a lot of damage so it's a good thing I'm not completely OCD for conceptual uniformity with my Google account names.