I'm getting a little tired of the way that bob seems to idolise "milenial cullture" as if everyone under the age of 30 thinks and feels the same. It's just weird. I'm a fan of bobs stuff and it's not a personal dig but after while it does become a bit tiring. Milenials aren't inherently better than other generation and putting us on a pedestal doesn't help anything. Most people I know who could be described as "milenials" are heavily critical of pretty much everything south park was targetting in the last season. Moreso than "gen X"ers who just see these things from the sidelines. If anything it's almost like it's bob here that's "getting old". The stance he takes on this type of thing is almost like he's attempting to stay young by emulating what he thinks "the kids are doing these days". Or to compare to south park, he's stan's dad. There's also the impicit notion that if a cause is just it shouldn't be questioned which I completely disagree with. It's even MORE important that we question movements for equality because we want them to be successful.
No I'm pretty sure he meant the final frontier. Who wouldn't admire the deep political and philosophical themes raised by a film directed by william shatner where william shatner fights god and wins simply because he's awesome. I mean clearly it's the deepest star trek film, if not the deepest film ever!
Marvel own the merchandising rights and have done since at least asm2, so i doubt this is it. A more likely scenario, considering we haven't heard or seen anything about his role, is that spiderman has cameo appearance at best. Probably an after the credits scene.
The thing is, where else is red skull going to show up? I don't think he'll be in civil war or in the movies in general for a while. Having him be big bad in agents of shield would be a sensible place to put the character until the movies want to do something with him. That way agents could explain exactly how he comes back without the movies having to devote a serious amount of time to the explanation which would inevitably bog down a film. A quick few seconds of dialogue and a shot of one of the shield team would be enough to tell movie goers "he's back now, that's everything you need to know but if you WANT to know more he's on this tv show". I see it as a win-win scenario really. I mean all the inhumans stuff has been covered on agents and that's pretty huge in terms of movie plans.
To be honest, it's looking fairly thin in every category imo right now. Maybe the martian will win something but, while a solid film, it didn't really blow me away. I imagine at this point it'll just be Joy winning everything, which is a shame because I don't think it looks that good. We still have a few months to go though so things could change.
But that's exactly why they started the episode with simmons learning to survive on her own, if anything I think the front loading that bob talks about in his review is exactly intended to avoid simmons coming across as helpless. She COULD have survived on her own (in fact she's limited at multiple points by will) but they needed a reason for her to want to stay and they needed someone for plot dumps. Since the only other sensible way around this would have been to have some weird time dilation thing where she's spent a significant portion of her life on the planet and/or her blankly reading someone's journal they added the will character. Right now he's literally just a plot device. Which is good or bad depending on your viewpoint but there's no denying that, will or not, this was simmon's episode.
Ok, yeah done a little bit more research. So what I'm thinking of is a yama uba which is similar to a hag and has been depicted in noh theatre using what we would see as black face. It is indeed a likely explanation for jynx but an unlikely one for popo who is ostensibly male. So chances are that the character is depicting some form of blackface. I stand by what I said though about a lack of cultural context in this case. The blackface image is only, in and of itself, a racist image because we've made it so. There's a long history in the west of blackface being used to mimic and ridicule black people and while I'm sure there has been a fair amount of that in japanese history (I'm not disputing the fact that japanese culture can be massively xenophobic and indeed racist at times) it doesn't hold the same cultural weight. Japan, from my knowledge (correct me if I'm wrong) doesn't have the same history with the black slave trade and so their approach to race in this sense is completely different to our own. Again, I'm not denying that japan being a fairly homogenous nation, an island one at that, has a lot of offensive stereotypes that are used but I just don't believe in this particular case that we can call character designs like popo's actively racist.
As @raikolives says the original term is already a pun in japanese. We're talking about a translation here and not the original. I'm not sure how much involvement toriyama had with the translation process but I don't really think he would have requested to have the name changed so that it sounded a bit like a chinese phrase, instead of just leaving the original pun intact. If that is what happened then fine but i'd say there's more evidence here for it being a bit of a coincidence.
Apparently in japanese they're called Saiya-jin and saiyan is just a westernisation of that. The jin bit is the same route as the jan part of sai jan so if you were to translate it in the way you are doing it would be western person person. I think it's just a bit of a coincidence, two words sounding similar, either that or it was intentional on the part of the translators but not on the part of the creators.
Isn't popo's look based on a japanese mythological creature that shares a lot of base traits with western depictions of blackface? Similar to jynx. I don't think that it was ever intended to be blackface but a lack of cultural context (both from the japanese of western racist imagery and an ignorance from the west of japanese culture) has led to a slightly uncomfortable image. Now, it may be the case that the original creature was intended to be a horrific metaphor for black people but I think there are also reasonable explanations for the original creature too.
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