oh god my braaaaaaiiiiin

[sholio]

I, um, just read on imdb.com who was cast as Piccolo in the Dragon Ball live-action movie.

James Marsters.

CANNOT. STOP. LAUGHING.

(Edit: In case you're not familiar with Dragon Ball, which I imagine is true of probably 90% of my f'list, this is Piccolo.)

Comments

[sholio]

From what I'd heard, I was expecting Avatar-style whitewashing fail, but it's much weirder than that! Right now I'm just wondering if the whole casting department was on LSD or something.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Okay, I am officially scared of the movie. I just went to wikipedia to look at the cast list again and saw that there are some original characters, one of whom is a school bully and the other is a classmate of Goku's.

WHAT

WHAT??????????

I had never read any plot synopses and just (naively, I guess!) assumed it was, you know, a live-action version of the story, not something completely made up with some characters with the same names as the Dragonball cast... D:

[sholio]

Oh my god it's a high school AU! It's a canon high school AU!!!!!

DBZ was the fandom that I credit with turning me off AUs (until SGA lured me back in) because you could not turn around in that fandom without tripping over goddawful high school AUs written by 13-year-olds. I still look askance at high school AUs, even though I can read other sorts without kneejerking now. I swear, it sounds like I'm exaggerating, but at the time it seemed like every other fic in the fandom was a high school AU.

I'm not sure whether to laugh or hide ...

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I love high school AUs, but I don't really want to read ones by teenagers. :p (The fact that the DBZ ones were probably all horribly Americanised, even if they purported to take place at a Japanese school, just adds to the badness.)

I had no plans to see the movie just on principal, but now I'm curious to hear just how bad it really is.

[sholio]

The fact that the DBZ ones were probably all horribly Americanised, even if they purported to take place at a Japanese school, just adds to the badness.

YES! That's it exactly ... they were basically, at heart, "Goku and Bulma and Vegeta and ChiChi go to my high school", and the result was exactly as awful as you would imagine.

I don't have anything in theory against high school AUs; it's just that encountering so many bad ones seems to have turned me off them in a major way (though I can still be lured in occasionally).

I'm sort of morbidly curious about the movie; it's certainly not something I would want to pay to see in the theatre, but it might be fun with a group of friends and a lot of alcohol ...

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

For me it's not particularly the school setting so much as I like writing about teens and kids, and I like writing stuff set when I was a teen/kid, and thus I write stuff like Life and Written Your Own Directions.

[sholio]

*nods* I should add that I do enjoy yours; they're very different from what I associate with "high school AU" in my head, and I think it's mainly because you're writing about people, and not trying to live out a "my favorite characters transfer to my high school!" sort of fantasy.

My own adolescence was unpleasant enough that it's only been the last few years that I've gained enough distance I can enjoy reading and writing about teenage characters, and I suspect that this ties into it, too ...

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have managed to avoid coming across that genre of high school AU for the most part (I think the closest is the sort of American transfer student to Hogwarts story, and even those I only see through the filter of babb_chronicles and other badfic comms) so it's not really what I think of first.