- Joined
- May 9, 2002
- Messages
- 13,066
- Real Name
- Cameron Yee
I'm not sure how many here follow Comic Book Girl 19 on YouTube, but I really enjoy and appreciate her opinions on media and entertainment, though I may not always agree with them.
Recently she posted a video about World of Warcraft and made an off-hand comment about how audiences in China are "unsophisticated" and thus the reason for the movie's popularity there vs. here (I didn't see the video before it got taken down, but learned what had happened second hand via comments).
Not surprisingly, her calling Chinese audiences unsophisticated made some people angry, and the video got taken down to be eventually replaced by the one below (which you'll notice has comments disabled), which further elaborates (but doesn't apologize) on the perspective.
[Just a warning, she likes to use the F-word a lot.]
I'm posting this here because I'd like to discuss this topic and this is the best place on the Internet to do it.
If I had seen the original video that bothered some people, I would not have thought twice about her choice of words. I've seen a lot of Chinese (i.e. Hong Kong) movies and I love them -- when they're good. But there's a lot of crap from there, and I think more so recently as Mainland China has been influencing more of the output from Hong Kong. This seems to be the general consensus by those I've talked to, either from Asia or who follow Chinese moviemaking.
Now the thing that had not occurred to me really, was the notion that Chinese audience are not media savvy (CBG19's new choice of words) because of decades of censorship. I'm not entirely convinced on that point. I think there's a cultural aspect as well around how stories are told and what one expects to get out of a movie (e.g. wanting to be entertained vs. art/making you think), as I've noticed this difference long before China became a global influence on what kinds of movies are being made. I think it's ultimately that cultural piece that is missing from her argument and I'd be curious to know what her exposure has been to Hong Kong cinema before China took over.
In any case, those are my initial thoughts, but hope to have more discussion
Recently she posted a video about World of Warcraft and made an off-hand comment about how audiences in China are "unsophisticated" and thus the reason for the movie's popularity there vs. here (I didn't see the video before it got taken down, but learned what had happened second hand via comments).
Not surprisingly, her calling Chinese audiences unsophisticated made some people angry, and the video got taken down to be eventually replaced by the one below (which you'll notice has comments disabled), which further elaborates (but doesn't apologize) on the perspective.
[Just a warning, she likes to use the F-word a lot.]
I'm posting this here because I'd like to discuss this topic and this is the best place on the Internet to do it.
If I had seen the original video that bothered some people, I would not have thought twice about her choice of words. I've seen a lot of Chinese (i.e. Hong Kong) movies and I love them -- when they're good. But there's a lot of crap from there, and I think more so recently as Mainland China has been influencing more of the output from Hong Kong. This seems to be the general consensus by those I've talked to, either from Asia or who follow Chinese moviemaking.
Now the thing that had not occurred to me really, was the notion that Chinese audience are not media savvy (CBG19's new choice of words) because of decades of censorship. I'm not entirely convinced on that point. I think there's a cultural aspect as well around how stories are told and what one expects to get out of a movie (e.g. wanting to be entertained vs. art/making you think), as I've noticed this difference long before China became a global influence on what kinds of movies are being made. I think it's ultimately that cultural piece that is missing from her argument and I'd be curious to know what her exposure has been to Hong Kong cinema before China took over.
In any case, those are my initial thoughts, but hope to have more discussion