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The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (TV).

I thought I said that pretty succinctly myself.

Clearly almost noone out there ACTUALLY feels it deserves a 1, maybe a 5 or something, but they rate it a 1 just as an attempt to bring down the average.

Even if you want a more exciting life, and even if you get that exciting life, you'll still be the same boring you."

frouella wrote:

Dan42 wrote: Or another way to put it: An adventure is when something dangerous, exciting, and unique happens to someone else in far away place. Yeah, that's definitely a more succinct way to put it!

While both of you had described it quite nicely, I still have a difficult time finding out the Chinese curse you mentioned in its original form.

"Who is more moe? Yuki or Mikuru?"

I vote Yuki.

To some extent, it does depend on the person. Some people simply can't take ANY criticism no matter how it is worded. If they read/hear something remotely negative about their favorite show (no matter how much it is praised at the same time), they will get offended and counter-attack.

At the same time, if someone starts blasting a series simply because they didn't like it, you can't expect fans to simply sit there and take, particularly if said person is basking in ignorance and is making ridiculous posts.

So yes, it does depend on the peson. Both of them.

However, the popularity of this "Chinese curse" puzzles Chinese scholars, who have only heard it from Americans. If it is of Chinese origin, it has somehow escaped the literature, although it may be a paraphrase of a liberal translation from a Chinese source, and therefore unrecognizable when translated back to Chinese. It might be related to the Chinese proverb, "It's better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period."

Quote:

The parallels he's drawn between the characters from other series are stretched rather thin. Just because a story's characters share some superficial similarities to characters from other stories does not render them stereotypical.

This is from a few pages back but I just had to answer. If you think that the HSnY character are even *slightly* original, you are utterly deluding yourself. Sure they are well fleshed, but even within the show, Suzumiya herself refers to Mikuru as the "moe lolita character", to Yuki as the "indispensable silent character", to Itsuki as the "mysterious transfer student". The show *itself* revels in the stereotypicalness of its characters, so don't even try to pretend they are original.

If I had to name the theme of the series, I would say it's something like "we may want excitement and adventures from time to time, but in the end having a normal life is the best". Anobody else? What do you think the theme is? (if there is one)

Shoot, another "Chinese idiom" written by fortune cookie makers. No wonder I couldn't find it in any Chinese idiom dictionary.

Sample yoji jukugo:

• 傍若無人 - boujakubujin - behaving with arrogance, as if one were the only person present
  
• 三日坊主 - mikka bouzu - "three-day monk" (i.e. giving up at the first sign of trouble)
  
• 十人十色 - juunin toiro - "Ten people, ten colours" (i.e. suum cuique)

All of which will probably be as familiar to Chinese readers as to Japanese. But chéngyǔ / yoji jukugo form an important stylistic device in both languages, and deserve a bit of study.

The first is almost identical to Chinese one: 旁若無人, and in many cases 旁 and 傍 are compaticle and interchangeable. The latter two, however, were Japanese originals.