Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/User:MacMania/HowTo:Be Japanese
User:MacMania/HowTo:Be Japanese[edit source]
Heartfelt apologies in advance—
Sir MacMania GUN—[03:43 17 Jul 2010]
- The amount of articles you have up for review right now is fucking mindboggling. I'll take care of this one over the weekend at some point. —Unführer Guildy Ritter von Guildensternenstein 14:55, July 23, 2010 (UTC)
| Humour: | 6.25 | Ah, the Japanese: the most easily-mockable industrialized people on the face of the Earth. When I first saw this on the queue, I knew I'd have a lot to say about it, because A) you're the author, and B) because Japanese cultural oddities are so well-known and pronounced that it's almost sort of hard to come up with an original angle regarding them. I mean, the whole "the Japanese are xenophobic ethnocentric white-washing racists that watch cartoon battle-mech pornography"[1] has been done before. So I was curious as to what you'd do. Anyway, here goes:
Fundamentally, I think this article has a bit of the same problem that plagued your first draft of Moby-Dick--having just returned here, you're still in shake-off-mental-cobwebs mode, so to speak. You take many stabs at jokes, but many of them fall flat. The strikeout joke in the opening paragraph is very meh, as is the caption to the first image. Basically, a lot of this article is very Uncyclopedia-passe: the use of the username template, the general "option 2: something ridiculous!" angle, the "zomg money!!11!!" thing, etc. This is either do to the cobwebs I mentioned above, or because you're attempting something I'll elaborate on in the Concept section. Anyway, there were a few lines/parts that I did rather like: the "just plain silly" line was good for a smile, the Gulliver's travels joke is an excellent one-liner, and a great example of what you TVtropers would call a "Genius Bonus" (as is the reference to North). And the paragraph at the very end is amusing. More on that later. |
| Concept: | 8 | From what I can gather, you've got two things going on here. The first, and most evident, is making fun of how impossibly hard it is to gain Japanese citizenship, and in the process mocking the very xenophobic cultural values of the Japanese. Fair enough. In this right, this article is fairly amusing.
The second thing you've got going on is a little more tenuous and hard to put a finger on. But basically, it seems to me that throughout most of the article you sort of mock/satire the whole HowTo genre, from using the second-person narrative structure (complete with username template) to the ridiculous advice, only to mock/satirize/lampshade it by effectively going "Hey! You were expecting me to make fun of them, weren't you? Sick insensitive bastard." You entice your audience with promises of mocking the well-known xenophobia of the Japanese, satirize the "genre" that would contain such humor, and then pull that little twist thing near the end. This is pretty clever. And then, in a very whatever way, you dismissingly list all the jokes that you were expected to pull. So that's nice. |
| Prose and formatting: | 7.25 | No spelling or grammar mistakes really, so not much to say in this department. Generally speaking, the article looks pretty nice. I'm not really a fan of how the first image runs into the table of contents, but that can't really be helped. The second article may be a bit too big, too, but it's not really that big a deal. |
| Images: | 7 | The first image is very standard--I'm sure you could find something better if you really looked. The second image (despite being a tad too big) is good, both because it calls attention to the whole jus sanguini thing, plus it implies this lesser-known Japanese cultural oddity. The final two images are basically standard fair for this type of thing, and are both appropriate. |
| Miscellaneous: | 6.75 | Again, below your average by a solid point or two--kind of a ballast. While this is a solid article in any given one of its constituent elements, it could still use some work. |
| Final Score: | 35.25 | Haha, weird Japanese. |
| Reviewer: | —Unführer Guildy Ritter von Guildensternenstein 03:31, July 26, 2010 (UTC) | |