Christian Wright, Hugging Embrace, 2014
PURE BATHOS
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According to Urban Dictionary, the term Weeaboo “indicates a person who retains an unhealthy obsession with Japan and Japanese culture, typically ignoring or even shunning their own racial and cultural identity. Many weeaboos talk in butchered Japanese with the 8 or so words they know (i.e. kawaii, desu, ni chan). While weeaboos claim to love and support Japanese culture, counter intuitively, they tend to stereotype Japanese culture by how it appears in their favorite anime, which can be safely assumed to be offensive to the Japanese.”
Christian Wright's playful early machinima Weeaboo Warrior plays homage to the extreme Japanophilia of many Western gamers, or any gamer who is not of Asian descent. A tragicomic tale of a knight who desperately needs a new sword to fulfill his goals as an avatar, this machinima explores the bathos that permeates Dark Souls, thanks to an epic soundtrack that mixes Max Richter’s On The Nature Of Daylight and Motoi Sakuraba’s The Ancient Dragon. Another Wright's trademark — the use of intertitles or captions — is also at play. Once again, the juxtaposition of text and image create hilarious outcomes.
Matteo Bittanti
Works cited
Christian Wright
Weeaboo Warrior
digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 09’ 59”, 2015, United Kingdom
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