Silverluna
That's Professor to You!
- Joined
- Dec 30, 2001
- Posts
- 8,195
Sweet Swimming Snakes!!!!
I'm almost to 1,000 posts?!?!!!!
(guess i'm not a newbie, eh?)
I'm almost to 1,000 posts?!?!!!!
(guess i'm not a newbie, eh?)
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unclej said:allright, i've got a briskette on the smoker and some beer iced down. when you reach 1000 grab 10 or 15 of your closest friends and we'll party!!!
Silverluna said:What is a bishounen? Well it's a japanese word that literally means handsome or beautiful male youth. Technically it really shouldn't refer to anyone much beyond middle school age, but like otaku it has taken on a connotation with anime fans that far excedes the translation, and varies to some extent depending on who you ask. (Almost exclusively used for manga and anime characters, though it is sometimes applied to real people. I have for example heard Koyasu Takehito and Shin Kurokawa referred to as bishounen.)
The first thing to go from the literal meaning of the word was the age restriction. Bishounen technically really only covers “boys”. Anyone you’d call a man is definitely out under the techincal interpretation, and debatably even older teenagers. But among most fangirls, a bishounen can be anywhere from elementary school age (CLAMP Campus Detectives) to eons old (Dark Schneider), all they have to do is have maintained their appearance. However, there are lots of other points of what constitutes a bishounen that even the drooling fangirls don’t always agree on.
I guess as implied above, the one unarguable trait of a bishounen is that they are good looking. (Hence the presence of the first kanji in bishounen, “bi”, meaning beautiful.) I tend to stick with a middle of the road interpretation on what bishounen covers, equating it about to "pretty boy" That is, a man who might be called beautiful instead of/ in addition to handsome. Sephiroth with his long hair, Kurama with his soft voice and slight build, ect.
A stricter definition would be men with feminine/ androgynous characteristics. Sometimes this can mean an effeminate demeanor, being attracted to other males, in other words being a character a female could identify with. But more often that not it means a male with a slender build, thick eyelashes, long hair, ect. Someone who might at a glance be taken for a female. From the last example Kurama would still apply, where as Sephiroth would not.
An expanded definition would be any attractive male from an anime or manga. Tasuki from Fushigi Yuugi and Ken from Weiss Kreuz may be attractive, but there’s nothing about them you could really call remotely “pretty”. Handsome, sure. To some, they’re cute and anime, so they’d count as bishounen. To others, they’re too masculine.