Kuso

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For the American film, see Kuso (film).

Kuso is a term used in East Asia for the internet culture that generally includes all types of camp and parody. In Japanese, kuso (糞,くそ,クソ) is a word that is commonly translated to English as

internet phenomenon, spreading to Taiwan and Hong Kong and subsequently to Mainland China
.

From Japanese kusogē to Taiwanese kuso

The root of Taiwanese "kuso" was not the Japanese word kuso itself but kusogē (クソゲー). The word kusogē is a clipped compound of kuso (糞,くそ, feces) and gēmu (ゲーム, game), which means, quite literally, "crappy (video) games". This term was eventually brought outside of Japan and its meaning shifted in the West, becoming a term of endearment (and even a category) towards either bad games of nostalgic value and/or poorly-developed games that still remain enjoyable as a whole.

This philosophy soon spread to Taiwan, where people would share the games and often satirical comments on

Death Crimson series.[citation needed
]

Because kusogē were often unintentionally funny, soon the definition of kuso in Taiwan shifted to "anything hilarious", and people started to brand anything outrageous and funny as kuso. Parodies, such as the Chinese robot Xianxingzhe ridiculed by a Japanese website, were marked as kuso. Mo lei tau films by Stephen Chow are often said to be kuso as well. The Cultural Revolution is often a subject of parody too, with songs such as I Love Beijing Tiananmen spread around the internet for laughs.

Some, however, limit the definition of kuso to "humour limited to those about

Densha de D, both Initial D and Densha de Go! are parodied, as Takumi races trains and drifts
his railcar across multiple railway tracks.)

In China, earlier e'gao works consisted of images edited in Adobe Photoshop. An example of this would be the Little Fatty internet meme.[1]

Compared to e'gao

In Chinese, kuso is called "e'gao" (simplified Chinese: 恶搞; traditional Chinese: 惡搞; pinyin: ègǎo), with the first character meaning "evil" or "gross" and the second meaning "to make [fun] of [someone/something]." In 2007 the word was so new that it was not listed in Chinese dictionaries.[needs update][2]

According to Christopher Rea, "E'gao, the main buzzword associated with online Chinese parody, literally means 'evil doings' or 'malicious manipulation'"; he notes that e'gao's "semantic associations [to kuso] can be misleading, however, since e'gao is not fundamentally scatological—or even, as the Chinese term might suggest, malicious. In its broad usage, it may be applied to parody of any stripe, from fan tribute-mimicry to withering mockery. In a more restricted sense, it refers the practice of digitally manipulating mass culture products to comic effect and circulating them via the internet. The term e'gao may thus be interpreted in multiple senses, as it denotes variously a genre, a mode, a practice, an ethos and a culture."[3]

See also

References

Sources

Citations

  1. ^ Meng p. 37.
  2. ^ Wu, Jiao. "E'gao: Art criticism or evil?" China Daily. January 22, 2007. Retrieved on January 25, 2012.
  3. ^ Christopher Rea, "Spoofing (e'gao) Culture on the Chinese Internet". In Humour in Chinese Life and Culture: Resistance and Control in Modern Times. Jessica Milner Davis and Jocelyn Chey, eds. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013, p. 151.

External links

Look up kusogē in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Look up kuso in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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