Do you have to be Japanese to be a Kaiju?

Flying Squid@lemmy.worldmod to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 630 points –
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Unless it's from the Kaijuu region of Japan, it's only sparkling beast.

Paul Bunyan? No. Not a monster. Just a man.

Babe, his giant blue ox, however: totally a Kaiju.

The literal translation/definition of "Kaiju" is "strange beast." Which is why giant humans don't qualify.

There's counter evidence that humans can actually achieve a Beast Mode, though.

Source 1

Source 2

Altered Beast, Sonic and then this Zombies are my neighbors or something game are the first games I remember at all.

Maybe around ‘96?

Anyways, yeah that’s hard soli evidence right there you can’t deny it

Are mostly bald apes with manes that are oddly good at throwing things not strange beasts?

Someone get Arin Hanson on the line we need an official verdict.

I've been watching so much Game Grumps recently, there's a good chance that's where I subliminally obtained this knowledge.

I stopped watching for a while, but then Zelda came out and they're a steady habit again

Are they back in decent form at all? Me and my partner stopped watching a long time ago due to the downward spiral of their content quality and editing. It just became more of “how many times can we roll our eyes over the course of a video” than anything else.

Which sucks because our mutual enjoyment of them (among other things) was one of the things that brought us together.

(For reference, I started watching around 2012, her around 2016, and we stopped watching somewhere in 2019)

Watch the tears of the kingdom series and see, I got pretty tired of their schtick for a while before that came out

If it’s not from the Tokyo prefecture it’s just sparkling King Kong.

Little known fact that America has one of the first Kaiju. And if Paul Bunyan doesn't count, Babe does.

I’d argue that babe better fits the bill of kaiju being a giant blue ox (animal/creature)

Nah, he's just a French Canadian logger.

Bunyan doesn't sound like a French name to me. Also, didn't it start as a Midwestern U.S. folktale? Like Wisconsin and Minnesota? That's what I thought.

I've heard that he was the continuation of Joseph "Jos" Montferrand, a French Canadian logger and legend born in Montreal, who worked in the Gatineau and Outaouais region, known also as big John Mufferaw. He then moved south of the border to continue working as a logger where he became known as Paul Bunyan.

Bunyan sounds the same as some old French Canadian swear word, but is written differently. I think the real spelling would be something like "bon yenne", and also resembles a French Canadian folklore named "Bon Jean".

...where'd he chop a tree that big? did that bastard take down all the cool, fantasy trees??

Are the "good guys" still kaiju? I mean, I know the good monsters are still kaiju. But is, like, Ultraman a kaiju?

Can you really call Paul Bunyan a “good guy”? The canopy over North America was once monumental, but after he chopped it all down, it is mere legend, fading from memory with the death of each passing generation

It’s a Japanese word, in English we just say giant

Like Isekai, in English we just say fantasy

Isekai means different world and is specific a subgenre of fantasy. For literal fantasy, it's just ファンタジー or fantoji, lol.

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By definition, yes. An abnormally large creature capable of destroying a building without the use of any big weapons. Mr Bunyan could easily topple a building in NYC with just his hands.

Jolly Green Giant must be kaiju also.

Sprout is a baby kaiju.