American YouTube manga girl making waves in Japan

Tokyomango posted a funny "stare down" video by a 22-year-old former supermarket cashier from Florida who "now spends a bulk of her time making YouTube videos of herself staring blankly into the camera, babbling elementary Japanese, and striking cutesy poses. Her popularity in Japan catapulted when Japanese online publication JCast wrote an article about her in January of this year." American YouTube manga girl making waves in Japan

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Mojave

Quote from the vid Capt. Tim posted…
“Magibon is awfully quivering”

Awwww, yeah!!! Bow Chika Bow!!
Takuan

I tried sitting blankly in front of the webcam
http://www.dvdoutsider.co.uk/articles/pics/r/ringu.jpg
Mantissa128

Oh dear. Does she really look like this? I can’t believe I’m seeing the same person:

http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/1/1e/MagibonTrolld.jpg

I wasn’t impressed with her YouTube vids, but admit I found her cute – until now. She may be a wonderful human being but there is simply nothing special about her in any way.

I guess the “perspective” motivation poster spoke a deep truth:

http://www.intternetti.net/~jiri/motivation/perspective.jpg

Yikes.
kpkpkp

14:55, 14:56, 14:57, 14:58, 14:59, *DING*

Nothing to see here, move along…..
mr.skeleton

After watching Cpt. Tim’s link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1WeU3mmzps) I think it’s all wonderful. She taught herself the little Japanese she knows from watching dramas and listening to music (which I think is pretty impressive); she loves Japanese culture and wound up getting a free trip to appear on that Japanese show just by uploading a few inane videos of herself. Sounds like a good deal to me.
Mojave

ouch…just saw the teeth. how unfortunate. off to find my next instaweb crush girl!!
frankiez

PEDOBEAR SAYS: “Magibon saikou… demo kono news wa mecia fuuiii yo!!!”
Antinous

She may be a wonderful human being but there is simply nothing special about her in any way.

You have forty miles of bad road ahead.
Takuan

sigh… tell you what; go down to the local newstand and buy some movie star tabloids. You’ll find plenty of “candid’ pictures of the “most beautiful people on earth”. Take it from me, every media image you see is not real.
Anonymous

lovely!!!!! i could watch these for hours. it is like watch a kitten playing. a living manga. how pretty.
noen

Gee, I can think of someone else who stars in “videos of herself staring blankly into the camera, babbling elementary Japanese (English), and striking cutesy poses” and gives her children cartoon names like twig and trac.

Maybe we’re not as different from the Japanese as we think we are.
Nelson.C

Miasoko, are we looking at the same videos? Or do you have some particular predilictions that I’m not privy to, that make you think that staring into a camera and talking elementary Japanese is acting like a sex doll?
Burns!

a.) The first video creeped me out, more than a little.

b.) Cpt. Tim’s video? That is one f’ed up grill. Kinda destroys whatever bit of cute snuck in around the creepiness.
EH

She’ll be even more popular with braces.
jeshii

I was about to be all insulted and say “How dare you call that poor girl’s Japanese elementary! It takes a lot of time to master Japanese! I bet she is JLPT level 2 or something! How dare you!”

But then I actually watched a few of her videos. I regret ever thinking that. It _is_ pretty elementary. ><;;;
FoetusNail

Miasoko, not to be ganging up on you, but how do you know she ain’t smart?
stas59

I wonder if Warhol considered that 15 minutes of fame would lead to such vicious and mean spirited back lash commentary. Certainly this seems to be the case in the empathy barren YouTube era

The fake anime look achieved by web-cam distortions, the emptiness of the content, and the vile misogyny that has followed…

All very very sad
markbellis

And also, she doesn’t seem to have any past – no parents, no home town – the film crew who invited her to Japan didn’t interview her parents when they were at her ‘home’ which definitely was not in Florida, on one show she needs an interpreter, but on another, with a faster talking host, she does without one, her Youtube profile says she’s in Japan, and she’s got a Japanese blog on Yahoo! Japan….
Takuan

idolru?
Anonymous

Beware visiting the link in #1– the Encyclopedia Dramatica site just installed malware on my machine via Firefox 3.0.4.
badger500

God that is PAINFUL to watch. Just full-on uncut contrived vapid self-promoting cutsey-ness.

I need to reboot my brain with the absolute opposite of this:

(well aside from the self-promoting)
- Antinous
  
  Seriously off topic, Badger.
Brettspiel

“She’ll be even more popular with braces.”

QFT
badger500

I’ve removed it, you’re right Antinous. I’m terribly sorry.
Takuan

heh, lot of people outside of Japan don’t seem to know what is cute or attractive in Japan. Or understand daily mannerisms.

Teeth for example; perfect little straight chicklets don’t really exist much outside the USA. As a consequence, 95% of the human race doesn’t pay much attention to the normal range of colouration in dental enamel (no, it’s NOT all normally bleached snow white). Also, not whole economies are universally devoted to $5,000 to $10,000 worth of orthodontics for every child. This has bonuses in that people aren’t instantly dismissed for “bad” teeth , allowing others to appreciate other aspects of their beauty… minds for instance. An old aspect of conventional modern beauty in Japan includes “charm points”, the equivalent of the perfect little Marilyn Monroe mole, perhaps in the form of a pointy biscuspid or other pleasing asymmetry.

Ah, but what do I know? (stupid crikky vertebrates and your calcareous endoskeletons!)
Chocolatey Shatner

Alice Marwick, a doctoral candidate at ROFLCon talked about this girl. Her story didn’t end well.
Anonymous

She’s cute, and obviously plenty of people agree or she wouldn’t have achieved the fame she has. I think she’s adorable, even though I couldn’t care less about anything Manga-related.

So for some of you to sit there whining about her teeth really makes you seem like miserable little wretches.
songs

welcome to 2007 – what would we do without BB?
miasoko

to clarify a post from forever ago: it is a prudent point that i have no idea whether or not this girl is a genius or an idiot; however, what bothers me is that i constantly see females on youtube acting flirty or cutesy or vapid, or some terrible combination of all three, in order to score the most views.

it’s sad. that’s all. i want to see someone charming and intelligent and female on youtube. i could just not be looking hard enough.
Teller

“The children were nestled in front of their screens,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their jeans”
Takuan

what? she was revealed as boringly normal? In Japan your fifteen minutes has long been fifteen seconds.
Bek

Holy Mother of FSM.

Boingers are actually defending this vapid camwhr (voluntary disemvoweling) as something more than abysmally ordinary?

What she has is a good camera angle and the ability to keep her mouth shut.

Contrary to what your kindergarten teachers programmed you, not everyone is a special, special snowflake.

Yeah, the truth hurts.
Takuan

yeah, one over you, Bek
hobomike

So THIS is what rates as porn in Japan these days?!

Please tell me people aren’t getting elective ops to look like mangapeeps.
Battlehobo4000

I wouldn’t blame 4chan. They hate her, her inane videos, and her failed dental plane.

She needs to step her molar game up, playa.
Anonymous

Hahahaha, Magibon! Finally some frontline North American coverage. Well I’m off to sit blankly in front of a webcam for a couple years… see you when I’m famous.
Nelson.C

Wow, the mean-spiritedness of some BB commenters still amazes me. Neither her teeth nor her Japanese are that bad. Though I say this as someone whose teeth and Nihongo are worse (my spoken Japanese is bad enough that my teacher claimed I could be mistaken for a typical Tokyo-ite).

It’s a good thing that the Japanese love her.
erissian

I blame 4chan. http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Magibon (Link is not safe for anywhere)
miasoko

this really makes me too upset to find the proper words. it’s exactly like that goddamn perverted manga girlfriend game that susannah breslin posted last week or whenever that was. except it’s a real person. acting like a sex doll. huh. are there any SMART women on youtube? that people pay attention to, i mean? god.
markbellis

I think she’s part Japanese – also I don’t think she’s a former cashier from Florida in her 20s. In Japan, younger cheesecake models are acceptable, (there are bikini shots of her on other youtube video) and I think this back story about her youtube discovery might be just a marketing ploy to build up her career – there’s a lot of competition to be a teen idol!
Junior

Ah, Magibon. Such a well-played fake loli.
Mojave

Oh. My. G-d. I am sooooo in love!!!
Junior

“I blame 4chan”

Ha. I almost posted those exact words.
mistervega

and they say we don’t export anything good anymore.
Bek

Ww, Tkn.

BngBng hs rlly gn dwnhll.

n n prtclr rdr, lt th fvrts g n ffnsv trds wtht th pprprt dsmvwllng, lt th prvsly ntrstng blg ldrshp gt dltd wth slf-prmtnl prdct plcng/pltcl psts, dvd nt nchs rdcng vrtn n th strm f nfrmtn, thn lt th mdrtrs gt nslt-hppy.

Whl gr wth mst f th pnns xprssd n ths blg, th slf-sltng cmmnts sctn s rnfrcng tslf nt hll. Y r bcmng yr wn trlls.

Dsmvwl wy, bcs t’s yr prty nd y’ll cry f y wnt t.
- Antinous
  
  Okay.
Mojave

WOw…just checked out some more of her videos. This chick could write her own ticket in Tokyo. She’s got to strike while the iron is hot. WOnder if she needs an agent?
sswaan

Is she wearing these contact lenses?
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/11/contact-lenses-for-a.html
Antinous

I’m charmed by the idea of someone who gets on the internet to not talk.
bill streeter

Wow she’s 22? I saw her several months ago and I thought she was about 12 maybe 14 at the oldest.
megantheatre

I’m with Bill. I would never in a million years peg her as 22. I was thinking in the 14 – 16 age range.
eliba

say what you will about her teeth, but she’s got great hair.
Cpt. Tim

she spends this video covering her teeth the whole way through:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1WeU3mmzps

Its sad really, and people shouldn’t judge someone based on it. but when you build your meme around being super cute then a grill like that will catch attention, and she seems very aware of it.