One of the nice things about being the editor of a general interest website like 8Asians: I get to go in and make inappropriate image changes for the original writers to be mortified at. I’m particularly proud of this one: this started out as an image of a victim of a panda attack while he was trying to retrieve a dropped toy for his son.

This makes me a terrible person, doesn’t it?

Will BoA be the first Asian pop star to reach super-stardom in the United States? The short answer: No, but it won’t be for a lack of trying.

The long answer: Anyone who has a basic knowledge of J-Pop or K-Pop music knows who BoA is. If you don’t, here’s a brief synopsis: A 12 year old Korean girl auditions and gets drafted into the Korean music scene. She becomes huge in South Korea, then promptly goes to Japan and records a bunch of #1 Japanese records, making her the first Korean to do so. She promptly becomes a superstar all over Asia. Now BoA is 20 and there are dreams for her to make it big in the United States. Don’t they all, really? But this will be easier said than done, because — and let’s be brutally honest here, because I’m actually a really big fan of BoA since her Kimochi Wa Tsutamaru days — the girl can’t pronounce her Rs.

No, seriously. Take this song, performed by teen fashion dolls turned bad pop band Bratz, for example: I played this for my ex once and when BoA butchered the line “All the Girls” as “ARR DE GURRS,” I lost car radio privileges for the next two years.

So now BoA is giving another go at it with her new single “Eat You Up,” and the big guns have been called: the song is produced by Bloodshy & Avant, who produced another song you may have heard of called “Toxic,” by Britney Spears. Her video producer is Diane Martel. And Flo Rida is rapping on one of the remixes.

If I was the agent of a pop star, those are the names I would want to be using, really. But at the end of the day, the great American music machine is more than that — it’s promotion, it’s going to radio stations, it’s going to TRL and having 15 year olds from New Jersey being able to love you through an accent and a lot of peace signs. And it’s a shame, because she has the image skills, she definitely has the dancing skills and watching an exhausted-looking BoA learning hip hop moves and auditioning dancers and dealing with Americans that speak 100-words-a-minute, she most definitely has the drive and the work ethic. And it’s for those reasons that I really want her to do well when her single comes out in digital format on October 7th.

But given the track record of Asian in the American music industry? I’m not holding my breath. At all. Here’s to vocoders and chest pops taking you to the top, girl. Vocoders and chest pops.

Like the other ten million people out there, I play World of Warcraft. It’s a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG for short; I go online and I can fight monsters or other players from around the world. But today, a new MMORPG has entered a private invitation-only phase that could possibly bring Blizzard to it’s murloc-killing, PVP-flagged, epic-wearing knees:

HELLO KITTY ONLINE.

Why yes, the makers of Hello Kitty is entering the MMORPG realm, specifically “Targeting female players from their pre-teens to twenties.” AND ME.

Efren: but what the hell would hello kitty fight? bad badtz maru gone awry?
Ernie: hahahaha… bad bad bad badzmaru
Ernie: or maybe hello kitties evil twin sister, born on the ninth plane of hell
Efren: oh god…like those bad hello kitties you see now with the skulls and stuff?
Ernie: Exactly.

The thought of using two flaming swords to topple a 100-foot demon Pochacco and three Kero kero keroppi spawns somehow fills me with glee. Okay, it probably won’t be that as much as it will be a way to customize the fabulous outfit that you’re wearing, but a boy can dream.

That’s a way to get a response from me; create a video that starts out with the line, “Asian men have a lot of diseases [and] small penises.”

Gimmicky way to start off a documentary aside, some interesting points are raised by this video: stereotypes of Gay Asian men exist – that they’re skinny, smooth, only date white guys and that they are effeminate and thus passive. The pod also asserts that non-Asians feel that the stereotypes of Asians are justified because that’s all they see when they walk around in the Castro on go on chat rooms.

Usually it’s easy to write my own personal opinions on the matter, but for this post I’m having a strangely difficult time on this one. Maybe it’s because I’m definitely not a gay Asian stereotype – I’m definitely NOT skinny, I can’t dress for shit (ask my friend Royce; he’ll tell you stories) and I don’t think I’m THAT effeminate (feel free to shoot me down if I assume wrong.) While fighting stereotypes sound like a noble thing, when you’re coming out of the closet you WANT to fit in somewhere, be in a tribe, look and act like everyone else as a way to not feel ostracized. I had huge self-esteem issues where I’ve felt like the only way I could ever find a boyfriend is if I were to somehow magically lose fifty pounds and dress in DKNY, because that’s the only thing I saw – horrible, but true. As a result, I hung out with the bear subculture for a while, but that didn’t make things any better – an experience with discrimination there is one of the reasons why I started 8Asians.

Now I’m a little older and I know that if someone is trying so hard to live up to a certain label that they’re not really worth my effort anyway. Dating is still a challenge but if someone is not into me, then their bad. Gaysians, what are your experiences?