Lazy and addressing this to you even though I don't know if you care.
Didn't want to mention it, because it could imply that what I said was interesting, but the post titled "China": the character wanting, or trying, to kill Orchid is something that she mentions because of his motivations for doing so. It was to help his group. Even if helping his group ultimately led to his death, he did not betray his group.
Someone from a culture with an individual-based moral system would probably say, "go ahead and betray your group if it benefits me for you to do so." In general, "I don't mind if you act in an immoral way that other people would disapprove of, if it benefits me for you to do so." With the consideration that many immoral things are also illegal, and one cannot e.g. rob a bank and give that money to someone and they will get to keep it even if the robber gets caught.
So the overall story is supposed to be about how the individual-based moral system of the US is not worse than China. I don't think there's any realistic chance for it to seem better than China's group-based moral system; the only hope is for it not to seem worse.
Was watching 2013 國際半導體展 SEMICON Taiwan 技鼎 Premtek Lamigirls 開場熱舞表演(Amis、小妍、小帆、伊伊) [Hit Me Up] and 2013 國際半導體展 SEMICON Taiwan 技鼎 Premtek Lamigirls 開場熱舞表演(Amis、小妍、小帆、伊伊) [Wild]. In the first video, left to right at the start is 伊伊, Amis, 小帆, and 小妍. I once looked up the group members of a group that features several of these dancers, which a search reveals to have been called High Channel. They had like 12~16 years of dance experience. It turns out I actually bookmarked their page on Modelmodel, which links to the page for 小妍, which lists all the performances she had done up to that point. I think their dance experience shines through at points where they differ from 小帆, like with the back foot sweeps at 0:25 and 2:00.
I thought of a question, which is a bit hard to fit into a scenario. Suppose someone does something really romantic, like they save your life at great risk to their own: something that many people would not do for a random stranger. (Going into a burning building is never advisable, even if there are two young people trapped inside). Then you find that before they did the action, they had written down somewhere, like on a piece of paper in their pocket or on the inside of their jacket, a message about how they were doing the action to save or help a large number of other people.
It seems to me that for many people, finding this message would change their interpretation of the situation. They would view it as less romantic and treat the person who saved them differently.
If you look at the psychology behind this, I think it is actually people thinking that they are evil, and that they would not be a good fit for someone who does good things purely out of a desire to help other people. People don't like to present or describe it this way, because in a sense it's the opposite: the logic subtly implies that people are rejecting opportunities that would benefit them out of a desire to help someone else, even if it's just a single person, and this could be seen as a weakness (a negative thing) which people try to downplay or hide.
But I have not thought about this much.
So anyway, back to the dancers. I was thinking that 小帆, Xiao Fan, simply had not practiced the first dance with the others; maybe she learned it a different way, since Amis and 小妍 (her Modelmodel page links to a YouTube page titled JinShiauYenAngelina, so maybe she has sometimes used the name Angelina but I'll just call her Xiao Yan) were both part of High Channel which performed the same dance (copy on Xiao Yan's channel, uploaded a few days earlier, and a deleted copy). But in the second video linked above, Wild, Xiao Fan moves differently at 1:27. 伊伊 is also not listed on the page for High Channel, so she probably learned the dance the same time as Xiao Fan, and she moves the same as Amis and Xiao Yan. So I think Xiao Fan just learned some parts of both dances wrong.
But just a few seconds later, at 1:32, Amis doesn't move her foot like the others. So it might not really be fair to say that Xiao Fan danced worse than the others. I just think the foot sweep in the first video looks cool, and Xiao Fan did not do it, so I tried to understand why. Again in the first video: the others do the foot sweep the same way at 0:25 and 2:00, but at 0:25 Xiao Fan steps forward while the others step back, and at 2:00 she does step back but without the foot sweep and skipping her left foot touching the ground. When the others do step forward, 伊伊 (left) steps forward with a different foot than Amis and Xiao Yan.
Two seconds later, Amis and Xiao Fan both look left as their arm points, while the two in the back keep looking foward. This leads to different interpretations: Xiao Fan looks forward for a moment, while Amis keeps looking to the side. This slightly slows Xiao Fan's spin; the others have already turned their heads by the time their left foot leaves the ground, which allows their upper body to also turn and gives them enough angular momentum to do the foot sweep in time. Since Xiao Yan's face was forward, when she turns it, she has a bit more angular momentum than Amis, who was already looking to the side, and I think this is why Xiao Yan did not look to the side when Amis did.
So with this particular movement, the spin, the differences look like dancers who observe the general movements and figure out the best way to do it. What Xiao Fan does, looking to the side and then forward again for a moment before turning her head, has a logic: look at the audience. The two dancers in the back can be seen doing this, turning their bodies while keeping their face forward, and they basically all rotate their heads faster than their bodies, so their face is forward before their body is forward. This is something that non-professional dancers, like people doing dance covers, often don't think to do.
But I think the quick head movement to face forward before the spin doesn't look good. It's extremely minor within the whole dance, and just it reveals the process of learning the dance. Even after learning it, how easy is it to notice if someone else is doing it a slightly different way? Amis and Xiao Yan probably learned the dance together, before the other two, and they still turn their heads at different times.
All of this is just part of why synchronized dancing is difficult, and why two or more people dancing together is usually more impressive than one person. People sometimes don't think about this. I actually don't know much about concert performances in the US; whether famous US singers ever do something that's like a dance, the way that, for example, HyunA performs songs like Change with a specific choreography as a solo artist. I actually remembered this performance of Bar Bar Bar by 謝金燕 Jeannie Hsieh; the video provides additional material which would be very funny for anyone who understands Chinese.
But for people who do think about it, they understand that one person can just dance however, and it can seem right, with any mistakes probably going unnoticed. This is probably part of why most promotional dances feature at least two dancers, despite the added cost. Some of the rare exceptions:
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2017年高雄巨蛋資訊展中華電信開場熱舞 Orangelaii橘ㄦ& 賴鈺涵
This second performance is notable in that other dancers did the same performance on other dates (maybe all from the Rhino Angels group, like cheerleaders for a baseball team). This dancer, Orangelai橘子; Cali卡卡; 蔡小佩; and three other dancers who performed together.
They all had the task of learning the dance for this song, which is a short edit of the original song, and they all created a different interpretation and performance. For example, only the group of three dancers do the fast steps in the original dance at 0:56 in this live performance by Co-Ed or 1:48 in the music video for Bbiribbom Bberibbom 삐리뽐빼리뽐. (Only two members of Co-Ed move their left foot forward and back, highlighting the difficulty of a synchronized performance.)
I'm like the person who has the piece of paper that says "I did it to help other people". Maybe it's unrealistic to think that you, or anyone else, will do something that you otherwise wouldn't do simply from learning of this idea. It's clear based on my life that I think differently about some things than many other people, and basically I'm not sure what thoughts or expectations some people might have on certain topics. Just like there are many people who sincerely believe that their own culture is significantly better than any other culture. Like someone who would think that the Netflix version of 3 Body Problem is better than the Chinese adaption Three Body — which has a significantly different portrayal of the personality and motivation of characters present in both series — if they saw both, because they don't consider 'working for the good of the group' to be a common or optimal motivating factor for effective people.
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