lemm.ee

1 point

1 year ago

Wait, Yu-Gi-Oh’s characters change depending on the language? Is it a big difference in characterization or more subtler shifts due to differences in language?

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a_mac_and_con@kbin.social

[ - ]

2 points

1 year ago

The main thing is they cut out a lot of scenes, which dove into everyone’s characterization. It makes all of the characters more two-dimensional. However, there were things like Malik and his other personality, who were changed into “WORLD DOMINATION” types as opposed to the revenge for family/born to cause chaos which they were originally.

Things weren’t always (or often) subtle in the manga either, but the English version made it ridiculous. They made everyone sound so stupid in English. I might not believe in “women’s intuition”, but it’s more of an answer than “I have absolutely no idea!” (word for word what they made Anzu say, like what).

I never finished the English anime, so I’m better at pointing out the differences between the Japanese anime and the manga.

…and I just cut out about four paragraphs I wrote about those differences, because I was writing an essay which was beyond the scope of your query. XD Whoops!

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[ - ]

1 point

1 year ago

Well, that’s a shame. I assume the English version was the dubbed version and not the subtitled one? Usually, subtitles allow the original meaning to come across better because the translation isn’t constrained by synchronization to the mouth flaps.

If it’s both, then that’s pretty dang lame.

I am kinda curious about those four paragraphs of yours XD but admittedly, I have a very shallow familiarity with Yu-Gi-Oh. 😅

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a_mac_and_con@kbin.social

[ - ]

2 points

1 year ago

Well, that’s the thing. The version which came over was so cut up it didn’t come with the Japanese language at all. The language track wouldn’t fit. They actually tried at one point to both make a more faithful dub, which also included a subtitled option, but for some reason stopped after a handful of episodes. To this day you have to watch the original with fansubs.

When I get back on my computer, I could edit those paragraphs into something which makes sense for someone who doesn’t know it as well, if you want.

Either way, looking into all of the different ways 4Kids censored the anime they brought to America is a fascinating subject. Yu-Gi-Oh! wasn’t the only one they butchered, it’s just the one I’m most familiar with. Other than Pokémon. They cut out a ten minute short from the start of the first movie and turned Mewtwo from a confused creation who was desperately trying to understand their identity and value into, you guessed it, yet another villain bent on world domination and destroying everyone. Let alone the end of the movie. Not because of removed scenes, but because of changed dialogue. The entire meaning of the original was demolished for a more proper “black and white” story.

Because kids in the US couldn’t deal with nuance, I suppose.

Damn, I’m rambling again. Now about censorship. :P

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[ - ]

2 points

1 year ago

I would actually be interested in those paragraphs if you still have them :D It always fascinates me how much different certain stories are once translated and how sometimes you can’t get a full sense of the story because of cultural nuances.

I only watch foreign movies or anime with subtitles now, but growing up, I actually started with dubbed over anime in my native language, Filipino. I am absolutely certain a lot of nuance was lost in the effort of translation, but at the same time, I can’t watch the anime I grew up with, subtitled XD

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a_mac_and_con@kbin.social

[ - ]

1 point

1 year ago

There are a few anime I can’t actually try in the original Japanese. I love the English versions so much. Or ones that, even when I can watch it in Japanese, I still enjoy more in English. One is Yu Yu Hakusho. It might be that I love Justin Cook’s voice, but I really enjoy the whole cast. It might be the one anime I’ve actually watched more than I’ve read the original manga. (And I’ve read that manga a lot too.)

The paragraphs! They are a bit bigger now, because you said you don’t know as much about YGO. Hopefully this makes sense!

To add more card games in, they made up a lot more… stuff. The plot was almost always about a card game tournament, so it was unnecessary. Anzu (the token female teammate), is known for being the “friendship speech girl” because of the anime. To be honest, some of the ways they do it really do make her seem like an idiot. In the magna, the entire friend group had those moments.

Fleshing out minor characters in the anime also went wrong. They were made flatter (which is why they seem even more two-dimensional to me in the English version). They shoehorned more romantic subplots in, when the only major one in the manga was Anzu’s crush on Atem. (Manga!Yugi’s crush on Anzu stopped coming up at all after a while.) Shizuka was only a plot point as Jonouchi’s sister. The manga never had her be someone else’s love interest. The anime had to make her the crush of both Honda and Otogi.

I’m all for an adaptation expanding on minor characters, but not like that. I know why they wanted to do something. Even in the manga, Honda is given very little to do as the story goes on. Then they brought in Otogi. He had a short arc about him (between card game tournaments) and then he was in the same place as Honda. They had nothing to do but be cheerleaders. Like Anzu. Except in the manga, while Anzu had her rather pointless crush on Atem, she was often used for the mangaka to inform the readers about something. Anzu would think through the situation from an outsider’s perspective. It wasn’t a great role for a character, but it gave her a little more purpose than poor Honda or Otogi.

I also started ranting about the anime filler arcs. Those made later things a lot more confusing. Because they still stuck to the manga, just added more events between things. You can’t have someone learn the same lesson twice and have the character not seem like an idiot for regressing. Not without showing why they lost that progress.

I wanted to like parts of some of the filler arcs, but because they didn’t decide to diverge from the manga after… It lost the point.

(One of my projects is a rewrite of the manga, with growing canon-divergence, just with keeping in mind the latter manga and putting those facts right at the start. I’m now like a fountain of opinion on this subject.)

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[ - ]

2 points

1 year ago

I admit, I had to google some of the characters to refresh my memory of them (I think I’ve only seen 1 or 2 episodes of YGO 😅 I bought some of the cards as a kid but that was because they were so shiny and pretty :D). It’s a shame they felt they had to add more romantic subplot to make it more “interesting” --I always find it shallow when adaptations do that and it usually comes at the cost of character relationships.

I suppose that’s part of the struggle of anime adaptations. The business seems so finicky. It’s tough for developers to figure out which arcs to include when they don’t have the guarantee of another season. So they end up cutting filler content, but then some plot points don’t make sense without it, and so they include filler–but now there’s less episodes for plot. Then the characters suffer, because some arcs take a while to develop, but they still have to justify an animator drawing them in, so they get shoddy characterization instead. I imagine it’s far easier to have characters return to status quo, like a sitcom. So they end up learning the same lessons all over again.

Thanks for the write-up! It was interesting to read. Good luck on your project! :D

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