#Very well said! Op hasnt been active in years iirc but their posts are very good

[g0nta-g0kuhara]

[Taken from under the cut]

"The localization definitely did change some things about the portrayal of Angie’s religion, but I would hesitate to say that they changed the overall feel or messages of Chapter 3. The original was already pretty… well, I don’t know if “atheistic” is the best term for it, but the point of Chapter 3 in the original was definitely to have a kind of clash between western and eastern religion that reached a boiling point. I don’t think any of the general negativity associated with Angie and her cult, or Korekiyo and his séances, was impacted by NISA so much as it was already there in Kodaka’s writing.

As far as I could tell when playing the localization, in fact, Korekiyo’s translator didn’t change or alter much about his dialogue. Other than the “Kiyo” nickname, I agreed with most of the choices they made (translating “Kagoinu Village” and the “Kagonoko Ritual” as the “Caged Dog Village” and “Caged Child Ritual” respectively were really good choices or a localization, in fact, since they made them easier to understand). All of the reveals that happen in the post-trial (as in, those reveals, about his sister) were adapted pretty straightforwardly from the original. Nothing was cut or altered significantly; his motives really were that messed-up.

As for Angie, the term “brainwashing” actually is a direct translation and not something altered or swayed by the localization! The term 洗脳 (“sennou”) comes up as early as Chapter 2 in both the original and the localization. I believe the first instance of it is in an optional dialogue session with Himiko on the night of Saihara’s first training session, where she mentions that she should’ve “had [Angie] undo her brainwashing sooner.” The following morning, when discussing Himiko’s magical show, Angie is pretty quick to change the subject and avoids answering any questions when she’s asked by the rest of the group what she did to Himiko.

What’s more, there seems to be a very intentional correlation between Angie’s talent and Mitarai’s. While not entirely the same, the two bear definite similarities which come to light especially if you do Angie’s FTEs. In her third FTE with Saihara (her 5th overall if you did Kaede’s), she shows Saihara a picture she was painting, only for him to lose consciousness immediately upon looking at it. When he wakes up again and asks her if there’s anything intrinsically special about the painting itself, she says she’s not sure, and that she just “creates her art exactly the way god tells her to.”

It’s pretty heavily implied (more like confirmed, in her FTEs at least) that her artwork is how she gets people to listen to her and do what she asks, both on her home island and within the religious student council she sets up. There definitely seems to be a much larger degree of free will involved with her abilities than there was with Mitarai’s, the game is pretty emphatic about the fact that she does brainwash people to go along with her ideas. The effectiveness of her brainwashing is up for debate, though; Saihara remains pretty unaffected in his FTEs with her despite her best attempts to force him to marry her, Tenko was only pretending to join the student council in order to keep an eye on Himiko, and I highly doubt Tsumugi was ever actually brainwashed because of, well, reasons.

Overall, the general feeling with Angie (in the narrative at least) seems to be that she was someone whose intentions weren’t necessarily bad, but that she still did some pretty unsavory stuff nonetheless. It’s pretty clear that she does, in fact, want the killing game to end—she’s one of the most outspoken characters of the opinion that “greed” and “desire” only lead people to commit murder, and that they’d all be better off staying within the school and making it comfortable for themselves, rather than continuing to try and escape the school.

Unlike other characters who have brought up similar plans before, like Celes, I think Angie did genuinely believe what she was saying, too. There’s an optional dialogue moment in Chapter 4 if you click on the door to Angie’s lab while exploring around the school, where Saihara pretty much outright says that he couldn’t agree with her methods, but that he does realize that she was trying to stop the killing game in her own way, then follows up with a really nice comment about how he’ll never forget her. He has similar comments for most of his classmates following their deaths in each subsequent chapter, but I thought it was a really nice touch nonetheless.

As you point out though, if there is a fault in the localization to be found, it’s in changing Angie’s god altogether from a very general, unspecific god to “Atua.” Ever since I heard about that particular localization decisions, I couldn’t agree with it for a number of reasons, not least of all that it’s extremely disrespectful, as Atua is an actual, real deity in Polynesian mythology. Adapting a real-life deity and applying it to a character whose backstory, island, and god are all deliberately undefined (and fictional) is a very bad choice all around.

Angie already suffers from a lot of bad, racist writing tropes on Kodaka’s part in the original. It’s pretty clear that since she’s both dark-skinned and a “foreigner” (and we don’t know anything regarding whether her pre-game self is actually a foreigner or not) she was designed to be the “exotic, quirky island girl” whose religions and culture teeter between baffling and downright creepy.

The portrayal of her island’s religion and customs already isn’t positive in the original game; between “blood sacrifices,” purchasing organs and children off of the internet, and the hypersexualization of both Angie and her people (she tries to take off Saihara’s clothes in the same FTE I mentioned before, and there’s a lot of talk about the people on her island “comforting” each other sexually or “sharing the bride” at weddings), it feels like Kodaka was just one step short of calling them “un-civilized,” which is… eugh.

Taking all of that messy and unsavory writing and directly correlating it with actual Polynesian culture and mythology is such an incredibly disrespectful decision, moreso when I highly doubt that Angie’s translator for the localization is Polynesian themselves or did any actual research into the subject. There was no need to slap a name onto Angie’s god in the first place—her island and culture are still entirely undefined in-game, so why NISA felt that her religion needed to be equated with a real-life one is still beyond me.

Other than the general racism though, I don’t think a lot of the rest of Angie’s dialogue was changed. There was a brief, optional line in the bonus mode when she comes to invite you for a date where her translator decided to have her say “Alola!” (which, you know, a Pokemon region based on Hawaii isn’t even the same as the Polynesian islands, but okay), but otherwise her translation was pretty faithful to the original dialogue. I think her translator didn’t have too much of a problem capturing the feeling of her character; their main problem was simply the decision to make an unnecessary correlation between Angie’s fictional, made-up religion and all its negative aspects and with actual Polynesian religion and culture.

Overall, I think a lot more of the issue stems back to Kodaka’s own racism and flawed writing, though. I don’t think he was trying to leave a message of “religion = bad, always” in Chapter 3 so much as he was just… unaware of how it might come across to others. Religion in Japan is decidedly different from religion in the west, so it’s important to remember that Kodaka was writing from a Japanese perspective, rather than an all-around western atheistic perspective. He definitely wanted a sort of clash of ideas between Angie’s very foreign, western, cult-like religion, and Korekiyo’s research into eastern culture and spirituality, but the writing got… well, very messy along the way.

This is just my take on it all, anyway! The association with Angie’s religion and “brainwashing” was definitely there in the original game, even very early on, but I do think the localization would’ve improved overall if it hadn’t bothered trying to put a real name to any of it. Thank you for asking this question by the way—it’s always good to clear this kind of stuff up, especially since all of the “Atua” changes must make it really difficult for anyone playing the localization to know how much else was or wasn’t changed in Angie’s dialogue. I hope I could clear a few things up!"

here's a question ive had since the localization came out; did the localization do anything to enforce more of an athiestic bent and put angie and shinguji in a more negative light wrt religion and spirituality (particularly angie)? or has that always been there? the whole "brainwashing" angle felt p harsh, not to mention saying angie's god outright is Atua instead of the general "my god" that the translations seemed to have. plus akamatsu seemed very internally harsh about her god in their FTEs

The localization definitely did change some things about theportrayal of Angie’s religion, but I would hesitate to say that they changedthe overall feel or messages of Chapter 3. The original was already pretty…well, I don’t know if “atheistic” is the best term for it, but the point ofChapter 3 in the original was definitely to have a kind of clash betweenwestern and eastern religion that reached a boiling point. I don’t think any ofthe general negativity associated with Angie and her cult, or Korekiyo and his séances,was impacted by NISA so much as it was already there in Kodaka’s writing.

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