#not even gonna comment the 4kids version

[winxwiki]

I was asked for a comparison between the eng and italian scene of Sky's speech to Dark Bloom, so here's my findings

Here, the dialogue is completely different in Cinelume. Italian below

Lockette: What should we do? Sky: We can't abandon her. There must still be somewhere in her heart a memory of us.

Cinelume instead...

Lockette: Sky...! Sky: I know Lockette, you did everything you could. I'll try and give it one last shot.

I really don't like the implication that this was Sky's last attempt in Cinelume, meanwhile the real italian Sky is determined to bring her back through her *own* agency and memories. He refuses to give her up. Also Lockette didn't do shit

Interesting choice of words from the italian original, where Darkar says "You think you can convert her to the light?". In Cinelume, he says "Bring her back to the light". I think the original Darkar implies that Bloom is now fully a creature of darkness, that there's never been a chance to save her to begin with, forever corrupted. My own interpretation, but just a few words can change a lot. It's not "bring her back", it's "convert her".

There's also... a lot of awkward silence that wasn't in the original italian. So the scene is a little weird in the Cinelume dub, pacing wise.

In italian, Sky says "Please Bloom, react!" during his speech with Dark Bloom. Should I translate it as "Fight back!"? It's the implied meaning, roughly. It's better than "Wake up!" used in Cinelume. Sky gives Bloom agency, he trusts her, he knows she's still in there. Sky doesn't see Bloom as a helpless victim!

And last, his final words before passing out...

Italian

I wanted to spend more time with you... because I care more about you than anyone else in the world. (You must) Believe me, my love! Please Bloom... fight back!

Cinelume...

Maybe, the only thing I wanted, really, was to spend more time with you. Because I care more about you than anyone else in the world. Please, Bloom, please.

He's much more romantic and determined than Cinelume, dare I say...

[dededaio]

do you have any voice claims/preferred voice actors dedede, meta knight and bandanna dee? (bandanna dee doesn't apply to the second option, i think??)

there was another ask about how i see dedede's voice and i think i will just try answering this one

bare with me, i don't know too many voice actors by name so i can't say that X person totally should voice X character, i will just explain the way i "hear" their voices in my head

i might anger? a lot of people but i can't imagine dedede with 4kids anime voice. this has nothing to do with my opinion on the anime version of the character, it just goes at complete odds with how i imagine dedede.

dedede is a person who tries to act aloof but is very soft at heart. his voice should be low, but has this all encompassing warmth to it, which 4kids voice just doesn't have.

he tries to sound threatening, but whenever he tries to, he just sounds goofy, look no further than his "roars" he does in modern games.

he can sound threatening though... and this is when his voice is completely calm. when he is so beyond furious, he can't even put effort into sounding bombastic anymore. this is when you know you are gonna get it.

meta knight should have an accent. i won't say which, but he just should have SOME sort of accent, to emphasize that he's been places and that he has mysterious past, however, no need to comically overdid it. make it just enough.

meanwhile meta knight is only character i have definitive voice for and that voice is his japanese voice actor for the anime. that was perfect casting. he doesn't sound too low (like in english voice lines in smash) or edgy or whatever. he sounds cool, collected and calm.

bandana dee is actually very simple tbh... he has a "canonical" voice. there was a promotional video done for kirby battle royale with bandee and susie as commentators, both of which were voiced by makiko ohmoto. i loved bandee's voice there, so i feel like ohmoto just should keep voicing him in the future.

[5ds-sub-vs-dub]

Sub vs Dub Notes

Prior to the actual reviews, I want to take a moment to talk about changes that apply to the series as a whole and don't need to be talked about every single episode because that would just be tedious. These things may still come up as a comment here and there, but won't be addressed in depth every. single. time. There are probably also more than just the these things below, but going into it, these are things I remember off the top of my head.

So let's get in to it!

What's up with the names?

Maybe it's just because I don't watch that many dubs and the ones that I have are slice-of-life explicitly set in Japan rather than the more ambiguous, futuristic city displayed in the Yugioh franchise, but most of the time names are left in tact. So what's up with the localization of Yugioh when it comes to names?

I'm sure it's mostly because of the younger target audience, but let's face it: Japanese names pronounced by English speakers are butchered a lot. (This is true for any name spoken by a non-native speaker for the most part and doesn't just apply here, but I will digress before I end up going on a long tangent about one of the reasons for this happening in particular here is because Japanese names stress the first vowel and English names stress the second more often than not.) I can absolutely understand why names like Mikage and Ushio were changed for that reason.

In a similar vain, I'm sure Aki with an English pronunciation would sound more like an adult telling their toddler not to put something in their mouth because its "ucky (yucky)" so, uh, yeah, I definitely also get adding that extra syllable, as well as changing her surname to something more easily pronounceable. Additionally, considering the fandom at large can't even decide if the twins' names should be spelled as "Rua and Ruka" or "Lua and Luka" (the official subs take the latter), that change also makes a ton of sense, and in both cases the names ended up honestly being very similar anyway (which isn't always the case, see the change from "Saiga" to "Blister", lol).

The thing is, they can get away with it without causing a huge problem since not all the names in the original are Japanese anyway, so these types of changes for localization don't stick out or really detract from the content in any way.

But then you have Godwin. Like, hey, 4kids, that's an honest-to-goodness real surname. Quick google search gave me a dude who plays football and a gymnast, both with that surname. It's not a weird name. It's not even a hard-to-pronounce-for-foreigners Japanese name. So why on God's green earth did they feel the need to add that extra 'o'? It baffles me. It was unnecessary.

Moving on.

Similarly, there are the names of cards. All card names are the official names from the game, which means some of them differ depending on the version. Which, in some cases with the sub, is actually annoying because monsters like Red Demon's Dragon are already in English but the subtitles still say "Red Dragon Archfiend" because, ya know, that's what the card name actually is here. That aside, I will not be pointing every card that's name is different between the version because there are A Lot.

....

Characters and Personalities

I'm just gonna say it: some of the dub characters are entirely different characters from their sub counterparts.

This, I feel, is most noticeable with Yusei. Please understand, I don't dislike either one. I saw the dub first so dub!Yusei is the one I originally fell in love with! I love snarky characters, and I am a very pun-y person myself, and it makes for good humor! But dub!Yusei's snark and puns are vastly different to sub!Yusei's quiet stoicism. Now that I'm an adult, I appreciate sub!Yusei in a different way than I loved dub!Yusei initially as a teenager, in part because as an autistic adult, I see more autistic-coding in sub!Yusei than in dub!Yusei. Neither one is worse or better than the other, but they are very different.

This is less noticeable in other characters, but other characters definitely fall into this still as well. Ushio, for example, has an entirely different start with Yusei depending on which one you watch and that affects their character interactions -- I have an entire post in the works on main and I'll talk a little about it in the review so I won't go into detail right now on that, though. Jack, as well, has more of a change than just his accent to the point that I can tell which character version is being referenced when I read fanfiction based on how the dialog plays out, even when all sub names are being used.

To a certain extent, I'd say that most -- if not all -- of them have at least a noticeable change between the two versions. Some of these changes are small enough to be negligible, but many of them are quite noticeable.

(This will definitely be brought up in reviews in terms of changes made to dialog but I wanted to throw this out as a general point first, anyway.)

....

Thought bubbles

This...may only be true of the first two arcs. I have not seen the dub, save for a handful of random episodes, since it aired in 2008 to 2011. But it seems to me that most of the dialog presented as thoughts in the dub is original to the dub. I watched the first episode not that long ago and I know it's true for that episode at the very least. I feel like there are more "thought bubbles" in the sub from the third arc on, but basically any thoughts from the first two arcs you can probably assume don't exist in the sub. (There are a few, but there are very few.)

These will get commented on in reviews but only if it's a relevant or drastic change and I will not be pointing out every single one that is not present in the sub. Because that would be tedious.

....

Music

The soundtracks are vastly different. Generally speaking, the music is much less noticeable in that the volume is much quieter. I do not know why this is, it just is. I am not going to comment on the differences in score because that would be every score and I honestly don't really notice the dub score overly much when I'm watching anyway. (The sub score, on the other hand, can actually be distracting at times. Not because of volume, though; just because it's so freaking good. And because of the volume it's more noticeable. But I digress.)

....

Thanks for reading, and please stay tuned for the review of episode one on Monday, August 8th!

[dewbond-blog]

The Summer of Love: The English Dub of High School DxD

We will be jumping into the second half of season one next week with a look at the “Raiser Arc” and all it brings to the table, but this week I wanted to steer the Summer of Love into a topic that many people don’t really discuss: The English Dub, and my overall thoughts and feelings on it. There is a good, a lot of good, and some slightly not so good. So join me after the cut as we jump into our next chapter of The Summer of Love, the dub! This is another long one, so be ready!

To discuss the English Dub of High School DxD, it is important to give some backstory about English dubbing of anime in general. If you grew up in my generation, (late 90s, early 2000s)  then you are very familiar with the 4kids of era; a time in which the american company 4kids entertainment pretty much had a stranglehold on the western anime market. Simply put, they called the shots and every anime that was actually on television had to go through the 4kids “Americanizing process.” Needless to say, this was a bad thing.

Cardcaptor Sakura had it’s entire yuri/yaoi subtext removed and whole episodes removed. Dragon Ball censored and omitted world building, Yu-Gi-Oh became a “so bad it’s good” mess of a dub. Vision of Escaflowne became a shadow of it’s former self. Monster Rancher went from a 50+ episodes series to only a handful, and of course what they did to One Piece. The list just goes on and on. The 4kids era of anime was not a good time for the youthful medium, and frankly the wounds inflicted by this era are still fresh in many minds of my generation.

Things have gotten far better since then, with companies like Funimation, Sentai Filmworks and Aniplex taking over the dubbing market and delivering quality dubs of anime that are true to form and (sometimes) even superior to their Japanese counterparts. Yet despite this massive improvement there are still many who refuse to even give an English dub a chance, whether it is loyalty to the “authentic’ Japanese version, or trauma for the scars of the 4kids era.

Now how is this connected to High School DxD? Well not really that much, but I think it is important for readers to understand why people are somewhat hesitant on English dubs, despite a whole new generation growing up with them. There are old wounds that have yet to heal, and in this era where censorship is a hot button issue, I wanted to explain why.

Anyway, let’s get into the dub itself, and let’s start by talking about the cast.

The Cast

The English cast of DxD is frankly very strong, though it has been a cast that has had a few replacements. Akeno has been voiced by two different actress, as has Asia, and the while voice changes are noticeable, they thankfully don’t differ too much to make much of a difference. What I can say is that Asia and Akeno are both voiced excellently, with Asia being played with that cute innocent perfection, and Akeno with a level of sultry seductiveness that, while not on par with her Japanese seiyuu, gets the job done well.

The biggest voice change though has to be Issei himself, who was voiced by both Scott Freeman and later Josh Grelle, and while the change over in season 3 is a rather noticeable change (unlike Akeno’s voice change in the same season), with many people being initially put off by the sudden shift in voices. I can both say that they play an excellent Issei and bring a-

Wait..what’s this?

Fuck…do I have to do this? Do I really have to bring it up? REALLY?

ALRIGHT FINE…FINE..I’LL FUCKING ADDRESS IT.

In 2015. Scott Freeman, the voice actor of Issei and several other Funimation dub roles, was arrested, convicted and imprisoned for the possession of Child Pornography. Funimation rightfully and subsequently cut all ties with him and his roles current and future were replaced with new actors, hence the sudden change to Josh Grelle in season 3 and later 4.

Anyway, Issei’s work in the English dub marks the first, but not the most significant change in the DxD anime. While the script plays him true to form, Issei’s performance in the dub is markedly more “american” compared to his Japanese counterpart. While it is 100% loyal to the authentic story, there is a lot more ‘sex jokes’ and ‘western references’ that peek out from time to time. I’ll get into this when I discuss the script, but I did find it worked quite well for the story, and both voice actors are able to ‘get serious’ when the time comes, especially in season 4 when Josh Grelle gives his best performance as a harem lead, and this guy has MANY to his name.

However the biggest and frankly best change has to be Jad Saxton as Koneko Toujou, who completely re-invents the character for the English dub. In the Japanese version, Koneko is the quiet little kouhai who seems to only have one single emotion, very much in the veins of the Rei-clones that had a stranglehold the industry for years. The English dub however turns this completely on it’s head. Koneko becomes a motor-mouthed little girl who, while still holding true to the character’s spirit, adds far more to the plot and group chemistry than her Japanese counterpart. I just find Jad Saxton’s Koneko to be a far more interesting character, acting as a sort of the reality foil for Issei for many season, and still willing to call him out on his perverseness even after falling in love with him. Frankly, the difference between the two voices is astonishing, just watch this comparison clip.

The rest of the cast do a find job. Jamie Marchi as Rias is an excellent casting choice, and while I prefer the Japanese voice, Marchi’s signature voice is able to play both sides of Rias’ personality well and she only gets better as the seasons roll on. Kiba, Gasper, Xenovia and Rossweise are all again done very well, but it is only really characters listed above who are the real stand outs.

The Script

Remember how I brought up 4kids at the start of this post. Well I did also bring that up, because the English script of High School DxD does feel very much like a bit of a holdover from that era of anime dubs. There is more than a hint of the adapters putting in their own lines and having some fun with the dialogue than compared to other shows. It was clear to me that the writers were having some real fun trying to adapt this show for an English dub, and while some may grumble by only  being a 90% authentic script, the show does give us some great memorable one-liners like:

“I’m gonna make you eat those words like a kid doing the tide-pod challenge!”

“Cunt-tuckey fried chicken over there is in love with you”

“Forgive dat ass, don’t spank it!”

“Her milk-shakes are all over my yard”

Those are just some of the examples of the fun bit of humor that is injected into the series via the English dub and yes, it is not for everyone and yes, it is going to turn some of the purists off. Yet the voice actors give it their all and when the time comes for the show to “get serious” like with the Akeno break down, Asia story-line, the Issei/Rias fight, and more, those actors absolutely step up to the table and deliver excellent performances. So I can forgive them for having just a bit more fun with a show that is, again, about busty big boobed girls fawning over a perverted idiot.

What I do NOT forgive though, is the “president gaffe,” which undermines a vital and important plot point.

See, there is a very clear reason that Issei calls Rias “president throughout most of the anime’s run.” It helps show the class and social difference between the two characters and how, despite Rias falling truly deeply in love with Issei, her social status and his role as a servant make him hesitant to step up. It is only when that issue comes to a head that does Issei finally start calling Rias by her full name, and it is a great moment to cap off four seasons of development.

The dub however ignored that completely for the first four seasons and admitted that they weren’t aware of just how important it is. While they do address it in the season 4 dub, making an offhand comment that “Issei has been calling her President a lot lately” it doesn’t really fix the problem and remains an annoying nitpick for me. Is it a deal breaker? No, but it is a pretty glaring problem when looking at the series as a whole.

Final Thoughts.

Overall, the English Dub of High School DxD is a great one, and I honestly love it to death. As i said in my primer, I would have watched the series dubbed to do this event, but I wanted to be faithful to the Japanese release. The dub is still my go-to way of watching DxD and I suggest anyone to give it a show after watching a bit of the OG Japanese version. It’s not perfect, but it’s made with love and affection and doesn’t stray too far from it’s routes, but when it does what 4kids never could do to anime. It adds something without taking anything away.

[alicaneiceindigo]

*rant warning. Also read the rest of the comments this person left in the reblogs that arent present on this post for context*

The problem I have is the cringy way they still try to relate to young american audiences. The voices yes could be straightened up slightly but theres alot that brings humor and context that sub to dub kinda...messes up the experience.

Props to Funi on some of the anime I've seen from them that I can appreciate however it's not going to be all perfect (which I dont expect) but sometimes alot of the dub I've watched from them makes me cringe super hard. Examples?

Dumbbell nan kilo moteru: using terms like "nightmare sauce", restating things in a context that doesnt seem right, even some of the simpler shit like how they literally say phrases in english but restate it in a way a fan (at least one who would be looking at merch with catchphrases or at a minimum watched both sub and dub) would find unnecessary

Shokugeki no Soma: a very close to the top sub to dub I wanted to cry. The voices sound like these guys had very little acting skills. It didnt make any of the moments feel as passionate or exciting and instead made it even more so cheesy

Chibi Vampire: too many sins have been committed by this series that it's more so off subject. Non the less the voice actors truly couldn't act or understand the emotions of the characters

Yuri on ice: I'm pretty sure everyone agrees that Victor straight up sounds like Gru. It's been a while since I've suffered through the dub of this one but it's at least left enough of a scar in my mind knowing the accents they were going for were butchered all around.

4kids is basically the christian waterdowned version of movies that are an attempted copy of a popular thing but are low budgeted and worried about their image to really care about quality. While yes every and their mother can shit on them, I'm not gonna praise Funi of half assing either. Even if Funi went as far as to attempt to make sure their products have good voice acting, I'll give them alot more props (even if I'm criticizing in the background about how they need to stop acting like 50 year olds trying to be hip with kids on weird slang that isnt in the original anime to begin with. attempting to americanize it is a poor choice at best)

Me showing up in hell

Devil: welcome to hell. We have anime

Me: fuckin sweet

Devil: ...in funimation/ 4kids dub

Me: I'd like to leave now