Your statement is correct, but I think people are taking it as an implication that all anime sexualizes kids, which is false. There’s lots of really great anime out there.
Well in Pokémon a character asks to suck Misty’s tits, it’s an anime trope for old people to be pervs and you come across a few in the series. There’s the beach episode and you get a lot of shots that pan from her ass
In Yu-gi-oh you get the “love slave” comment…along with yugi’s grandfather being a perv. Mai also hits on yugi a ton which either she’s a kid who they draw with huge tits and a really short skirt or she’s an adult trying to hit on a 14 year old
Inuyasha has Kagome bathing naked a few times
No Game No Life has not just loli but hinting at incest a bunch. But the main character (kid) is obsessed with trying to spy on the girls while they bathe. If you get the light novel then the opening pages are straight up loli hentai
Weirdly enough, I just learned in my Developmental Psychology class recently that there’s a very surprising amount of sex between old people going on in nursing homes. Some of the students who’d actually worked in nursing homes before even confirmed it. So the trope may not be as unfounded as we might think.
Not saying old people hitting on kids is okay. It’s freaking weird and gross. Just stating an interesting fact.
I mean a lot of it does, there’s a reason it’s part of the stigma against anime
Even some shows that I otherwise really like have an uncomfortable amount of sexualization of minors. A Certain Scientific Railgun, Steins;Gate, Gate, Gurren Lagann, to name a few
I’m talking specifically about the scene where Okarin grope Luka. It’s one scene, he’s rightfully called out for being a dickhead by everyone, but it’s still uncomfortable to watch
I mean, I wouldn’t call that sexualization, it’s intentionally framed to make you uncomfortable (you’re playing as Okabe in the VN after all).
And still, it’s two scenes with 16-year olds, pretty sure most western teen dramas do far worse. The stigma is because of stuff like SAO or Code Geass where they literally can’t let two episodes pass without a butt in your face.
Well I know about Japanese culture with the “perverted wind” blowing up skirts, people peeking under skirts and the crotch shots when kicking someone in the face and getting a bloody nose and stuff. I know about that kind of pervertedness but that seems fairly harmless to me. I’ve seen some Pokémon episodes mentioned which weren’t released in the west, and even then I wouldn’t deem it as problematic. So I am thinking either I’m really naive, which I will say I certainly am, or I am missing some things. Most people I know don’t even know what anime is, and if they do, they think of Pokémon and Sailor Moon. But not much else. So I guess most of this news has passed me by.
[edit] Oh and I’ve seen none of the anime you mentioned so maybe that is the issue. I’m mainly focussed on older anime. But I have just now watched that scene from Steins;Gate and I totally get what you mean if you are talking about that. That is so incredibly uncomfortable and unnecessary to be in there. Graphically I think the show looks nice and I feel like I want to watch this some more if I could have not seen this scene.
While most anime doesn’t sexualize minors, a lot of it does, and unfortunately what comes to a lot of people’s minds when we talk about anime is either stuff like Naruto and DBZ where two guys shout at each other until someone wins, or stuff like Kill La Kill where a female character’s power level is seemingly determined by how small their clothes are. Anime would have a much better reputation if shows like ACCA and Mushishi were the ones everyone knew about.
I feel like I want to watch this some more if I could have not seen this scene.
To be fair, that is the only questionable scene in the show. I highly recommend watching it, I’d hate for your only experience of Steins;Gate being the worst scene in it
Uhh… no? Despite the fact that a lot of anime they dubbed was shounen, so for teens (but obviously they wouldn’t know because cartoons are only kid stuff in their head), if they only censored sexualization of minors, or sexualization at all, people would be much, much less mad.
They censored every small mention of blood and death and most japanese cultural references, changed 90% of the names and soundtrack, straight-up skipped episodes and oversimplified dialogues dumbing down every message the series might’ve tried to convey. That’s criminal. Yu-Gi-Oh is literally a different series outside of Japan. I’ve seen series/games where the only censorship is on sexualization, and the backlash is nowhere nearly that bad.
Not to mention they also had horrible practices towards voice actors and licensors, so really, there’s no reason not to hate those pieces of shit.
Ah yes, more denaturalization of the original product = higher quality. Wonder why they didn’t have Captain Europe when localizing Marvel movies.
And then people wonder why anime dubs have a bad reputation when the biggest companies producing them were literally in a race for who could fuck more shit up.
And, in most cases, they suck. The Inside Out ones I’ve seen are acceptable because they’re minimal and, as they say, “They learned that some of their content wouldn’t make sense in other countries”. But 4Kids didn’t do that. They literally turned Japanese anime for teens into American cartoons for kids.
Removing any hint of a deep message in everything and making every series a travesty is nowhere nearly comparable to what Pixar, or other modern companies did. Pixar altered things to get the same message across, 4Kids did it to remove any, and change it with one of their dumb jokes (which, albeit often funny, were slammed in serious situations and killed the mood of everything. Make an original series if you want to do that).
The dubs vs subs argument made more sense when dubs were generally low effort trash. Now dubbing is done very well. As someone who can read subtitles fine, a dub is always more a relaxing/ less cerebral experience where I can focus that much more on the content.
Honestly I think some of the older dubs are the best (your cowboy bebops, your Gurren laganns, and even silly shows like Ouran High School Host Club had great casts), back when the industry still had passionate and skilled actors. Now it’s well known that anime voice acting pays for shit and all the talent has left for greener pastures—and I don’t blame them.
Now it feels to me like most dubs get stuck with VAs just at the start of their careers and it really shows… Most dubs make me cringe nowadays with the acting.
Plus, I feel like you get a more accurate translation with subs because they’re not trying to fit tweaked dialog into previously-animated mouth movements.
I used to really advocate for dubs and preferred them, but my stance has flipped quite a bit in recent years. Kinda sad to see them decline so much :(
It’s done well (usually), but it’s still not the original. Something will inevitably be lost in the adaptation anyway, and if you know even a slight bit of Japanese (or whatever the original language is), subs are the better choice for a first view, imo.
Then, if the series/movie was good and I feel like watching it again, I’ll go with the dub when available. Rarely, if ever, I found a Dub that was better than an original version, but a lot have been at the same level so it’s definitely worth it.
Fate/Zero and Psycho-Pass are two good examples where the dub is superior to the subtitled version. They mess up some of the meanings in the subtitled versions, like in Fate/Zero when Saber first appears. In the dub she says “are you worthy, to be my master?” Which is definitely the intended meaning especially once you get further into the show and know how she is, but the subtitles just say “are you my master?” which makes her seem not quite like a dumbass… but it does make you go “wtf kind of question is that?” Not to mention the actual performances. Gilgamesh’s dub voice actor is absolutely perfect for that role, and while the Japanese voice actor is good, he just doesn’t compare.
Similar things with Psycho-Pass. All the meaning gets across pretty well in both version if I remember correctly, but Makashima’s English actor is irreplaceable for that character. His performance alone is worth watching the dub for and it’s just so much better, which is pretty difficult because I watched it subtitled first and I already loved it.
I’m certainly not a subtitle hater though, as everyone knows there are plenty of examples where the dub is terrible in comparison. Then you have shows like My Hero Academia which are interesting, because on the Japanese side they have Tomura Shigaraki who is absolutely perfect for that role. Listening to him in dub is painful to me, as his Japanese voice actor is absolutely perfect in that role. Then on the other hand you have Twice, who isn’t as disappointing to listen to in Japanese as Tomura is in English, but Twice in the English dub is NOT a performance you want to miss out on. It was so annoying watching that show when the two were in scenes together, I’d often switch back and forth between dub and sub just to get the full awesomeness.
All this is to say that it’s really on a case by case basis, and I’d suggest checking out both dub and sub early on (if both are available) that way you don’t get attached to the version you’re used to. Start right and give yourself the best experience from as early on as possible.
like in Fate/Zero when Saber first appears. In the dub she says “are you worthy, to be my master?” Which is definitely the intended meaning especially once you get further into the show and know how she is, but the subtitles just say “are you my master?” which makes her seem not quite like a dumbass… but it does make you go “wtf kind of question is that?”
I mean, it’s been a long time since I watched it, but I really don’t think that was the intended meaning. Saber had always been a very detached and humble person, I doubt she wanted to “test” Kiritsugu or anything. Iirc she’s also the only servant to retain memories between summonings (as she’s not a “copy” but Artoria herself), and it was the fourth time being summoned, so I assume it was just a routine at that point for her, kind of a plumber asking “where’s the leak”.
Although the issue is when spelled out in English, it does sound like a dumb question, and it’s also shorter than the Japanese so it wouldn’t match the timing well. I don’t blame them for changing it, but it’s still not the same as the original.
The point is also that it’s impossible to determine if a dub is good or not unless you’ve seen in their entirety both it and the original version. You may watch one episode and say “hey, I like the voices and the performance”, but maybe they made a mistranslation of something important and you’ll never realize unless you watch the original too. Maybe the first episode is done well but a bad voice actor later ruins everything.
All in all, sub is the original experience and you really can’t ever go wrong by watching it, as opposed to the dub which has an added layer of translation where stuff can potentially be messed up. I’ve personally watched dub first when my close friends recommended it, and did the same for them when I found good ones, but if I have to watch a series none of them watched dubbed yet, I’m not risking to ruin my experience.
There may also be cases where there are many untranslatable jokes that may fall flat when viewing the sub. I know it’s a bit extreme, but take Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo. Multitudes of untranslatable text and jokes so they just decided to redo the whole thing.
Not even that extreme. There’s stuff like Monogatari that they didn’t even try to dub because of the sheer amount of puns and japanese double-meanings they’d have to adapt. Unfortunately, a lot of good series can’t work in a different language without footnotes explaining stuff, and at that point I might as well watch the sub.
I tend to agree. Although as a counterexample for not singing in dub, I present to you Angel Beats. I watched the English dub of that and one particular song that the main singer of a band sings made me cry from how beautiful it was. I’m sure it still would have had an impact, but there’s no way it would have been as strong if they hadn’t dubbed that song. Granted, a large reason for the crying was the episode in general and learning the story of the singer, but it’s so fantastic in English that it seems like that was the only possible way it could be.
To each his own. Some prefer the original audio simply because it is foreign, making it easier to mentally dive into a fantasy world. Others get taken out of the immersion by having to read subs and not focusing on the screen all the time.
Isn’t it great that nowadays we have a real choice, so everyone can enjoy media how they want?
I really don’t want to make a thing of it, but it’s nice to hear the original voice acting. I kinda want to hear that Japanese voice actress who’s probably famous for all sorts of roles, it seems unfair to consume everyone else’s work but not hers, so I want to pick up the OG vibe from the dubbed anime if I can. I bet undubbed Cowboy Bebop is good stuff, I should find that and watch it.
It can get crazy though. US DBZ gives fairly masculine voices to all male characters who are not obviously children, even if most of them sound like young men and aren’t all that bassy, save, of course, Piccolo and Vegeta. Vegeta always sounds like he’s trying to put some bass in his voice, but he’s all nasal. Still. Man voices. Even Krillen gets a grown man voice, even if he’s reedy and is supposed to sound like a pipsqueak.
I watched 10 minutes of the show once that was in notEnglish and absolutely the fuck not. Everyone had extremely high-pitched little boy voices which was fucking weird, and I kept waiting for them to drop the gag, but no, that’s their voices for that version. Goku sounding like a chipmunk squeaker yelling in some other language. No thanks. To this day I have no idea what language that was.
So sometimes you just want subbed anime. Sometimes you want to watch Tenchi Muyo with a Ryoko who sounds right. My strong opinion is that I shouldn’t have one when it comes to subs v dubs, that’s internet clown stuff for people who think arguing is a fun sport.
That argument never held much weight for me years ago, because a lot of subs were trash back then, too. You just picked whatever trash you wanted and let the weabs on the internet be damned.
I think replacing songs in the dub can go pretty hard, like, that’s how we got most of the iconic 90’s american anime theme songs. pokemon, digimon, yugioh, etc. I do like a lot of the naruto OPs too, for the record, and soul eater, and fullmetal alchemist, but it’s really hard to beat how iconic the opening to pokemon is, and how that’s laser engraved to like a fifth of all millennial’s brains.
Actually, I wanna hijack this top post a little bit. Other people have brought up japanese name pronunciation, and replacing the names with more western stuff, and I would like to bring up the decision specifically in yugioh to make joey have a boston accent to mimic the accentedness of the japanese he would otherwise speak with. I dunno, there’s something to the 4kids dubs that has a little bit more texture than your normal modern anime dubs. I like the lack of censorship more, the VAs tend to be better, there’s not like, big confusing rewrites or repacings of certain sections, all that is good, about your more modern stuff. At the same time, I feel like a lot of the sub vs dub argument is gonna come about more when people don’t let the dub be it’s own thing. You already have to translate turns of phrase, culturally dependent expressions, yadda yadda, at what point do you really decide to stop? Maybe a bad example, because it doesn’t really conform to the spirit of the original at all, but people still occasionally talk about the ghost stories dub. I dunno. I guess it doesn’t need to be official, there’s always abridged series to fill the void in my heart when it comes to anime that’s written for a western audience more, but I do kinda wish that more dubs were just like. Willing to take risks. That more dubs were very obviously stand out.
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