Seemingly Unnecessary Preferences Toward Coarser Language
Posted by: CalAggie in Anime, Commentary
AnimeOnDVD chief Chris Beveridge has previously let his opinions be known about things within the anime industry that annoy him such as trailers and locked down anti-piracy warnings but yesterday, he posted a more personal piece about English dubs. See, he’s been trying to introduce his kids to more challenging anime than Naruto and is having trouble finding many family-friendly English dubs. He profiles his experiences with Adult Swim’s redone dub of Lupin the 3rd, Phoenix and Castle of Cagliostro, each of which has “hell”’s and “damn”’s thrown into them (as well as a few “shit”’s in the case of Cagliostro). Chris thinks that the primary cause is an appeal to the teenage audience by the studios; he even posed the question of “Is the dub industry sacrificing the next generation of fans for the current ones?” as the sub-headline of his article.
The topic of appropriate language reminded me of the many instances of me watching fansubs of Bleach, Naruto, and most recently Gintama and seeing the s-word appear, often (but not always) as a translation of ‘kuso’. I wouldn’t mind it that much except that I don’t find it’s needed in many instances. Sure, if the lead male shounen character is in a tight pinch and he’s frustrated, it might better convey his rushed state of mind to use that word instead of ‘crap’ and even ‘damn’. Of course one has to take the personality of the character into consideration when doing translation work and I guess I’m more accepting of Kagura in the above picture due to her aggressive fight-picking demeanor. I also think that shows with mature themes such as Black Lagoon and Speed Grapher have more allowance in terms of profanity due to the circumstances in which the series takes place but even then it shouldn’t run so freely that it becomes unusually frequent.
I suppose that last sentence reflects my personal view of cursing in that I dislike the common casual practice of using it to spice up one’s ire or lack of respect for someone or something. I am more accepting of vulgar utterances that happen in moments of passion like running away from a murderer because there is little time to filter your speech and it actually conveys that frustration I mentioned earlier. By comparison, if you see someone walking toward you from a good distance away, you have enough time to come up with something else to say other than the first thing that comes to mind or to decide to just keep on walking and not say a word. Don’t be a dick, don’t foul just to be foul.
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The Zegapain trailer was irritable in large part because of the amount of “Of course” instances that got turned into “Hell yeah!” It ruins the characters.
I don’t appreciate being talked down to, but it can’t be helped. Maybe every R1 studio has discovered that the vast majority of teens and young adults in their area are dumb as bricks and like to see stuff blow up.