In the house like carpet

if something wants to get at your blood, and they’re, say, some kind of murdersaurus, or maybe a really big frog, that’s where the problems start to arise. a really frog is not made for removing blood, and your blood knows this, which is why it is so vehement about wanting to stay IN your body instead of coming out. 

(if you remember the 3 whole posts i made when asahi got de-gayed on EN you'll know i am mad too and that this is probably going to get long)

i don't like to be too cynical but it was so obvious that they were going to change that line, i had a feeling since the event first released on JP and after the incident with Asahi where I went through and tracked down multiple other examples of EN removing queer subtext it became clear to me that in no way shape or form was "emu-chan really loves nene-chan" making it to EN without getting changed. what i didn't expect was them changing Nene's line after Luka's comment, which actually makes this whole situation far worse than many of their other instances of toning down queer subtext.

for anyone who isn't aware of what happened, in chapter 5 of the current Emu event, there's a scene where Nene, Rui and the Virtual Singers are talking about what would cheer Emu up. The vsingers all talk about how much Emu loves spending time with Nene, leading to the following exchange

If you look for them, any fan TL of this scene will be something similar to this:

Luka: ...Fufu. Emu-chan really loves Nene-chan, doesn't she? Nene: Th-that's nothing special...

EN's official translation is this:

So what's the issue? I'll start with Luka's part. In the original text, she uses the word daisuki, which can mean to "like a lot" or "love". It's a word you will see frequently in the idol/idol-adjacent genre of games, due to its ambiguity in that it can be read as either platonic or romantic when used towards a person, and often will be used in ambiguous situations so that it's harder to confirm the writers' intentions either way. so here, fans of the emu/nene ship could view the fact that emu loves spending her time with nene as more on the romantic side, but people who don't like the ship could view it as platonic and move on.

while they didn't translate daisuki directly, Luka's line still works, and still contains the ambiguity that works as ship tease in the original text. it's a perfectly fine localisation that still conveys the original intent. despite that, there is something to be said about EN's consistent refusal to translate daisuki as love in most instances when it's not used on An/Kohane (but then again, EN has literally teased An/Kohane on their twitter account so is it all that surprising?).

Here's some examples:

Aibou no koto ga daisuki de / he loves his partner -> he cares about his partner very much (The Power of Unity chapter 7 when Kaito is comparing Arata to Akito and Toya)

HARUKA-CHAN, DAISUKI DAYOOOO!!! / HARUKA-CHAN, I LOOOOOVEEE YOU!!! -> You're the best!!! (Dear Me, As I Was Back Then chapter 4 when minori is at an ASRUN concert. this one isn't actually that great of a localisation)

Honachan no koto daisuki dakara. Kore de iinda yo. / I love Honachan, so this is fine. -> I want what's best for her. And this is it. (Leo/need main story chapter 14 after Saki tells Honami she won't bother her anymore)

Minna daisuki de - taisetsuna tomodachi na no / I love them all - they're my dearest friends -> They're all amazing, and very dear to me. (Leo/need main story chapter 17. this isn't good either)

What's particularly amusing about that last one is that there's a second official translation for it that I assume was done by JP staff (since EN never promoted doing the Journey to Bloom subs like they did back when they provided subs for Petit SEKAI) that actually keeps the word daisuki as love.

Yeah. I love all my friends - and they mean the world to me.

It's a better localisation than the official EN team one.

Questionable localisation choices aside, Luka's line is fine and is actually in line with the original. The issue with this localisation very much lies with Nene's part, because that is an entirely new line.

In the original text, Nene's "that's just normal" or "that's nothing special" or however you choose to TL it, is meant to be her questioning Luka's statement, since all the things that the other vsingers said that Emu liked were pretty normal things like going shopping and playing video games with nene. To Nene, these things are normal activities for them to do together, so she gets embarrassed by the fact that Luka concludes from that information that Emu loves Nene. When I dissect it like that I think you can really tell what the writers were going for here lol.

"That's just us being friends" does still convey the idea that Nene thinks these activities aren't anything out of the ordinary and she isn't sure why the vsingers are picking these out as some of Emu's favorite things to do, but it's very different from the original line. "But those are just normal things we do together" is something I just came up with on the spot, but it's a lot closer to the original text and still conveys the same meaning. The fact they changed the line to "that's just us being friends" is, honestly, not even subtle that they're covering up queer subtext. The original scene was very clearly written in as ship tease, and EN mentioning "friends" for no reason, especially since the word nor anything close to it was not used in the original, is instantly a red flag because it's like the go-to for queerbaiting and censorship. This was intentional. There was no need for them to specify that the relationship is platonic, Luka's part is ambiguous for a reason so that fans can view it how they like.

Just to top all this off, here's Rin's original line just before that Luka+Nene interaction:

Oh, and! And! She said that playing games with Nene-chan is also super fun!

And here's Rin's line from the official EN translation:

That's not the same thing, but even more weirdly, the incorrect part (super fun->really loves) is a correct translation for the part changed in Luka's line. So, they can do it, they are willing to say "really loves", just not in the right places. Maybe because Rin's part is less personal than Luka's part? It's strange actually, this isn't the first time they've done this either. Off the top of my head I can think of an example from Shiho's Varied Kindness 2* story where they translated the word "suki" as really loves, despite that being much stronger than the original word used (and the fact that daisuki is used a lot in the Leo/need stories and it's incredibly rare if not entirely unknown for them to translate it correctly).

It's not subtle that they're trying to remove implications of the characters possibly being queer, they did it in curtain call and they did it in walk on and on, and multiple times before then too. And considering some of the content in this year's events and the amount of times they say daisuki alone, it's gonna keep happening. honestly i hate the fact that i keep trying to justify the translations in these posts. these translations are intentional. what happened in the curtain call translation back in october says enough. when a character who uses explicitly romantic language towards another guy passes as a straight character in the translation you know they're doing it on purpose.

oh and once again, it's only the EN server that has this issue. The scene in question was translated almost word-for-word on the TW and KR servers.

and this was the official translation. SOME even argued it helped the ship more. either way they were at least WILLING to say it is "love".

the thing is? this was literally in 2021. so there isn't really much of an excuse for a fellow idol game to have THIS shitty of a translation for specifically the lines that have queer subtext three years after this event got translated.

here's another notable line that people in the bandori fandom have stated was also queer writing:

for context, this is the official translation of the last few lines of the ending of "On a Day When It Won't Come Off". the event released in around February 2023 on the EN server of Bandori. Both this line and the Parechu example also use "Daisuki" (the exchange with Misaki and Kokoro is a bit more confusing considering Kokoro is saying "i love you/daisuki" to Michelle (a bear mascot) in a clearly platonic way but Misaki (who is in the bear mascot) replies with a reciprication of feelings, this time in a less clearly platonic way considering the previous lines)

And you might be saying "well aren't these popular ships? do ships that are less popular have erased "I love you"s? And to that I say, nope! (I'm not sure of TOO many other examples outside of other ships with Kokoro, but showcasing these examples despite having the Misakoko interaction with two ships that are ultimately rarepairs is something that's a good idea anyways)

(this one is a part of a card story that was translated in November/December 2023)

(and this one is an area convo that has been availiable to read since at least 2020 (this is a follow-up to a previous convo from earlier but it's unknown to me when either actually released))

And even while these aren't the most extreme examples of clearly romantic subtext ever, they (as in the bandori cast) still express affection in a way that can be interpreted as romantic. you CAN'T say this about a majority of the official translations ensekai gets.

I also have to mention this 1koma in bandori (which has been there at the start i'm pretty sure, so april 2018), obviously a light-hearted matter but considering the ensekai devs also erased a joke like this i better mention it too. (this isn't even mentioning that unlike the pjsekai 4komas, this is in the game and in its loading screens, but this is more of a small thing)

thanks so much for the addition!! i hope you don't mind me adding your tags on ^^"

as someone who has played multiple other games in this sort of genre, prsk definitely is that game which has the most cnesorship by a mile. Like that parechu example from bandori honestly isn't that bad? I think the JP part for the second sentence is better, but EN made the I love you part honestly even more shippy than it was in the original text. And although I haven't played bandori for a long time now, I really don't recall them trying to work around every single usage of the word love or whatever like proseka does.

D4DJ doesn't really do it either, I can maybe think of a couple instances, but the fandom is very small so fan TLs and JP content is pretty hard to come by. Also it's literally like one or two poorly translated lines, you can very much still tell where there's romantic feelings written in because it's left in like 99% of the time. Maybe it's not the fairest comparison considering how explicitly queer D4DJ is, but still, proseka does have quite a bit of shiptease and sometimes outright subtext, and only occassionally does it actually make it to the EN server.

I have no clue why it's just proseka (i don't know enough about enstars to comment, i know there's issues with Arashi, but idk if there's any subtext between the boys that has been edited). Maybe they think it's too controversial or something? But come on, shipping is a big thing in idol game fan communities - worldwide - and especially the slash and femslash pairings are very popular and a big selling point. D4DJ literally got more popular after they added Hayate and Kokoa (who are canonically dating). Especially in online spaces (where y'know, the game gets free promotion via word of mouth) idol games are incredibly popular amongst queer people, a lot of people get into project sekai for things like that, and are incredibly unsubtle about it in twitter interactions, so it's... definitely a strange decision being made by staff.

Even weirder that An/Kohane content is rarely being altered (and maybe it's because some of their interactions can't be altered for various reasons, but also they're like, the only characters in the game to regularly get daisuki translated as i love you from what i remember). As a counter point to the an/kohane thing, me and some friends discussed that maybe they give them a pass because An is very affectionate and because of that then maybe it could be read in a platonic way when she says "i love you", but as a counter-counter point her relationship with kohane is outright described as them "seeing each other" in her Peak Excitement card story. It's... odd.

what's most surprising is that ensekai is definitely the highest budget out of the main idol games on the market rn. as far as i know, the en server is primarily operated by SoA, and I assume they're doing the translations because i don't think clpl has a branch for that and uh, why would they remove stuff they wrote in the first place? I dunno what sega's deal is either, considering some of their other franchises have queer characters. Obviously this game has a specific branch working on it, but you get my point - what the fuck sega?

i mean the en server is probably the most poorly managed of the bunch, which really. says something. censors aside, the translations can generally be pretty crappy. constant typos that never get fixed, even to the point of literally giving false information about a character and then contradicting that in the same sentence because they fucked half of it up. not to mention "that's showbiz baby" which you might remember if you've been here since launch, and also the fact the writers often struggle with rui's more poetic ways of speaking (good example here if you ignore the actual fact and just focus on the official vs fan TL). there was also the struggle with translating aibou in the earlier days too, which... might've been because they wanted to avoid the possible romantic connotations of the english word "partner". ensekai is just really poor for something presumably really high budget and something this popular.

i kinda steered away from my original point a bit there but ensekai just disappoints me a lot. there's always been censorship or otherwise "toning down" of queer subtext.

and i'm not too sure about other idol games outside of the ones you have already stated, but it's very strange considering you just don't hear complaints about other games like this (and even if there is it isn't something as ongoing as this, like you said the parechu thing was plainly controversial and "not the best" at worst, but even better at best, WAY better than erasing said queer rep entirely.), like obviously controversies do exist for other games but in terms of homophobia and queer erasure but ensekai's translations are the most egregious in terms of the idol game genre for seemingly not much of a reason aside from it being a direct malicious thing the en devs are doing. there isn't even an excuse as to prevent fighting considering not only the size of the fandom, but also other idol games and even jpsekai itself can shiptease multiple ships for a character just fine.

also the fact that ONLY anhane gets that treatment feels almost like it's an act of tokenism. the fact that they're the only pairing that has properly translated "loves" and outings/dates despite the original text on jp showing characters outside of anhane saying they love another character a lot of the time. it just screams either "we don't want to have any semblance of gay people in the game but the fandom knows how gay this game is so let's translate anhane properly so people don't notice" or "we ship anhane and only think anhane is endgame so ignore other moment and remove any implication any other character can be in love romantically"

it's gross how they treat anhane and it creates a false statement about the ship and every other ship in pjsekai despite anhane being on the same level of closeness compared to other ships like akitouya and ESPECIALLY minoharu if you read the fan translations. I'd even put other ships like shizuairi kanamafu and honakana onto this level as well in terms of it being teased, among a few others, and ALL of these ships are of the most popular. i'm surprised EN's integrity with the relationships of the game isn't any more shaky,

this getting pretty long now so i won't add too much but this is a good point. there's definitely a certain unawareness (or possibly ignorance) to what's happening with the translations within the EN fandom. in a weird way i'm somewhat glad that the whole Nene "that's just us being friends" thing even happened the way it did (because i had always expected it would be changed just not this badly) because it got a lot of traction on twitter and i saw a lot of tweets calling out EN's homophobia, which is a good start. It helps that the emu/nene pairing is pretty popular and this was a highly anticipated scene within that circle so understandably fans are going to be very vocal about it, but it'd be nice if there was a bit more awareness about how often this is happening and the fact it's been going on for such a long time. it doesn't help that a lot of EN players don't read fan TLs so don't actually know things are being changed, but reading fan TLs shouldn't be a required action anyway. i've been here since EN released and i can vouch that at the time the fanbase was largely made up of former JP players who would often call out poor TLs, notably the mass QRTing of Toya's first birthday 4koma. unfortunately the state of the playerbase has changed since then so there's far less awareness.

EN is subtle about it too a lot of the time, which isn't helpful either. This was very obvious 4kids-era type censor so it got picked up on very quickly, but there's things like in the walk on and on event, specifically Toya’s speech at the end, where they changed a pretty key line but in such a way that it didn’t stick out. Unless of course, you know that they left that line as Toya’s card name. That one I think is worth addressing because the TL was well-received as far as I’ve seen, despite removing a pretty significant piece of Akito/Toya tease when they’re arguably the 2nd most popular ship in the EN fandom. Like if you don’t remember/haven’t read a fan TL and don’t know any Japanese, you’re not gonna realise that “I want to keep singing with you. I want to stand shoulder to shoulder with you as we perform” is wrong because it looks accurate. Same with the Asahi translation, like unless you know that “horeta” means love (with romantic connotation) you’re probably going to think that the EN translation is correct given how easily it fits into the scene.