#ochidump

The long version is that while I’m here for occasional dub jokes, I actually have no real love for the way the dub was done. There are several problems I have with 4kids’ approach. I don’t necessarily mind censoring things per se - giving young girl characters longer skirts is something I can get behind, for example - but what really bothers me is often very unnecessary content changes that seem to have no other reason than to simplify things into a more black-and-white pattern. Or to change the dialogue into a bunch of jokes. What I mean is that it just twists meaning constantly for no good reason. In DSOD for example, Seto keeps going on about revenge in the dub, as if they were afraid him being less hatred-driven would make him less one-note and 4kids can’t have that.

What bothers me about this is, firstly, that this is not what a translation should do. Changes are fine, but trying to stay in the spirit of the original is arguably most important. But what really upsets me is how 4kids seems to think kids and teens are just uninterested in anything that is not goofy 24/7. They are apparently so certain that serious dialogue or even a moment of silence won’t grab the kids by their presumably super short attention span that they have to fill every second a character is not shown with their mouth closed with quips and jokes. It’s an awful trend in kids’ and teens’ shows in general. Kids are not stupid, and it’s weird for a dub to treat them like they are.

Secondly, YGO is ridiculous. It’s people in funny clothes and with silly hair yelling over card games. And that’s maybe just a personal problem, but the dub lampshading this makes it sort of redundant? Like, listen, I don’t need you to tell me this is silly af, it obviously is. But to me, it’s endlessly more hilarious and charming if all the characters and their dialogue take it so very seriously. Also, I’d like to have the little bits of character insight and development here and there between the card game dialogue. 4kids seems to think the only way to make YGO entertaining is to make tons of puns, but I rather want something genuine that is not afraid or even unaware of how weird and unintentionally hilarious it is.Like, Seto’s talk in the arena in DSOD? In the dub, he just talks a whole lot of empty nonsense that is highlighting how ridiculously huge is ego is, but do we need that? I mean, he just pretended a plane crashed and a guy got killed for shock value to then yell at an audience about his own problems and how card games will erase all boundaries and limits while several screens show his own face - I think it’s very CLEAR THAT HIS EGO IS RIDICULOUSLY HUGE I CAN SEE THAT. He jumps out of flying planes for chrissake. It’s already fucking hilarious without him making that abundantly clear through his speech.In the original, his speech isn’t even less absurd, but opposed to the dub, it carries more information about the character than just “he is really fucking narcissistic to the point where it’s just amusing”. There’s character development here, he talks about how winning is not the solution and leaves the winner still trapped. It gives us hints at his motivation in this movie. Because while, yes, all of this is silly, it’s still worthwhile to the viewer, 4kids. People who commit to watching this card game marathon probably care at least a bit about the characters. Strange, I know.

So, I don’t know how normal that kind of dub is for US audiences, but from my standpoint, it’s weird if a dub differs so wildly from the original? The worst part was how in German tv, we had our own Digimon dub that was actually close to the original, and I’ll forever be a bit miffed at the fact that 4kids owning the rights to YGO meant that the German dub was just the translated 4kids dub. 

I had actually high hopes 4kids wouldn’t get the rights for DSOD, so we’d get a German dub not dictated by 4kids, but alas.