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blackstarchanx3new · 4 months

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FSR Rambles 16

Dark spiraling into an episode is halted by a "Distraction" aka a flower.

Shadow being disturbed at Dark's response to eat it, just goofy shit.

Dark doing horrible to thinks he supposedly "Likes" is a trend with him. I discussed the "dark eating flowers" symbolism awhile back.

Dark just settles into being kinda forlorn again.

"I like Vio the most" pisses off Shadow. Obviously.

Dark's reasoning for liking vio is just "Everyone else does".

Which. Is just an implication he is feeling the vibes of everyone else and how they feel towards Vio. Thus. Dark likes Vio.

Lore about Dark Link's creation:

Vio's panicking was a caducous in a way to why Dark appeared in the form he did.

Dark Link wasn't entirely aware of his own presence at this time until Vio noticed him.

Dark continues to just point out Shadow's past wrongdoings lol.

I don't think many people noticed the shift in Dark's hair here to match Shadow's hair and not Vio's becoming a warmer shade of purple.

I ALSO don't think people noticed what Dark said here wasn't his own opinion. At least the 4th panel.

His immediate "hm?" as if he had no clue what the hell Shadow's reacting too made that more obvious.

Dark quickly gets mad at the notion he'd think something like that when that was smth he was just parroting from Shadow's internal thoughts.

Repeating what Dark actually thinks of Shadow and himself: He thinks Shadow Link is an outright monster and he himself a hero.

Dark being high key delusional about his standing in the world is just par for the course.

He keeps pissing shadow off and gets angry about that himself. Really in darks mind he isn't doing anything wrong so everyone else is just being unreasonable. 🫠

Shadow tries to deliver the same sentiment that Green gave him earlier to...different results.

Darks lovely thought process:

Family. Link had a father. His father was his family. Thus, if shadow is his family, Shadow is his dad.

He even elaborates that him having a father is a lot like link lol.

Shadow, is reasonably confused as hell at this response.

Shadow tries and fails to explain they're just friends not THAT kind of family. But Dark is stubborn and insists shadow is his dad now.

Repeating that shadow would drag his "son" to be an accomplice in lying to the others about being a part of Gannon.

Shadow tries to justify, and is worried about how dark even got this info to begin with.

Memory shinanigans.

Shadow cant deny cool powers when he sees em but darks lil internal monolog (a first with him having a thought bubble if I remember correctly) he expresses confusion at Shadow not being able to see into others memories too.

Dark just assumes everyone else can do what he can haha.

Shadow pushes for dark to do the right thing. But dishonesty isn't smth dark likes to do so, dude just roasts Shadow again for his lies.

His word choice of "I don't like lying" not that he DOESN'T lie is pretty accurate as to get shadow to accept him he lied XD he just didn't like doing it.

Well. Someone sleeps like a rock.

Dark just wants to kiss people lmfao. A weirdly sweet and creepy gesture from him towards vio.

Asking his dad if he can sleep, obviously that's just how that works hah.

Dark's wings haven't made an appearance in a long time lol.

Dark is now a key item. Lmfao. My way of putting off dark and vio talking rn hahahaha. Not yet...we're not there quite yet. 😈

Shadows inventory being call backs is just funny to me personally.

Obviously the triforce of power, the cups he used to drink with vio and his sword.

Shadow continues to admit he doesn't like dark what so ever lmfao.

Poor vio fell asleep while reading again lol.

... Someone's not talking...how suspicious.

Hahahahahaha. Not responding to your "name" is kinda odd.

WELL OKAY THEN.

Vio thinks he's Link lmfao. No wonder dude wasn't speaking.

Smth to consider...

If everyone is talking and speaking normally, but Link himself was silent.

Who was causing link to be mute?

A horrifying thought:

What DOES happen if a Four Sword user pulls the sword twice?

There's no true guarantee that it'd split them the exact same way as it did previously.

Especially after 7 years...

Who's to say this is "Vio" and not, a part of Link who thinks they're Vio? How would they KNOW for sure they are 1 to 1 with the Vio that was created all those years ago?

Even if the sword COULD do that...it's been 7 years. Link is a VERY DIFFRENT person since he first pulled the sword.

Whatever made up the previous four Links, could just NOT exist or be different now.

After all, they all LOOK different now. They don't even have the same face as Link.

How much is THIS Vio the Vio from back then?

Hey Vio's using his big boy words again.

Shadow references when Vio was talking about his home back in the flashback chapters.

So we FINALLY get an answer as to what freaked Blue and Green out back in page 108.

The presence of Mr. Demon king.

That was a LONG time for pay off lol had to do other stuff. XD

...Green. Your eyes are green. :)

Leave Vio alone Blue he's exhausted and his brain is working at 5% capacity atm.

Shadow and Green having a fun ol convo about how Green lowkey doesn't trust Vio right now hah.

He did catch Vio staring at the sword pedestal after Link ripped that thing out like a bayblade.

Shadow gets pissy about the implications.

"you trust me don't you green?" he asked in a very untrustworthy way.

I get it Green this dude spent your entire mission being an enemy and tried to kill Vio, trusting him is going to be difficult. Even if they spent 7 years together.

Shadow trying to urge Green away so he can talk to him in private. Perhaps share a smooch-

Anyway, I love this moment between Vio and Blue in the background of these pages. XDDD 💙💜

Blue willing to beat Shadow's ass at the drop of a hat lmfao.

Considering how Vio and Shadow's "Friendship" ended up last time...I'll let you decide if Blue's being over protective or not.

Blue points smth out that's been a visual thing for awhile: Vio's the most covered up one out of all of them.

He has gloves + arm guards, chainmail under his tunic, and is the only one with his sword visible at ALL TIMES.

Vio from a visual standpoint is always ready for a battle/on the defensive.

Huh. Okay. Vio's arm is scarred to hell. Wonder what that's about...

Blue's concern continues to be cute to me.

Haha it moves. It moves when you feel bad about it.

Vio's dismissive about it though.

Oh hey! It's our bestie Dark! Doing his job still hahaha.

The transition to real world to the headspace is one of my faves just because it's so quick.

Whipped his head around to see who was talking and bam. Dark Link.

Visual notes for the headspace: it's visually COLD here.

People didn't get Dark's cruel reference to it "being cold in the house' as him messing with Blue over the fact he was frozen. 😭

Unlike Vio, he doesn't get a real response out of Blue....So he baits again to no avail.

Dark's hair shifts to being blue, a clear sign he's mimicking someone directly and acts. well a lot LIKE Blue. Getting angry Blue is "Staring at" him, proclaiming Blue is "Boring" for not responding to him.

Dark's form starts to melt away as he promises they'll have fun "Later" whatever that means.

Vio: The master of tugging on people if he wants their attention.

Blue's helpful. Even if he's a dick about it.

HAHA WHAT DOES GREEN'S STOMACH LOOK LIKE AFTER VIO WHACKED HIM?

I'm not tellin'. Just alluding to it's existence.

Dark being cute as hell and for what.

Shadow deciding it's "Safe" to confide in Green about Dark is an interesting choice.

Hiding it would have meant issues and Green IS mr. Leader so. It makes sense.

Of course...Shadow ya don't need to shake Dark around and grip him so hard. Really makes you no different than vaati in that sense.

In the final panel you can see Dark's hair is just...Vio's hair. And he's in a very bad mood.

For whatever reason he doesn't want to come out even on Shadow's command.

Cut off time! Bleh.

#fsr rambles #four swords returns #four swords adventures #four swords manga #four swords returns au #four swords #loz fsr au #loz

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rachello344 · 2 years

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OKAY, so as a former lit major (with, to be clear, a master's in literature), I have some really fun information to share with the class for this last installment of Daily Dracula.

Now, first thing's first, I'm going to post the section I'm talking about specifically so we can refer back to it more easily. Namely:

In a voice which, though low and almost in a whisper seemed to cut through the air and then ring round the room he said:— "How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you'll have to deal with me." The fair girl, with a laugh of ribald coquetry, turned to answer him:— "You yourself never loved; you never love!" On this the other women joined, and such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the room that it almost made me faint to hear; it seemed like the pleasure of fiends. Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper:— "Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will. Now go! go! I must awaken him, for there is work to be done." ... They simply seemed to fade into the rays of the moonlight and pass out through the window, for I could see outside the dim, shadowy forms for a moment before they entirely faded away. Then the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious.

Now there is a Lot to unpack here, and a lot of people have already pointed out the surface layer homoeroticism (I mean, he says "love" outright and clearly means it), but there's some stuff I haven't seen anyone mention yet.

First of all, if you haven't seen it yet, please take a look at this post which shows Bram Stoker's notes on the novel. The important takeaway is that Bram Stoker had one line of dialogue from pretty much the very beginning: "This man belongs to me." It repeats thrice, and well before the characters are more than "Old Count."

What this says to me is that Stoker was, like any of us, writing his novel to write that One Scene that just fucks so hard. This scene was written to be horny. It is meant to be. Stoker wrote this scene with his whole dick in the way of all the horror greats. He's my hero. By this time, Stoker had already at least acknowledged his own leanings (see Stoker's love letters to Walt Whitman, the first of which was written well before he wrote Dracula), so we can guess that he had this image and wanted to see it on paper for himself. (Good for him, and Same.)

Straight audiences would have seen Jonathan's feminization by the narrative and the Count's clearly sexual interest in him as horrifying (cowards), but queers are and have always been queer. And I suspect they all read this scene in the same way we're reading it now. BUT they had an extra bit of info that we've since lost track of.

In the peak of epistolary writing, there was a bit of well-known shorthand. (If you've seen Mamma Mia, this is the equivalent to the "dot dot dot" in the mom's diary from her slut phase.) In epistolary novels, when your heroine is alone with a man, and she says she swoons... She got laid. Now, how far it went, I couldn't say, but this was At Least heavy making out, if not full on sex (I suspect it may have been up for interpretation, but I don't know). My professor pointed this out with a young woman swooning while alone in a carriage with a guy she was kind of seeing. "She says she swooned because this letter is to her father figure, but the audience would have known exactly what she meant."

So Jonathan swoons, and when he wakes up, he is undressed and in his own bed. The readers at the time would have immediately read this as a sexual assault.

For a long time, I was confused by how passive Jonathan is throughout this part of the novel, but he is playing the role of the maiden fair, trapped by the diabolical (and much older) seducer. And then, he is in survival mode as he is assaulted more than once, his virtue stolen before he can marry his beloved.

I mean, God, you have this whole romantic build, the count saves the maiden Jonathan and plans to "awaken him, for there is work to be done." And then Jonathan swoons, and the Count carries him to bed? Not to put too fine a point on it, but... well, it really only makes sense if Dracula DID wake Jonathan up and... made his claim abundantly clear. Clear enough, too, for Jonathan to feel like his "gloomy" rooms are in fact his only sanctuary. And like... Jonathan was undressed by the Count. That really does mean exactly what it sounds like.

So uh. Yeah, after that supremely possessive display and declaration of love, the Count fucks Jonathan (as with all maidens of the time, his consent is... dubious. Would he consent if he were able? We'll never know tbh) and carries him (undressed) to bed. Bram Stoker knew EXACTLY what he was doing, and I hope you all enjoy that fact. I know I will. ;D

ETA: Sources for my information about swooning are in my reblog, but you can also find them here, here, here (this blog post is referred to in more than one article), and here, and this one references this exact scene directly.

#daily dracula #my meta #dracula #I may or may not be planning out how I would write the sex scene that I think is implied here #you know #for fun #haha

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blindedguilt · 6 months

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Apparently the dialogue in Japanese during the "Leonard's lament/hunger" is a lot more explicit about his inclinations, would you know anything about this? I've heard that the fairy explicitly tells him to do the nasty to the fallen child soldiers but I've seen no confirmation of this

What WAS Changed from Leonard's Hunger to Leonard's Regret - Drakengard Analysis

//Hey anon! I assume you're talking about the game, right? Because I actually DID translate the full script from the World Inside 10th Anni box for the Leonard's Regret/Hunger chapter a while back (It was the only translated part of an unfinished project to do the WHOLE script that likely won't be finished), but that has in-game comparisons between the NTSC-J and NTSC versions as well! I'll link it here if you're interested. Note: This covers only the EVENTS in the game, and not actual in-game dialogue, as I haven't translated that. Sorry! For ease of access, I'll also provide a hopefully adequate summary below the cut detailing the differences between the original script (Later edited into what would be the NTSC-J version of the game), the Japanese version of the game, and the English localisation! Believe it or not, there was actually more cut content between the script and the Japanese version of the game than the Japanese and the English (Which certainly does have it's blunders, but nowhere near as steep.) And of course, if you have any other questions about this, feel free to reach out to my Discord at barnabism or just send another ask! :) Here's the info, strap in for a LONG post ahead:

So to start with the first scene in Leonard's Hunger, there's a couple points of interest right off the bat, actually!

Pointing Out Leonard's Survival

While it was toned down in the Japanese and toned down even further in English, when the Faerie points out the conscripts in the script it was actually an intended jab towards Leonard's absence "Hiding under the trees" which led to his unintentional survival!

(NTSC) "Hark you, hark! Look in the shadows of the trees. The ones hiding away are probably fine." "......" (NTSC-J) "Hey, hey, look carefully through the shadows of the trees. The ones who hide beneath them might be alive and well! Ahahaha!" "...Kgh!" (SCRIPT) "Hey, hey! Look carefully through the shadows of the trees. The one who does that might survive alive and well! Ahahaha!" "...Kgh!"

I wouldn't chalk this up to "censorship", however (At least not in the case of the English), it honestly kinda reads like a bad game of Telephone which is something you'll see a LOT with the English translation. Where the Japanese seemed deliberately toned down to give more "Insinuations" at best or just to outright write around it at worst, the English seems like its trying its best to pick up on that nuance without... Actually knowing where it's coming from? Without that base point of reference (The script), it seems like there was a lot of grappling around in the dark for those poor English localisers to do. :( *That said, there are some instances where things are explicitly written in Japanese but unable to be fluently translated, like Furiae's confession scene, or sometimes... They ARE just outright changed, like the infamous "You smell very nice" line from Ending D. The Drakengard fanbase DOES commonly assume that the latter is the case all-around, but there's a lot more to it than that! Moving on, here's an example of something that was VERY intentionally taken out from the NTSC-J release to the NTSC release.

"Something Else" - Deleted Snippets From Changed Lines

(NTSC) "Oh, it smells fishy. What will you do? Doesn’t it feel dangerous? Are you shaking? Over here! Here! Here!" (NTSC-J) "It smells fishy. What will you do? Can’t you sense it? Isn’t it dangerous? Hahah! Oh? Are you trembling because you’re scared? Or is it something else…? Ahahahahaha! Here! Here! Look here!" (SCRIPT) Faerie (Maliciously): "You can’t see them, but you can smell them, can’t you? Can’t you? That lively scent is your favouriiite~! Right? A large army of smooth, pallid, soft legs is here!"

So as you can see here, the bit from the Japanese - "Oh? Are you trembling because you're scared? Or is it something else...?" was taken out in the English release, but this original Japanese line that appears in the game is COMPLETELY different from what was written in the script!

And if that edited line in the NTSC-J edition of DOD wasn't clear enough as to what the Faerie was hinting at, here's something that's DEFINITELY more explicit. But unlike the English completely removing it over concerns to content, here it seems toned down as a result of differences in writing systems.

"Inexperience" - Pay Attention to the NTSC-J Line

(NTSC) "Right, right! Young soldiers right out of training, gutted like fish!" (NTSC-J) "Right right, ahaha! Still just sweet little things, lacking and inexperienced!" (SCRIPT) "Right, right, ahaha! Boys, boys, beautiful boys! How appetising~!"

Putting aside the Script's description of the young conscripts as "Beautiful" and "Appetising" (Hard, I know lmao), the edited NTSC-J version VERY cleverly used Katakana to it's advantage to make a point that... Honestly, if you ask me, is even more direct than the Script counterpart. Here's a look at what I'm talking about:

(NTSC-J Original) 「そっ、そっ、ウキャキャ! まだまだケツの青い甘チャンばかりだぜ! 」

I've bolded and coloured the Katakana referenced here with the whole article bolded itself, "Ketsu no Aoi", which as a whole can mean "Inexperienced" or "Lacking in x" (Skill, in this case). The interesting thing here is the use of Katakana on "ケツ" here, which, typically when written like that, is used to refer to someone's bottom. So it CAN be taken as "young and inexperienced" or quite literally, "Their ass is inexperienced" which... *Cough* Yeah. This, of course, is a VERY particular use of Katakana, so I honestly can't blame the English localisers just going "Fuck it" and making it their own.

Scrapped Ideas

An added note before we go onto the next scene, which I believe isn't EXACTLY what you're looking for but something I thought you or anyone else reading this would be interested in. There's also something interesting to mention about the "Garrison" that was brought up here ("If the garrison is here, then the prisoners should be, too."), and that's three things:

This WAS originally going to be a type of "Side-quest" where you go save your Union allies from the garrison and defeating the "Monsters" (I believe subhumans) guarding them, and THEN the conscripts begin to attack you in desperation. Unfortunately, it looks like this sidequest was scrapped, though I question what circumstances led to such a specific line pertaining to the quest still remaining.

At one point, it actually WAS thought that items could be used and included - Particularly "Crystals" and "Smokebombs", though looking back, I wonder if these "Crystals" mentioned here were later saved for the crystals you use to find your path in Drakengard 2....

Remember that one conscript that summoned a ghost at the end of the chapter? All conscripts were originally planned to do that. For better or for worse, it didn't go through.

Necrophilia Jokes

As the title suggests, when you mentioned the faerie explicitly goading him on to do it with the dying/dead conscripts, there actually IS something like that not in the NTSC and certainly not the NTSC-J games, but in the script! You'll find a pretty clear example in the very first line!

(NTSC) "Hey, hey! What’ll you do about the bodies? Stab them again?" (NTSC-J) "Hey, hey! What will you do with the bodies? Hahah! Is your torment growing?" (SCRIPT) "Hey, hey! Are you even lusting after corpses? Ahahah! Aren’t you pent up!"

Which of course is it's own can of worms, but shines MUCH more brightly paired with the Faerie's next line, after Leonard states his commitment to give the fallen conscripts a proper bruial:

(NTSC) "You have time for such luxuries? Well, do you? Do you? Do you?" (NTSC-J) "Hahahah! Is this the time for such a deliberate process? Hey, are you listening to me-? Hey, hey!" (SCRIPT) "Ahahaha! This isn’t the time to be toying with corpses. Hey, are you listening to me-? Hey, hey!"

Of course, the Faerie teasing Leonard about necrophilia can and WILL go even worse into the active goading of "Do it, buddy, I dare you" it will give later on, but I want to intercept that with something the Conscript here does in the scripts that really caught my attention - The Conscript, under the influence of Red-Eye, using the weakness of his inclinations to their own advantage.

The Conscripts "Manipulation"

I'm not gonna lie, when I first detail it really brought me back to this fucked up little fanfiction I saw on Pixiv where this conscript ends up seducing and subsequently disemboweling poor Leonard. As you might be able to tell by my mentioning, it's kinda stuck with me. Pixiv is a fascinating place.

(NTSC) "I’m afraid." (NTSC-J) "I’m… I’m afraid…" (SCRIPT) CONSCRIPT (Alluringly): I’m… I’m afraid…

Through the script, there are different dialogue tags to denote the tone in which that particular line is spoken. While this tidbit in itself isn't much, I figured it very worth mentioning just for its role in the general topic of "More controversial things that were snipped out of either the NTSC-J or NTSC versions of Leonard's Regret/Hunger", not to mention the implications it has on the wider nature of Red Eye Disease as a whole! Think about it - Taking into consideration that the script implies the Conscript "Knew" about his inclinations enough to use them to his advantage, Leonard mentioning that this conscript share's his brother's voice is a detail that definitely catches my attention now. I wonder if it was just tragic coincidence, Leonard being unable to judge correctly in his grief, or perhaps RED allowing the conscript to mimic his brothers? Which is an actually TERRIFYING thought, but hey, I absolutely adore it. There is a plethora of writing material and silly thoughts to have from that alone, which, as an RPer, is probably among the best things I can have. XD

The Faerie's Goading

Back to the faerie, there's a final detail in its teasing for this scene:

(NTSC) "Oh? Oh-oh-oh-oh? Feeling pity? For the enemy? Can’t start wavering now!" (NTSC-J) "Oh? Oh-hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh? Are you just happening to feel sympathy right now? For the enemy? Now’s no time to tremble. Hey!" (SCRIPT) "Oh? Oh-hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh? Are you getting ideas already? For the enemy? I wonder if you’ll go all the way? Just as I thought! Ahah!"

As is the recurring theme here, the script is MUCH more explicit than either, where the NTSC opts for snipping out a couple more details, which in this case is the line "Now's no time to tremble". There's nothing special I have to say about this outside of jesus fuck, of course so we'll wrap it up with the final event scene in Leonard's Regret/Hunger real quick!

Another Note

Just to add, Beholders and Gargoyles were among some of the enemies planned to be put into this level, along with... Treants! It's a popular bit of folklore across Germany, particularly in regard to the Black Forest (Though it came from France) that scared the crap out of me as a kid, so I was pleased to see them here and VERY upset they didn't make the final cut :(

The Final Scene - Leonard's Botched Confession

GOD, from the first time I saw this scene, I was so disappointed. All that tension, all those hints and build-up for Leonard to finally break and be asked "What's going on here? Why are you acting like this?" You'd think you'd get something better than "It's a secret." You just know that this was a scene that got rewritten last second, and it turns out that in the NTSC-J version, it's the same exact case - but in the script? We finally get to see what was intended to be put there (And my years long grudge against that scene was finally, kinda, put to rest.)

So, when Leonard falls to his knees and asks for forgiveness, and Angelus asks (Or perhaps Caim) asks "Why this wasted pity?", the faerie responds for him (Which, keep in mind, Leonard responds to this by immediately begging for Caim to kill him right then and there):

(NTSC) "He won’t say! He’ll never say the truth! It’s a SECRET!" (NTSC-J) "He won’t say! Haha! He’ll never talk about that. It’s! A! Secret! Heehee. Ahahahaha!" (SCRIPT) "He won't say! Haha! That boy was too cute for him to say. He wanted to hold him, among other such things. Heehee. Ahahahaha!"

To add to the bit "He wanted to hold him", the exact word used is "抱きたい", and while it DOES typically mean "To hold, to embrace" among other things in certain ~contexts~ (Like Furiae's confession scene, where the same word is used) it can also mean "To have sex with". The rest of the scene actually doesn't have next to anything changed outside of a tiny added "...You can't." when the Faerie addresses his wish for death that got trimmed from the script, though I will add for context an interesting thing in the same quote a detail added that wasn't originally in the script, similar to a couple other things we've seen so far, is a distinction that can only be seen in Japanese:

(NTSC) "Huh? What did you say? Helloo! You couldn’t die, could you? Just gave yourself a little nick. So sad. Didn’t you make a promise to live with me, big brother? I can’t survive alone anymore, you know. A pact. We made a pact. Don’t forget." (NTSC-J) "Haah-? What are you saying? Helloo? You couldn’t die then, could you? Just gave yourself a small little scar! …You can’t. Didn’t you make a promise to live with me, big brother? I can’t live alone by myself anymore, you know. The pact, the pact! Ahahaha! Take care to remember!" (SCRIPT) "Haah-? What are you saying? Helloo? You couldn’t die then, could you? Just gave yourself a small little scar! …You can’t. Didn’t you make a promise to live with me, big brother? I can’t live alone by myself anymore, you know. The pact, the pact! Ahahaha! Take care to remember!"

It's actually indistinguishable in either translation, so I'll highlight the Japanese text here:

(NTSC-J Original) 「はあ?　何言ってんのお?　もしもーし?　アナタ死ねなかったんですよねー?　ためらい傷バリバリ!　……やだなぁ。俺といっしょに生きてくれるって約束したじゃないですか、お兄さん。俺、もうひとりじゃ生きられない身体なんですよ。契約ね、契約。フヒャヒャヒャ。おねがいしマッス。」 (SCRIPT Original) 「はあ?　何言ってんのお?　もしもし?　アナタ死ねなかったんですよねー?　ためらいバリバリ!　……やだなぁ。俺といっしょに生きてくれるって約束したじゃないですか、お兄さん。俺、もうひとりじゃ生きられない身体なんですよ。契約ね、契約。フヒャヒャヒャ。おねがいしマッス。」

Again, it'll be hard to find a difference through all that, but you'll see the game actually added a term to the script's "ためらいバリバリ" - "A hesitant nick", with "ためらい" meaning hesitant and "バリバリ" standing for a small little cut or scar! Together it really is it's own term meaning "A shallow (hesitant) scar" The game, however, added a character - 傷 - which on the surface, doesn't seem to add much, as by itself the character quite literally just means "Wound". HOWEVER, put together with ためらい this creates a very specific term, ためらい傷 (Tameraikizu) which quick literally means "Hesitation wound", and stands as an exact term for the wounds left over when someone who attempts suicide fails and is left with lasting (Usually permanent) scars because of it. And recalling Leonard's failed attempt to slit his throat in his introductory scene... You know, I honestly wondered how permanent that scar was. Either way, I hope this post has the answers you're looking for! I really enjoyed writing it, and of course, if you have any questions, feel free to message me (Via asks, DMs, or Discord!) and I'll be happy to get back to you! Thanks so much for sending this in, just being able to talk about our boy is a treat, so again, I really enjoyed it~ :3> Again, thank you, and I hope you enjoy! :)

#||OOC||#Drakengard #Leonard #Leonard Drakengard #DOD1 #drag on dragoon #translations #drag-on dragoon

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bramble-scramble · 9 months

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Wow, I haven't really followed the paper mario fandom, although I loved the games. But that sounds really bad. If it's not too personal, what sort of things happened? (if it is i totally understand if you'd rather not talk about it)

Wheeew! Let me tell you a sad story. At least what I experienced from my perspective.

So, I first got into the Paper Mario fandom not long before Super Paper Mario's release. This was back on deviantArt, mostly. I adored the first two games, and when I heard about SPM, I was skeptical at first. It was more like a platformer? Why was the art style so strange? ...But when it came out, it ended up being my favorite! I knew that as soon as I finished it.

Of course, not everyone felt that way, and there were already people who didn't like SPM because of how different it was, or the story didn't resonate with them. But to be honest, I didn't interact with those people very much. I was mostly friends with other SPM fans, and at the time, if they liked that game they probably had played and liked the first two as well, or at least one. It was a happy time as far as I was concerned. Most people, even if they didn't like SPM, seemed to think it was just going to be some kind of weird spinoff and they'd get back to the traditional gameplay soon enough.

....And then years later, Sticker Star came out and its complete blankness of story and personality hit us all like a speeding truck. This is when things fell apart pretty quickly. Pretty much EVERYONE in the existing PM fandom hated it, for good reason in my opinion. This is also where I became more sharply aware that certain people had a resentment towards SPM, since it was either seen as the "beginning of the end" as far as the gameplay starting to go off the rails, OR people outright blamed the story for being too out-there and emotionally charged which caused Nintendo to put the brakes on all that and go in the complete opposite direction (which was backed up by dev comments that came out around the time).

So from here on out I started to feel more and more like a weirdo for maintaining that SPM was my favorite, and a game that means a great deal to me personally. But after Sticker Star, the PM fandom just became an irreparably damaged and bitter place. Initially, the blame was put on Miyamoto because the understanding at first was that he had mandated the PM series 1) put less emphasis on story and 2) no longer be a typical RPG, really, since the Mario & Luigi series also existed to fill that niche. There were a lot of ageist comments made about Miyamoto in particular. Over time, as more info came out, the blame largely shifted to Kensuke Tanabe.

Things only got worse when Color Splash was announced and it looked like more of the same. People said the worst things about the devs, especially the people in charge, and looked for any reason to hate the new game and wish for it to fail. Even though Sticker Star and the soon-to-be-released Color Splash didn't have many defenders of their own, a lot of the larger Mario/Nintendo fanbase began to grow tired of old-school Paper Mario fans, as they... we... started to develop a bad reputation. And with good reason! Looking back, the complaints were understandable but the behavior was often unacceptable. And you know what? I got caught up in it too. I'm not gonna pretend I was above it all. Those were easily my worst days as a fan of anything. I didn't go out of my way to be vocal or mean about it in Nintendo's replies or anything, but whenever I did bring it up personally or on my own stream or discord or whatever, I was bitter. In the past few years I've sometimes come across old comments I made that I'd cringe at now. You might think of me as someone who is largely positive and tries to focus on spreading joy and dwelling on what I love, not what I hate. But the PM fandom at that time was bad for me. Between the Sticker Star and Color Splash days, I was definitely not the kind of person I try to be now.

When Color Splash came out, I didn't even play it for a couple years. But in that time, I largely stepped away from keeping up with the fandom, and I mellowed out a lot, and continued to grow into the person I strive to be today. And then when I finally did play Color Splash in 2018..... I liked it!!! The writing, the scenarios, the general creativity and even the gameplay are just SO FAR above Sticker Star and I think most people didn't even give it a chance, and because so few people own a Wii U, it might be forever doomed for people to just assume it's a slightly better Sticker Star unless Nintendo ever ports it.

And by the time Origami King came out, I was soooo done talking about the series and debating it. I had just totally burnt out. But I was at least tentatively looking forward to the game itself. And whlie I don't love every choice made for Origami King, I liked the experience as much as Color Splash, if not more. It's a nonstop interesting game with utterly fantastic graphics and music, and further steps back in the right direction as far as characters and lore go.

And that brings us to today. There are people, sometimes people that I myself have known for years, who NEVER stepped away, who never stopped acutely feeling the pain of the Sticker Star days, and wage a campaign of complaining to Nintendo to this very day. Meanwhile, Origami King (and to a smaller extent CS and even SS- what I'd call the Real Paper Trilogy) has a sizeable fanbase of its own, especially among younger players. Oldschool PM fans tend to see fans of the newer games as simpletons who have no taste, and fans of the new games often write off people who miss the old style of PM as boomers who can't accept change and are forever bitter and annoying. And then SPM fans just kinda feel like our own thing sometimes, the black sheep of the family. But as someone who likes (almost) all the PM games, I've had people be rude to me just for talking about any side of the issue. One time I was talking about how much I liked Profesor Toad from Origami King only to have some stranger, unprompted, reply to me about how ALL OF TOK'S CHARACTERS WERE SHIT AND THEY ALL SUCKED AND HAD NO PERSONALITY and I'm like no??!!?!? That's not true!!! That's not true AT ALL! I didn't stream TOK when it came out, I wouldn't fucking dare, because when I did play Color Splash for the first time it was on stream and I had to deal with at least one person coming in and being like "why are you playing a terrible game?" despite my repeated warnings that I didn't want to get into a debate on the game's merits. And on the other side of things, I've seen people come up with the most specious arguments to claim that TTYD is actually a Bad Game because it has some backtracking or whatever and that PM as a series was never actually good. There's just... so so many frustrating things I've encountered in the fandom that I'd have to double the size of this answer, which is already a novella, to enumerate them all.

But yeah. I kinda want nothing to do with it anymore. I'm just going to keep appreciating Flavio in my own time.

#alter answers #bramble ramble #I'm not about to tag this with PM because I don't want to get into arguments lol #THIS IS JUST MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE #look how afraid I am of anyone beefing with me

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dk-wren · 1 year

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Buddy Daddies Finale Theory

I can't say what I'm really basing these thoughts on. I also am not sure if this is an actual theory or just my hopes/musings. But here we go:

Kazuki, Rei, and Miri will all make it. Kazuki or Rei might get injured, but nobody in this sweet, little family is dying on me!

However, I do think there is going to be a loss and after the end of Ep. 8, my bet is on Kyutaro (though I hope I am wrong!)

For a variety of reasons, all of which are valid, Rei, and perhaps Kazuki too, are gonna go after Shigeki and Ogino. If not outright killing them (perhaps symbolizing that Rei and Kazuki have changed and are different from them), they will somehow be out of the picture, leaving Rei as the head of the Suwa family/organization

Rei and Kazuki will continue to stay in that world or business, possibly to try and change the practices of the Suwa organization or still feeling too tied to it. So, Rei will step up to become the head of the Suwa organization, except he's doing things a little differently from his father. Rei will be handling that during the day while Miri is at school. During the same time, Kazuki will somewhat retire from missions and instead take over Yadorigi from Kyutaro, maintaining the place as both a cafe and location to exchange/gather intel. (Just let this man cook and be appreciated for his food/drinks)

Like Rei said in Ep. 8, his home is the apartment where he, Kazuki, and Miri live. And that's gonna stay the same. Their apartment will continue to be their home. Nobody is going to move to the Suwa manor and that place will instead become like an office or workspace for Rei. While they may all somewhat spend their day apart from each other, this little family always comes together at night in the apartment for dinner and family time.

Not fully related to the above, but also just wanted to throw my two cents into the conversation about this: I don't think we've crossed over into the present yet (or, we're still in the flashback). I feel it would explicitly be said when the show jumps back to the present or there would be overlapping events that clearly allude to the merging of the two timelines. I haven't watched a whole lot of anime, so I do not know if this is a common story technique or not and if there is like a trope or narrative device used in these situations.

I do agree, given Rei's growth and development in the relationship he has with Miri, going back and rewatching that first scene, Rei's reaction seems a little out of character now (like he still does not really care about Miri). But, and I saw a post about this earlier (sorry I forgot your @), if it's not actually Miss Anna calling, and instead Kyutaro or someone else with the voice changer, this could explain Rei's response. If this call is being made to lure Kazuki and Rei into a trap, and Miri does not actually have a runny nose or fever (I kinda forgot the specifics), then Rei's seemingly unfazed or uncaring reaction could be him simply trying to appease Kazuki's overprotective papa dramatics. Rei's "I guess" could be he truly didn't notice anything wrong with Miri because nothing is, she's just being used as bait. Regardless of the how the organization gets its info on Kazuki and Miri, they will know how much she means to both of them and what they are willing to do for her. That is why calling them and saying Miri is not in outright trouble or danger, but simply needs the love and help of her papas will quickly draw them to wherever the organization wants them.

I could be completely wrong, but just some of my thoughts about how the rest of the season may play out. I think the wait for next week's episode is gonna be a lot harder for me than previous waits.

#buddy daddies #buddy daddies theory #buddy daddies potential spoilers?#kazuki kurusu #rei suwa #miri unasaka #too many incoherent thoughts #might write some more later #late night babblings #might delete later

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doodle17 · 1 year

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🧿🔮Welcome to the blog weary traveler🔮🧿

Howdy. The names Doodle17, but you can just call me Doodle.

I'm just a girl who enjoys Drawing, Gaming and a little bit of writing on the side. I also really like talking. A lot. So don't be shy to drop a little message in the ol' askbox. I don't bite, promise.

Been drawing for 9+ years and don't intend on stopping. I use the good stuff for drawing. Sketchbook, pencils etc etc. For digital you can see me use the fantastic Clip Studio Paint.

I love games. Video games, to be precise. And though I may post a lot of one fandom, I'm Multifandom. Meaning I post memes, art and other things for any fandom I like, when I like. I love talking about my current interests, but hey, if you find something I might be into, don't be afraid to tell me about. Like I said, I do love talking.

In case you haven't noticed, this blog is run by a half-wolf-girl and a small cartoony dog looking creature. These are my little characters that I use to represent me. They are both me, yes. Dont ask how, they just are.

Christian in Faith, and welcoming of everyone. But, I'm afraid if you outright harass or threaten Christians, or anyone of any faith for that matter, let's do us both a favor and don't bother me, okay?

I'm sorry, but Politics are a big No No here. This Blog is for Art, memes and goofy things. A serious post or two may come up, but I'm trying my best to avoid that kind of thing.

This blog will have a few icky things, like swearing and violence, some traumatic stuff here and there, and some suggestive content. But I can assure you, you will never see me get involved with any NSFW anytime soon. But if any of the above topics still bother you, then feel free to block tags, or just not interact with me at all. I understand.

In case you need anymore info, here's my card.... Oh wait, that's just a coupon for Chick-fil-A... Hrmmm... Oh well.

I also own a Side-blog based on the popular Bendy Franchise if you'd like to go check that out, if you're into that. @ask-the-devilish-darlings

I hope you enjoy your stay here. Just a more few things before you get started are, Reblogs are greatly appreciated. Not saying you have to but, it'd still be nice.

Hope to see you around soon.

-Doodle17💙💜🩵

#Updating my pinned post because I thought it needed some reworking #It's supposed to be mysterious and stuff #But I'm actually a huge nerd :P #Anyways #Hope you guys like the drawings I poured my blood sweat and tears into #I shouldn't have added so much detail to them but I did it cause I felt like it #Doodle88 #my blog #pinned post

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justaduckarts · 9 months

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Hey! Is there any particular part of any of your AUs that you haven't had the chance to talk about that you'd like to? Anything, anything at all. I like ur lore n' stuff and I like reading the little extra worldbuilding posts ye make.

Hello!

Actually, yes. There's SO MUCH stuff I wanted to expand upon.

Like the map for the parks in DLNS. I've always wanted to draw up a map for it with all the different attractions! (Tragically, I don't understand maps)

I had a hard time conveying this in DLNS but the park is BIG. Like. Universal Studios big. It's not small. And each section had sm going on, ugh. <3

And how the sense of touch works for animatronics! Here's a snip from something in my drafs:

"So, before I get into washing techniques, let's talk about something important. Your companion may have already clued you in to this," Orlando pushed his glasses up, "but they have a network of touch sensors on their body that allow them to feel. This 'Touch Network' works much like the nerves in the human body- they are constantly receiving and sending info to the core processor. The processor sorts that info and determines which stimuli to respond to. The sensors can detect heat, cold, texture. They can even simulate sensations, like being tickled or pain."

"Hold on," Daisy shot up, "pain?! Why would you do that?!" She looked horrified. There were solemn looks all around the room. Fang looked at Monty, wide-eyed. Gabriel patted Roxy's back knowingly. Freddy hung his head.

"Yes," Orlando nodded, choosing his words carefully, "the pain response is designed to help them recognize when someone's being too rough or aggressive. It also helps them identify damage to their bodies." Daisy looked at Chica, then threw her arms around the chicken with a little whine. Orlando cleared his throat.

...

"Oh! Report it to maintenance! Electrocution could be fatal," she said confidently, "um, before you continue... If they can feel pain, doesn't it hurt to open their panels up?" She twisted the fabric of her corduroy skirt.

"How about we let one of the animatronics explain? Any volunteers?" Orlando looked around. Freddy got to his feet.

"Put simply," he said, "pain is a sign of damage. An open panel isn't damaged, it's designed to move. It does feel strange and having hands or things inside the panel is uncomfortable, but it's not painful. Think of it like... Like opening your mouth for the dentist. It's not fun, but it's necessary. Does that make sense, Daisy?"

I think I've mentioned before but the amount of stuff I post is much smaller than the amount of stuff I write ^^'

I've also wanted to touch more on some of the wider world lore for SH. Like if the gods have human forms, can they have animal forms? (Yes) And I can't wait to get into more stuff about familiars and oogh there's a lot goin on there <3

That's another place I really wanna map out.

While I'm at it, I wanted to touch on one more thing.

In Below The Surface, you may have noticed that the Eclipse Octopus isn't named Eclipse outright. His name was chosen for a special reason.

Fun fact: Pallfish and Sunfish are the only fish to receive names from Elusia. The other fish don't have distinct names like this. Moonfish is definitely an oddity among the other fish.

Sometimes I wonder why that is. :)

Anyway. I think that's all the lore I can really parse out through the fog. Thanks so much for this ask, I hope you've enjoyed this random bunch of headcanons/lore/worldbuilding <3

#justaduckarts answers #star holder au #DLNS #sunfish au

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shihalyfie · 2 years

Note

Hmmm... We've talked a lot about the differences and changes between the original version (Japanese) and dubs for 02 and Adv'99. In the light of the announcement of the reboot/Adv 2020's US dub, can you talk a little more about the American dubs in general?

My only exposure to them were material dubbed from the US dub (Digimon the Movie, and Digimon Fusion), so i'm curious about more details 👀

I haven't seen the American English dub as recently as I've seen the Japanese versions, but I did originally get into Digimon with it and therefore I do know it pretty well. As I've said before, the fandom myth that "the dub was a very loyal one for its time" is a complete lie or at least willful ignorance (only the "for its time" part might be true, and even then not as much as people think). Also, as I've said before, I don't think enough people realize that there's actually a difference between different series' dubs. There are some things in common between each, like changed names and added jokes, but the degree of how much they did it and how much it impacted the story varies a lot, both because the approach to dubbing changed per series and because each series' own writing style interacts differently with seemingly minor changes.

The short answer is: Adventure got fairly significant changes but the plot mostly held up, 02 got the highest number of significant changes to the point it actually took serious damage in terms of story and characterization, Tamers changes mostly are tonal, Frontier and Savers (Data Squad) are where they chilled a bit, Xros Wars (Fusion) was overkill, and tri./Kizuna were about what you'd expect from modern adults' anime dubs. The long answer (with a brief history of said dubs) is below the cut. (Also, hopefully this is interesting info for those who’ve never had contact with the American English dub at all!)

Adventure

One thing that’s important to keep in mind is that Digimon dubbing and rights have actually changed hands a few times. The first few Digimon American English dubs were by a company named Saban Entertainment, headed by a guy named Haim Saban who unfortunately has openly said a lot of very questionable things about the Japanese media he’s handled to the point of bordering on racism, but that was also unfortunately very common at the time. Saban was also responsible for Power Rangers, among other things. Digimon was one of their last dubbed productions before they started falling under and got bought out by Disney. We’ll talk about that a bit later once we get to Tamers.

Adventure was dubbed while the Japanese series was still ongoing, in what seems to have been an episode-by-episode workflow. Now, the good thing is that Adventure's plot wasn't really impacted that much by the changes, and this is probably the origin of the "the Digimon dubs were very loyal" myth, because people are probably thinking of things like the infamous 4Kids outright changing plot points or cutting whole episodes. At the time, it was also unusual for an anime to outright admit they took place in Japan -- Adventure’s tried to hide it for half a series (that’s why “Highton View Terrace” is a thing), but they decided to give up once the Tokyo arc really was too obviously in Japan to do anything about.

The thing is, who on earth is watching Digimon Adventure for the plot? We’re all watching it for the characters, and this is the part people tend to ignore when discussing how much the dub did or didn’t change. All of these characters are defined by their temperaments and personalities, and these are the lines that got changed the most frequently. On top of that, the approach to dubbing seems to have been, for lack of a better way to put it, “a bit too reckless” -- they were very casual about making changes to the script without any foresight that things would become important later. This manifests most clearly in things like Mimi making a throwaway joke about a little brother only for us to learn she’s an only child later, but this does start causing more severe long-term issues in 02 (more on this later).

The most drastic change is Mimi’s personality and temperament, and there’s a reason my meta for her actually has an explicitly set aside disclaimer warning that readers coming only from the American English dub might find parts of the description to be jarring. I’m guessing that the dub production staff didn’t anticipate (or didn’t care about) the fact that the Adventure characters are meant to subvert their usual character archetypes, so a lot of the characters are rewritten to be pigeonholed back into the stereotypical tropes. Mimi definitely gets the biggest brunt of it because the dub writers basically piled on every single “empty-headed materialistic girly girl” trope they could think of on her -- obsessed with materialistic spending and shopping, lacking in common sense, haughty and condescending, et cetera. (Note that there are definitely positive examples of this kind of character in fiction -- Miyako’s character arc in 02 involves some degree of the shallowness issue -- but the problem in this particular case is that there is definitely a bit of maliciously misogynistic “girly girls must always be shallow and stupid” intent behind this here.) Unfortunately, this starts posing problems around the last quarter of the series when Mimi’s mental breakdown and character arc starts depending heavily on her Japanese version characterization, and it starts feeling jarring that someone who was so condescending towards others for three-quarters of a series is now getting a character arc about how inherently kind and non-judgmental she is towards others.

In the end, I don’t think Adventure took as much damage from the changes because it’s ultimately a very straightforward plot, and a lot of their character arcs are tied so heavily to the events depicted visually on screen that bar making severe footage changes, you can’t really change it that much. Any character arc that spiraled out of control eventually had to snap back into alignment with the Japanese version to some degree (hence why a good number of people were able to see past Mimi’s initial dub-induced rudeness), and some parts that were changed probably still needed to be changed in some way for cultural reasons (Sora, Koushirou, and Jou all have characterization elements that depend very heavily on understanding Japanese social propriety). Also, Adventure is probably somewhere around the middle when it comes to how tonally lighthearted or heavy it is compared to others Digimon series, so the added jokes do have some impact on its overall silliness, but not as much. Probably the worst part of it is that unfortunately they keep cracking jokes even when characters are having mental breakdowns or during formidable enemy climactic portions, but these are mostly offset by the character arcs being so clear that it’s still hard to dispute their contents in the end.

The real problems start once we get to 02.

For better or for worse, 02′s Japanese version has this incredibly subtle writing style where the character nuances rely a lot on individual lines of dialogue, and the plot often runs separately from how they do their character development. It’s a double-edged sword; on one hand its high level of depth and complexity means I can dedicate a whole blog to picking apart its nuances twenty years later, and it’s infamous for having a lot of people saying they saw it differently years later as adults, but on the flip side it means a lot of its best substance goes over the heads of kids or first-time casual watchers, and I’m not even sure I can blame the audience for missing it. It’s honestly too subtle for its own good at times.

Unfortunately, combined with being dubbed as it still aired in Japan, this created a very nasty combination with some of the most recklessly aggressive dub changes in the entire Digimon franchise. (This isn’t just personal bias; if you actually do a count of number of changes per episode, 02 changes average at about 1.5 times an average Adventure episode and 2-3 times an average Tamers or Frontier episode.) A lot of the substance of what makes 02 work in the first place either completely dies in the dub or at least becomes significantly harder to see the value in, and there's a reason it seems to have the highest rate of people saying they liked it much better when watching it in Japanese for the first time. Those from non-English speaking countries who got Digimon the Movie (the only product consistently translated from the English script instead of the Japanese internationally) have sometimes complained that the tone and characterization seemed off compared to the Digimon they knew, with jokes being cracked every half minute and everyone being really rude to each other. So basically, imagine that for fifty episodes.

The changes are basically more aggressive and more exaggerated versions of the Adventure changes, but they end up getting much more damaging to 02′s integrity as a series overall for the following reasons:

Daisuke. Very little of his original characterization survived the dubbing process, and there’s a reason I consistently dedicate entire posts to what happened to his characterization and how this created a chain effect with 02′s entire writing. After all, Daisuke’s the lead protagonist! 02 is when the series started getting very theme-heavy (Adventure’s was broadly about individualism and self-awareness, but not as pinpoint about overarching story themes), and unfortunately the first half-writing basically added almost every toxic masculinity trope you can imagine to him, almost as if they wanted to make him unlikable. They started toning it down in the second half as Daisuke’s forward-thinking nature and friendliness actually became plot important, but this still didn’t fix the issue because now the character arc just became flat-out unbelievable (someone who was so arrogant and self-centered in the first half is supposedly one of the most open-minded and friendly guys around?).

“Adding jokes” is consistently done in every series dub, but the 02 dub stands out because it seemed to be utterly incapable of ever cutting the jokes out even during plot-important moments when it really needed to, causing a lot of the series to become basically devoid of emotional depth. Of course, this only ended up causing problems for characterization too, because the Japanese version could have a scene where they’re exposing their vulnerabilities and emotional weaknesses, but we have to make this into a joke, again, which implies nobody in the series is actually taking this seriously. (Kiuchi Reiko’s Daisuke has multiple moments where you can tell in delivery Daisuke’s about to cry, even if he doesn’t actually break into tears, but I can’t remember a moment I ever felt that way with Davis.) 02 starts off tonally lighter than Adventure at the beginning but ends with a much heavier emotional toll on all the kids by the end of it, but you’d probably never believe this with the American English dub alone. This is also why 02 fans who favor the Japanese version tend to get very upset when people justify why the American English dub is better because “it’s funnier”, because a lot of what made it “funny” also ended up doing serious damage to some core parts of the series.

A lot of the 02 kids’ characterization is built up through one-off lines or the nuances of how they approach things, and the dialogue changes being done so uniformly and recklessly across the series means that basically all of this goes out the window. Instead, it’s replaced with everyone constantly mocking and dunking on each other, which probably sounds fun and “savage” at first, but it leads to two major problems: firstly, it does damage to a series where a lot of the appeal is about the group’s dynamic and way of playing off each other (you’re supposed to get the impression these kids really, really love each other, because this is a series heavily themed around relationships and all that), and secondly, every single character now has an identical sort-of-snarky temperament with no clear distinction between them, so it’s no wonder the 02 kids have such a strong reputation in English-speaking countries for being “flat with no character development”. A good number of the emotional payoffs in the second half become nonfunctional because everything meant to build up to it is no longer recognizable.

Even in the original version, 02 definitely has a very crowded plot where lots of things happen and subplots get juggled around at the drop of a hat, but the very reckless dubbing approach to these points leads to unaddressed/unanswered/contradictory plot points and portrayals basically permeating the entire series. Hey, did you know the ending to episode 13 wasn’t a cliffhanger in Japanese?

I’m not saying it’s impossible to see some of the substance behind 02 when you’re dub-only; I liked the series well enough when I was younger (although I very much disliked Davis due to being upset with the creepy -- and dub-exclusive -- way he invaded Kari’s boundaries), and I think perceptive fans have been able to see bits of the original Japanese series’ substance poking through the cracks (although it generally manifests in things like “I see what it was going for even if it didn’t succeed in execution” far more often than it would in Japanese). But I definitely think 02′s Western reputation has definitely taken a severe tangible negative hit thanks to this dub, and there’s a reason this blog devotes about 10% of its posts just trying to weather out and inform people of the differences at all because the confusion has gotten so bad.

Incidentally, Ken’s character arc and backstory is closest to that of an Adventure character in that it’s heavily tied to the actual plot events depicted on screen (i.e. it’s the least subtle and hardest to miss), and that’s probably why he’s the character who’s closest to unscathed out of all the 02 kids. I think the strength of that character arc contributed heavily to salvaging 02′s Anglosphere reputation and allowing 02 to still get good reviews by a decent number of people out there; it’s hard to argue with what happened in it, and it’s also hard to argue with the appeal of the rough-around-the-edges Davis mellowing out through his relationship with him (even if it has way more hurdles to get around than it was originally intended to).

That said, I do have a major credit to give this dub and it’s that it had a lot of pretty good dub-exclusive insert songs (mainly made for The Movie, but I digress). Adventure’s dub only had one, “Hey Digimon”, and it was this lighthearted song that they somehow felt they had to use even for some really climactic battle scenes, resulting in some of the worst anticlimax ever. 02′s are much better and much more well-timed.

Hurricane Touchdown gets its own post because while people generally know it was the most edited-down part of The Movie, the fact a lot of people don’t actually know much about the original movie (it didn’t even have very good fansubs until around two years ago) means what got lost is often not very well-known -- mainly that the original was heavily about moving on from denial and nostalgia for the past, and that Wallace was characterized as a relentless flirt and general disaster child. (Willis in The Movie comes off as significantly more responsible while Davis antagonizes him, but in the original Japanese version Wallace was the unhelpful gremlin while Daisuke was more understandably upset at his antics.)

One extra thing I have to point out before I move onto Tamers is that Diablomon Strikes Back (Revenge of Diaboromon) was the first Adventure-branded thing to be dubbed by anyone besides Saban. (Diablomon Strikes Back, both Tamers movies, and the Frontier movie were dubbed by Disney in 2005, between Frontier and Savers/Data Squad.) As a result, for a while, it was probably the most accurate-to-the-source dub of any Adventure product. There are still some changes, but they’re within line of necessary cultural nuance considerations and the overall tone of the movie. I’ve seen some dub-only people say that Davis came out feeling unusually nice and friendly compared to the TV series. Yeah, funny thing about that...that’s actually because that’s Daisuke’s original characterization. My biggest fear right now is that the upcoming 02-based movie may have fights breaking out over how the characters are portrayed there, because it’s entirely possible they’ll be accurate to Japanese characterization but get accused by dub-only fans for being out of character.

Tamers

I’m not actually sure at what point the deal between Saban and Disney was finalized in practice, but on paper the handover happened around the point of the D-Reaper arc. This is where things kind of get interesting, and I think whether you prefer the original version of Tamers or the American English dub will really be a matter of taste.

Firstly, not only did they start really toning down how aggressive they were with the changes, they also started getting more tasteful about how they wrote in added humor (instead of just intrusively adding in jokes in periods of silence, the way people would deliver lines would be more smoothly integrated into the series). It feels much like a transition period into what would eventually become the style used for Frontier and Data Squad, and it’s why I wonder if the shift to Disney wasn’t already happening earlier than when they say it did.

Tamers is a much more straightforward series than either Adventure or 02 when it comes to characterization -- it’s not very subtle, and characters will often state their motivation or epiphanies directly in dialogue -- so although there are of course enough changes that you could unpack them in more detailed Tamers meta or run into discrepancies in deeper fandom discussions, for the most part the characters come off as almost the same among most casual watchers. This means that the biggest difference is tonal, and that’s where the preference issue really comes in.

Japanese Tamers is a very unrelenting series, and its reputation for being “dark” probably has a lot to do with the fact it has very minimal situational comedy compared to Adventure, 02, or Frontier. (Note that Ghost Game is heavily relying on situational comedy for tonal regulation; Kiyoshirou is a huge factor in balancing out all the knives and stuff.) I don’t believe the core contents are necessarily unusual for Digimon standards, but I do agree that tonally speaking, by the time you get to the third quarter, it becomes a barrage of heavy thing after heavy thing happening to the characters without as much in the way of balancing it out (or at least not much compared to other series). It’s a lot for even an adult to handle, and based on testimony from Japanese fans watching it at the time as kids, it was often just too emotionally draining for them. It’s considered one of the leading theories over there as to why Tamers was the first series to experience a major financial hit (ratings started dropping enough to make the TV networks panic early in the series, and it ultimately made only barely over half 02′s toy revenue that year), in that people may have dropped it because it was just too much. (In actuality, there were several other things that probably contributed to the downfall, but the point I’m making is that this is notable enough for people to take it seriously as a theory.)

In contrast, American English dub Tamers was...I’m not going to say “making jokes” per se (it thankfully does not have people crack inappropriate jokes at people’s suffering or anything like that), but the tone of everyone’s dialogue carries an ever so slightly lighter and more casual tone from the beginning even all the way to the end. If the above theory of the original series turning people off for being too overwhelming is true, it’s very possible that -- ironically, given Tamers’ reputation -- the dub contributed to actually retaining a proportionally larger audience in English-speaking territories as a result of being less unrelenting. (Of course, again, things went south in the West too due to changed universes going over less well with Western audiences and other things related to franchise mismanagement, but, again, that’s a digression.)

My impression is that the Tamers dub never got quite to the level of utterly assassinating emotional resonance the way 02′s was often guilty of, but of course there are things you can still dispute for good reason (based on characterization nuances -- Kazu is a bit more openly misogynistic than Hirokazu is, Ryou and Ruki’s dynamic is a bit changed in ways that probably turned a lot more people off, and I’m personally uncomfortable with how the Chinese elements are the most aggressively stripped out in a series that partially involved discussing racism against Chinese families in Japan), and tonal preference is always going to be a thing. Also, Tamers is a bit unusual in Japanese in that it's one of the more willing to be indulgent in gender-neutral Digimon personalities (Renamon, Culumon, etc.) and this unfortunately doesn’t come into play in English -- although I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume this was more due to the fact the writers simply didn’t get the memo in time and weren’t given references on how Japanese pronouns work. That kind of thing is more commonly provided to localizers today, but the actual translation process was very shaky back then.

I will say one really major thing the Tamers dub bungled (possibly due to lack of foresight) is that they changed Leomon’s last words to Juri to ones of reassurance -- they even named an episode after the new version! -- only for things to pose problems when it turned out his last words having a trigger word for her (”destiny”) was plot important. They awkwardly tried to retcon it by having flashbacks to the scene use more accurately translated dialogue, but it’s really conspicuous.

In any case, like I said, the last quarter was when things transferred fully to Disney, and that’s when the changes started toning down.

Frontier

Legally, Frontier’s dub is by “Sensation Animation”, but in practice by Disney commissioning former Saban staff to finish dubbing Digimon material. Nevertheless, the company shift shows in multiple ways -- for one, they stopped having the rights to the original Digimon dub theme song anymore, and that’s why you’ve never heard it used in anything since Tamers (and why the Frontier theme song is used in Revenge of Diaboromon, because that’s the only theme song they had the rights to at the time).

Again, I think there are definitely nitpicks you can make here if you happen to be a Frontier meta writer, and I definitely think there are reasons to be annoyed at the fact everyone is a bit more cruel to each other than they were in the original. (It’s not as bad as 02 because in Frontier everyone is very rough around the edges and not always in sync, especially at the beginning of the series, but it is supposed to be one of the tighter groups in the end, and them softening around each other is a way the series often employs to show the potential these kids have to be much nicer people.) However, on top of this being where dubbing started to really chill due to the company change, Frontier is also a very straightforward, easy-to-understand plot, and therefore I don’t think I’ve ever heard any major disputes in understanding between Anglosphere fans of Frontier and others in terms of getting the characters and how they work.

Probably the one biggest difference I can think of is Kouichi, and this is mostly due to his very limited screen time in terms of speaking for himself -- in Japanese it’s much clearer through his speech pattern he’s actually normally a very casual, sociable kid (he uses ore!) and just happened to be shy with the others due to circumstances. His major focus episodes in the American English dub (with Crispin Freeman’s delivery) sound a little more sad and a bit angstier, so you might get the impression he’s a lot softer and more introverted of a kid.

Savers/Data Squad

For all I’m not normally the biggest fan of Disney, I have to say it is kind of impressive they were pretty dedicated to Digimon during the time they had it. They went ahead and dubbed all of the remaining movies (at the time) to promote Data Squad, and when they brought on Studiopolis for it, Jeff Nimoy made it a thing to get high-demand voice actors among Digimon fans for it (if I remember correctly, Colleen O'Shaughnessey is Yoshi specifically because of this). But anyway...

Data Squad is about the level of Frontier in terms of dialogue and tone changes, with the one major sticking-out point being that Disney got really antsy when it came to depictions of bombs and led to one of the franchise’s most infamous censors (hi Citramon). Personally, though, I think Citramon is hardly much of an issue compared to the fact that Tohma’s fake betrayal centered heavily around the fact he was being blackmailed with a bomb around his sister’s neck...but other than that one unfortunate part, Savers was always a series that was big on situational and slapstick humor even to the very end, so it takes well to dub humor, and on the flip side the dub was careful to still preserve the themes about xenophobia and the cycle of hate.

Xros Wars/Fusion

I haven’t seen all of this one’s dub yet (I stopped after five episodes), so I’m going off what I remember of it and what others watching it reported. This was the first dub done after the franchise was transferred back to Saban Brands, Haim Saban’s successor company to Saban Entertainment. They seemed to be on a roll of procuring Toei franchises, since they took Power Rangers back and also tried to start a dub of PreCu-- um, Glitter Force. Unfortunately, they were also convinced that the best way to go about things would be to pretend it was the nineties again.

The end result is Adventure/02-style dubbing applied to a 2010 series in an era where nostalgia wouldn’t even save it. (I do think it’s a bit hypocritical the Digimon fandom treats this like the most radical dub in the franchise when in actuality Adventure and 02 were even worse at times, but it is true that in this case Saban didn’t even have “this is normal for the time” as an excuse.) The problem is exacerbated even further by the fact that someone (not sure if it was Saban or Nickelodeon, which aired the series) decided that most of everything that could be remotely taken as objectionable had to be censored to ludicrous degrees -- even if they were things that were fine back in Adventure -- and while I’m personally whatever when it comes to issues of design, I feel like even the idea of a kid in Taiki’s backstory getting gravely ill from pneumonia for months being considered objectionable is a bit much.

Overall Xros Wars is a bombastic series that never lets up on situational humor, and even during its most tense moments it’s over-the-top, so Fusion probably didn’t suffer too much to that extent, but I also unfortunately heard stories of them still overdoing it to the point that even if it didn’t cut into the series themes and characterization, it was just plain cringeworthy writing. That said, I don’t know very many people who survived watching it to the end in the first place...

tri.

I don’t personally know very many people who watched this beginning to end, and I didn’t watch it myself (and the reason is actually just because Vic Mignogna as Matt is just a bit too much for me to personally bear at this time). I do know that the dub was allegedly commissioned by Toei themselves now that they’ve been getting more actively involved in their series localization. Otherwise, I didn’t hear much about it, and the few people I know who did watch it didn’t have much to analyze very deeply about it. I assume there was definitely some added humor, but from the sound of it it was somewhere around Tamers level.

The biggest complaint I heard was mainly that they tried to have Meiko have a sort of “fake Southern” accent to approximate her Tottori dialect, but in actuality it was just too intrusively distracting.

Kizuna

I assume this was also commissioned by Toei. This one I did actually watch myself. Not many added jokes (and the few they added were well-timed), Daisuke and the others are in-character, and honestly this is probably because the movie just goes so fast and is so packed that there isn’t much room to add in the first place. In fact, my biggest issue with the dub is something that wasn’t the dub staff’s fault at all; the original Japanese script’s official translation is awful, and the dub staff was very obviously given that to work with. The other issue is that the voice acting is a bit stale compared to previous dubs -- one thing I had never faulted Digimon American English dubs for prior to then was voice acting quality, and it was one of the best among dubs of the time -- but this is probably because it was during early COVID pandemic conditions, so I don’t think much could have been done about it.

Adventure: reboot

So funnily enough I’m writing this despite not knowing much about it at all -- I don’t even know who commissioned this or who has the rights. (My best guess is Hasbro since they’re the ones who took in Power Rangers after Saban Brands also imploded, but I really have no idea.) I also don’t know where it’ll be airing; it doesn’t sound like Nickelodeon, and it could very well be a streaming service like Netflix.

I will say, though, as someone who watched the reboot from beginning to end, even if they do decide to go nuts with joke adding in the dub for it, I don’t think the series risks getting heavily damaged by it. As I pointed out earlier, impact of heavy dub changes also varies depending on how straightforward the series itself is, and not only is Adventure: extremely straightforward, it also is a series centered more around action and zany hijinks than it is character psychology, so a bit of extra humor doesn’t seem out of place there. But we’ll have to see!

#digimon #digimon adventure #digimon adventure 02 #digimon tamers #digimon frontier #digimon savers #digimon multi series talk #shihameta #dubbing discourse #tomorrows2top #shiha's ask box

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madness-in-the-flesh · 2 years

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any 2bdamned/doc headcanons ? :)

-👾

Eyy 👾 anon! Here you go! I need to write for doc more tho. Absolutely adore pee paw 2BDamned, Let him play flappy bird on his tablet.

GENERAL 2BDAMNED HEADCANONS

GENRE - Romantic / Platonic

TRIGGER WARNING - Toxic relationships, Manipulation, stalking, drugging, implied self harm, reader death mentioned

At first glance, You wouldn't suspect a thing. He treats you about as nicely as he would any other person which is why he's both one of the most dangerous and interesting. You really won't see it coming.

He plays a long game of cat and mouse, So much so that by the time he's got you right where he wants you to be: It's too late for you to get out of those claws.

His obsession, like wise, is slow. He doesn't fall easily and most of his time is consumed by work. You'd have to do something extra special to kickstart his interest.

However when you do, He's looking through every file that has even the littlest bit of info on you and compiles it into one large file: For his eyes only. There's pages apon pages of personal info, records and data, photos, videos, literally everything and anything he can get his hands on and trust me, He can get his hands on A LOT

Uses this to his advantage, purposely choosing more favoured conversation topics such as you hobbies and interests. You might walk in on him doing one of your favourite things, Pleasantly surprised. Unaware this is all a plan to get closer to you and possibly even plot things you may enjoy from simple deduction.

Lingering touches last a little too long during check ups, Probably does some uncomfortable things but nothing that can't be brushed off as an accident. Especially when he apologies ( a rarity with him ) and doesn't do it again.... for a while.

If your one of his mercenaries / under his watch, You may find yourself put in the line of fire and hurt more than the average merc. While you just assume your a little more risky, Doc is actually going out of his way to make sure you get hurt. The worse, the better for him as it'll leave you in his care.

Doesn't matter if other people with medical knowledge are on sight and so much better than him, He is the only one who gets to touch you / heal you. He just says it's because your one of the best and can't afford to lose you But then why not put you in more capable hands?. He just cannot stand the idea of someone else doing his job in helping you, feeling like he's entitled to be doing so.

He'll manipulate you into slowly being the one to seek out his company. When the time is right, He'll " pull away " getting busy with work and putting his everything into it in hopes you'll come find him and make sure he's okay. He's essentially doing this in order to figure out if you care about him.

It's a way to reassure that you're warming up to him and starting to care for him. If it is successful he'll be very happy, Seeing as now he's supposedly a while you could just be doing it because what else are you supposed to do? Let him rot? That would be kinda shitty.

Either way, he's slightly more open with you now if you did make sure he was okay, as well as seemingly bonding and hanging around you a lot more. Attempting to build more of a relationship between you and him while demonstrating exactly why he's the perfect partner for you without outright saying it.

All the while you just assume the relationship has developed normally, both with mutual feelings and there isn't a monster under that mask just itching for an excuse to keep you all to himself. He's very possessive, If I haven't made that clear yet.

If his little plan doesn't work for whatever reason, doesn't matter on said reason, He'll be very angry that his methods are not doing as well as he planned and all of it has been a waste. However, this plan was more so an insurance policy before he did do anything drastic. After all, why should he do so when he can work to make the relationship he wants with you organically?

Doc would prefer to make up that relationship with you organically: It won't stop him from going down a less than favourable route however.

From then on, Doc might be a little snappy at you. Just because you apparently don't care about him. You'll also see cameras and feel eyes watching you always. Making you insanely paranoid and struggle with sleep. Inevitably people will pick up on your sudden exhaustion and recommend you go to see the good doctor for something to help!

He's more than happy too. Giving you a little too much however as he's got everything prepared and it's the most opportune moment to kidnap you. Even if they wanted too, It's not that anyone else can stop him. He'll just send Hank and friends after anyone who even thinks they can take you away from him. However even then, they'd have to get past him too, a very skilled strategist, and all his defences. Which only get 10x more care and effort put into them. After all, It's not just about keeping people out. It's about making sure you stay in.

Will probably get you hooked on drugs to without your knowledge. I'm not sure how, maybe he spikes your drink / food but it would only be when he's around. Aka somehow creating the illusion that you only feel this good around him, therefore somehow trying to convince you that he is allowed too.

Sometimes he won't even visit you, locking you in a secluded room for days on end - Not even making contact when you are given food or water ( probably has one of those sliding prison food door things ). He'll leave you and you'll to deal with your withdrawal all by your lonesome. If you hurt yourself - good for him because he'll be right there to patch you up. He isn't phased by even the nastiest of wounds. I mean, He's revived Hank multiple times and now Deimos. No matter what happens, he'll always claim he's seen worse.

He also may kidnap you if, in the relationship he's manipulated you into, You do something he doesn't like. For example, not telling him where you are or who you're with, Or just keeping secrets from him. He can hack into all your accounts and watch your every move. There really isn't anything you can hide from him since he already knows everything about you. Very controlling and needs to know everything so he can plan and act effectively.

I feel like there's also no way of escaping him. Not even death will save you from his clutches because whatever happens: He'll bring you right back to him. Even if it means every part of you that used to be is left to rot in the other place.

Your his and both of you are taking that to the grave. Whether you like it or not.

#👾 anon #yandere madness combat #madness combat #yandere madness combat x reader #madness combat x reader #2bdamned #cw yandere #cw toxic relationship #cw manipulation #cw stalking #cw drugs #cw drugging #cw implied self harm #cw reader death mentioned

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