I've been seeing this a lot lately, but a little while ago I mentioned something to do with disability in a discord and someone asked me if I was a "spoonie". Not if I was disabled, but a spoonie. I need y’all to fucking get it into ur heads that disabled is not a dirty word. You can use the term spoonie for yourself all you want, but the second you start imposing it on other people and generally using it in place of the word "disabled", its just another woo-woo euphemism that seeks to soften and make comfortable the vocabulary and concept of disability.
Like at a certain point it becomes clear that a lot of people now are using “spoonie” in the same damn way as “differently abled” or "handicapable". The origin and intent of the term become moot within that usage because what it serves to do is invoke disability euphemistically, obfuscating and softening it in service of compulsory normative able-bodymindedness.
If you want to use that term for yourself, fine. Have fun. It doesn't have these same connotations when its used as a self identifier rather than as a replacement for the word "disabled". But stop applying it to others in place of "disabled" I’m so fucking serious.
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okay, i've got some things i wanna say about twst EN's translation of scarabia's story that i was originally typing out as part of a response to an ask, but then i realized i was going off on a bit of a tangent and was like "this could basically be its own post"--so now it's going to be its own post!
i'm a twst EN player, and for the most part, i do really like the localization. i don't speak japanese but i love learning about language and the process of translation and localization, so at one point after finishing books 1-5 i went and reread them all (and 6 as well, once it was fully released on EN) with a fan translation and the localization side by side to compare them. and from what i could tell as someone who isn't a japanese speaker, i honestly thought it seemed like they usually did pretty well? sure, there were a few mistakes like cater claiming to be an only child (this one, i think, has actually been fixed recently), or how in book 2 they removed a small mention of falena making it seem like he's never mentioned at all until leona's flashback and they also removed the numerous times that he said "be prepared" (at least they finally properly translated it in book 6, though!!). but i thought most of these mistakes were somewhat minor and could be forgiven... until book 4 (well, and book 5, mostly in regards to vil and epel's conflict and i'm not talking about them here, so).
see, i actually realized that something was off about the localization when i first played through book 4, because i have a weird memory and have picked up a bunch of random words and phrases from being into japanese media and reading so much about the localization process. and i also play twst with the sound on because i love to hear the voice acting. so sometimes i would hear jamil speak, i'd pick out the words "shujin" and "juusha" for "master" and "servant", and then the subtitles wouldn't include them at all. so i'd guess certain things about the actual intent behind the story based on that. take this message i sent to my friend when i was sharing my blind reactions to the game:
and she ended up telling me that apparently, what i thought he should say essentially IS what he originally said!! according to the fan translation on wiki.gg he said this instead:
i had wondered if maybe i was reading into things and assuming too much, but it turned out i was completely spot on! but most people who play EN would not be able to pick up on this and realize that jamil was born into servitude to kalim and has no escape, because as i later discovered almost every single mention of him being a servant at all was removed, in events and vignettes as well. which is actually really weird to me because they don't remove it entirely, they do in fact bring up the fact that jamil has to test all of kalim's food for poison during book 4 and they also left in a line where he says he "works as kalim's servant". but they only really mention these things once or twice and then they try to sort of play it off as jamil being a paid employee or something most of the time... seriously, during beanfest there's dialogue where jamil says it would be rude to refuse an order from his boss but i've read that that line was originally him saying a servant couldn't disobey his master. and in the scalding sands event he calls himself "a dedicated employee" of kalim's... what, am i supposed to assume he works as a butler by choice or something? yeah, no. also, one of his birthday vignettes, which are fully voiced so i could TELL he said, with a devious smirk on his face, that if he had a parrot the first word he would teach it would be "shujin-sama". "master". what did EN change this into?
the person i was originally writing all of this in response to said that sometimes people's takes on jamil make them wonder if people are reading a completely different story but also that part of that can probably be blamed on the way EN completely changed the context of his situation with these translation choices. and yeah, i fully agree with that assessment: more casual fans or people who just aren't that interested in the scarabia duo could be said to be reading a different story with this whole "boss" and "employee" thing that has jamil make it sound like the worst that could ever happen to him if he got in trouble would be getting a really stern lecture from his parents.
and it makes me sad because i really do love both jamil and kalim so much and i think their dynamic is so tragic and complicated and interesting to think about. i think they're both really complex characters who are trapped in an awful situation. kalim is so kind and loving and would never wanna hurt anyone but he hurts jamil just by existing as part of the fucked up society they live in. kalim thought he and jamil were best friends, he had no idea of the toxicity of their dynamic and the pain jamil was in, and people say jamil should've just talked to him about it earlier... but jamil's first memory as a child is of seeing his parents bow to the asim family. being a servant is practically all he's ever known and he's had it drilled into his head since they were both small children that he can never be himself around kalim, can never just treat him like a normal person because he's a servant and kalim is his master. and even if he did accept kalim's offer to start over as equals and be friends, what would happen when they had to go home to their families? they won't be at school forever.
and i just. augh. i hate what the localization does with them. if you try to water them down to just an employee who's super mad at his obliviously crappy boss, or just two childhood friends who needed to communicate better or something like that, then you take away from the complexity of both characters. you also lose extremely cool writing choices like how jamil is a character who was born into servitude but has the power to make himself the master with his unique magic. i see so many takes about how jamil is just a jerk who betrayed his best friend and how kalim never did anything wrong in his entire life and i hate it but i'm sure the localization's choices are in fact to blame for a lot of this.
so anyway jamil and kalim's actual dynamic is fascinating and lives rent-free in my head, no thanks to how the EN version gutted it.
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