The Four Color Media Monitor

Two weeks ago, One Angry Gamer wrote about anime dubbers at Funimation shoehorning SJW politics into the products they were translating:

Some of Funimation’s localizations of original Japanese animated cartoons contains sociopolitical commentary that was not present in the original. This issue came to a head recently when Hajimete no Gal (also known as My First Girlfriend is a Gal in English) had an episode that drastically altered the dialogue from what it was originally supposed to be, in order to include typical “Progressive” or SJW talking points. Many fans wrote to Funimation about the issue, made threads on Reddit, and tweeted at them on the official Twitter account about keeping personal politics out of the localization process. Well, Funimation responded by veering the conversation away from localization and onto the topic of harassment and doxing. [...]

This is the third major incident involving an anime that was localized to reiterate common talking points found in Social Justice Warrior circles. One of the other more notorious moments that took place was in an episode of Prison School, where the writers decided to take a dig at the #Gamergate consumer revolt, as reported by Niche Gamer. [...]

Fans have found instances where Funimation localizers have included using terms such as “SJW”, “Cuck”, “Patriarchy” and “Misogynist nerds” in the English dubs. These terms have become popularized in Western media outlets with strong Left-leaning biases.

I've got a hunch that, even though there's a lot of "cultural differences" in anime that have to be taken with a grain of salt and could require a strong stomach, their politicized dubs fail to make any clear points and go for all the easy targets. If anything, this is a vital lesson how anime, if it matters, is just as vulnerable to leftist politics as anything else. Certainly there's some out there with very liberal stances coming from the Japanese animators themselves, but usually they don't all clog the scripts with their politics at the expense of entertainment. If Funimation's crossing the lines, maybe the original studios should withhold the translation rights until they can monitor the dubs to ensure there'll be no political interference.

But who knows? Even anime producers can surely be a bad lot themselves in more ways than one.

Labels: animation, manga and anime, politics