Hoshicon 2016 – page 8
It’s been so long since I’d actually attended panels that weren’t purely of a fan nature, I’d forgotten how awkward it can be when this happens. And yes, you really can tell when these people have had practice at moving on to other subjects.
…and sure, to be fair, sometimes the people asking the questions don’t REALLY think the dub actor was somehow involved in the creation of the Japanese source material. Sometimes they just want to engage in fanish conversation about the show like they would with anyone else, not realizing that actors are REALLY BUSY PEOPLE who may not watch the show outside of the capacity of their jobs. Still awkward, though.
(Historical Notes: Past Me is only scratching the surface of the awkwardness of this panel. The guest was some 4Kids guys whose name I’m too lazy to look up right now, and you could REALLY tell he was long past done putting up with frickin’ weebs and their complaining about dubbers changing stuff in the localization. The sad thing was, dude totally had fair points, but he was NOT communicating them well, to the point that you could tell a lot of folks in the audience were really uncomfortable. Not, like, being abusive or anything, just coming at the issue from the perspective of a person who really didn’t give half a crap about anime fandom itself and was only involved with dubbing shows for the paycheck. On the one hand, he’s totally right that some jokes just don’t translate and the general audience a show like Pokemon was being marketed for isn’t interested in another culture’s esoteric references. But on the OTHER hand, he seemed willfully oblivious to the fact that there are OTHER audiences who actually do want all that stuff, even if it wasn’t the audience a company like 4Kids was aimed at. There’s a big difference between “Our business model doesn’t allow for catering to that demographic” and “That demographic literally doesn’t exist.”)
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