I'm just someone liking and reblogging stuff they think is cool. I'm a rookie traditional artist, but I haven't had time to draw anything for a while now, hoping that will change soon. Bi, He/Him. I'm mdraco76 on Twitch. My self-shipping side blog is https://baamshipping.tumblr.com
Hey, I got let go from my job this recently and with everything becoming more expensive and nobody hiring because it's the end of the year, I thought it might be appropriate to share my paypal.me in case anyone wants to provide some support
Go to paypal.me/ADragon443 and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.
I do have some savings so it isn't an emergency, but any money you can give would still help a lot
It's the start of a new year and I'm still between jobs. Currently working on getting unemployment and disability benefits. In the mean-time any help is welcome
My mom's wallet got stolen, including all her debit and credit cards. It's a solvable problem but it's a bit scary financially right now so any help would be greatly appreciated
Just a quick update: My mom got her new cards a little while ago, so that situation is mostly sorted (the old ones were of course disabled immediately after they were stolen). I called the Social Security offices a couple weeks ago and they let me know they'd send me a letter letting me know what documents I need to give them if any. I haven't gotten the letter yet but I'm hopeful about it. I'm still unemployed but I am doing a little better financially thanks to the donations I got, so thank you all very much!
I thought I wouldn't have to reblog this again but unfortunately I am still unemployed and Social Security hasn't gotten back to me yet so I have still have zero income coming in. With the all the illegal funding freezes going on there's no telling if or when I'll be able to get my SSI, so any help would be appreciated while I search for a employment
We're into March now with no sign of anything from Social Security and no leads on any jobs. The situation isn't urgent but any help would still be appreciated
My bank account has been steadily losing money to little things over the course of the past few months. I've gotten connected to some people trying to help me with getting a job and/or disability but it could take months. If you have enough money you should give it to Palestinian charities and gofundmes, but if you have a bit extra to spare I'd appreciate the help
I only just now finally managed to start a new application for SSI and am finally getting hooked up with new job prospects. I have only a few dozen dollars left in my checking account and less than 3k in savings. Any help would be appreciated.
I finally got a letter from the Social Security Office. Unfortunately they denied my claims for both disability and SSI. While I work on getting an appeal, help would be appreciated.
Go to paypal.me/ADragon443 and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.
realizing many people don't know about infinity train creator owen dennis' among us show from years ago, which has been trapped in unreleased limbo all this time and was just dumped on streaming this morning with no advertisement. they don't even know about its weirdly stacked cast
the shit you do to make a dying phone work when you dont wanna buy a new phone is amazing. my phone no longer charges unless i plug and unplug the charger exactly ten times & then flip the charger around then it works. I dont want to say i have to fuck the port a little bit first but i have to fuck the port a little bit first
I always get a little disappointed when people draw post-shattering Ranni naked with a human body because i genuinely think her doll body is so beautiful.
Grace gets onto Rocky for trying to call planet Adrian “medium rough texture circle planet” but he literally named Rocky for the fact that he looks like a rock
I Know Rocky realized that like months after getting to Erid & going “… HEY WAIT A MINUTE, QUESTION!?”
Umamusume is an extremely funny series to introduce to someone because not only is the core premise absurd (gijinkas of famous Japanese racehorses who run races that mirror the careers of the horses they're based on while also being idols), but it feels like every other writing and worldbuilding decision is somehow even more absurd than the last
The series takes place at what is ostensibly a high school but the umas have careers that occur years if not decades apart. The umas do not age, no one appears to ever leave Tracen Academy if they don't want to and there is no satisfying explanation for how this works
Despite, again, all of then ostensibly being in high school, some umas act like grown adults who pay taxes and others act like they're no more than 8 years old
Canonically, no one gambles on the uma races.
The creators had to patch some of the story dialogue because they accidentally created a timeline where the modern day Republic of Ireland has a monarchy
Super Creek wants you to do age regression with her because she likes playing mommy
Admire Vega had a twin sister who was aborted in the womb and said dead fetus is now a literal ghost that actively haunts her
Matikanefukukitaru also has a dead sister and she isn't being haunted but she does have religious psychosis
The creators get permission from the owners of all the horses before putting them in the game. The owner of Daiwa Scarlet allegedly approved her inclusion in the game on the one condition that she be given bigger boobs than her main rival, Vodka
Vodka drinks tea from a flask
Agnes Digital writes erotic friend fiction of the other umas
There are no male Umamusume but Umamusume give birth like humans do. Presumably they date human males, though it’s not explained what determines whether the child is a human or an Umamusume
Umamusume have similar physiologies to humans but inexplicably are immensely physically stronger and faster, up to like 45 miles an hour
Haru Urara’s whole thing is she’s terrible at racing and never wins, but she’s only scripted to lose one race. NPCs will still talk about how bad she is and how she’s never won anything, immediately after a race where she came in first by eight lengths
Agnes Tachyon does unethical science experiments because she’s obsessed with understanding how the fuck Umamusume work. She also retains her real world counterpart’s fragile skeletal structure that magically heals itself at one point in the story. No one, including her, seems particularly concerned with this
Despite being in her late teens at most, Nice Nature seems to genuinely believe she’s ancient compared to everyone else. She’s also apparently incapable of getting anything but 3rd place, referencing the real Nice Nature, but this creates the same problem as with Haru where she’ll be undefeated and then talk about she only ever gets 3rd
Carrots are apparently considered treats for Umamusume but they can eat and enjoy any food that humans can. For no explained reason other than the stereotype they just really like carrots which are put into everything, including hamburger steak (as in the literally stick a whole carrot into it), and are given away as raffle prizes.
The director of Tracen Academy is literally a 10 year old horse girl (as in little girl obsessed with horses) and got the position because she gave a good speech
Gold Ship is repeatedly visited in her dreams by an unknown entity that mimics the voice of Director Akikawa (the 10 year old horse girl)
Tazuna, Akikawa’s assistant, is very likely an Umamusume in disguise, evidenced by how she never takes her hat off and her dress can easily hide a tail, plus she’s shown to not only keep up with an Umamusume but actually outrun them. But no matter if she is or isn’t it creates some kind of issue. If she is then there’s no indication of why she’s hiding it since Umamusume are highly respected. If she’s not then now there’s a human who can inexplicably outrun a horse
Super Creek is so powerful that Gold Ship fully began wailing on her in an attempt to make her move and she just stood in place smiling and saying how strong Gold Ship is as though she was a small child pretending to fight
To expand on the idol thing it seems like part of being enrolled in Tracen Academy requires song and dance training which involves learning different moves and song parts so you can perform no matter what position you get in the race. Even if you get dead last you’re expected to smile and sing on stage with the people who beat you
In most races there are default Umamusume who are just there to fill out the remaining race slots and aren’t actual characters or based on actual horses from what I can tell. One of them is called Heart Blowup
Umamusume have signature outfits for racing and most are impractical, resulting in some of them running 3200m in chunk heels
Umamusume is an extremely funny series to introduce to someone because not only is the core premise absurd (gijinkas of famous Japanese racehorses who run races that mirror the careers of the horses they're based on while also being idols), but it feels like every other writing and worldbuilding decision is somehow even more absurd than the last
The series takes place at what is ostensibly a high school but the umas have careers that occur years if not decades apart. The umas do not age, no one appears to ever leave Tracen Academy if they don't want to and there is no satisfying explanation for how this works
Despite, again, all of then ostensibly being in high school, some umas act like grown adults who pay taxes and others act like they're no more than 8 years old
Canonically, no one gambles on the uma races.
The creators had to patch some of the story dialogue because they accidentally created a timeline where the modern day Republic of Ireland has a monarchy
Super Creek wants you to do age regression with her because she likes playing mommy
Admire Vega had a twin sister who was aborted in the womb and said dead fetus is now a literal ghost that actively haunts her
Matikanefukukitaru also has a dead sister and she isn't being haunted but she does have religious psychosis
The creators get permission from the owners of all the horses before putting them in the game. The owner of Daiwa Scarlet allegedly approved her inclusion in the game on the one condition that she be given bigger boobs than her main rival, Vodka
Vodka drinks tea from a flask
Agnes Digital writes erotic friend fiction of the other umas
"Despite, again, all of then ostensibly being in high school, some umas act like grown adults who pay taxes and others act like they're no more than 8 years old"
Admittedly this is essentially the high school experience.
Umamusume is an extremely funny series to introduce to someone because not only is the core premise absurd (gijinkas of famous Japanese racehorses who run races that mirror the careers of the horses they're based on while also being idols), but it feels like every other writing and worldbuilding decision is somehow even more absurd than the last
The series takes place at what is ostensibly a high school but the umas have careers that occur years if not decades apart. The umas do not age, no one appears to ever leave Tracen Academy if they don't want to and there is no satisfying explanation for how this works
Despite, again, all of then ostensibly being in high school, some umas act like grown adults who pay taxes and others act like they're no more than 8 years old
Canonically, no one gambles on the uma races.
The creators had to patch some of the story dialogue because they accidentally created a timeline where the modern day Republic of Ireland has a monarchy
Super Creek wants you to do age regression with her because she likes playing mommy
Admire Vega had a twin sister who was aborted in the womb and said dead fetus is now a literal ghost that actively haunts her
Matikanefukukitaru also has a dead sister and she isn't being haunted but she does have religious psychosis
The creators get permission from the owners of all the horses before putting them in the game. The owner of Daiwa Scarlet allegedly approved her inclusion in the game on the one condition that she be given bigger boobs than her main rival, Vodka
Vodka drinks tea from a flask
Agnes Digital writes erotic friend fiction of the other umas
OKAY, somebody in the comments called Teddie a "perv" again and NO NO NONONONONO I can't believe how much damage localization crunch has done to the perception of this character in the west. Teddie is CHILD. He's mentally no older the Nanako. He acts like that because he is lonely and wants attention by being mildly annoying and kinda funny, not because he's a predator! Vote Teddie to spread the truth. I love Koromaru, but I am sure best doggo would not stand for this slander of his bossom buddy.
It's not your fault, it's kinda a result of how the game was localized way back in the 00s... There used to be an article about it on the internet (the site has since closed down unfortunately), but the localization team for Persona 4 went on the record stating they were heavily crunched when translating the game, being given basically only 1-2 months for the entire job (which is insane for a game of that length), and while a majority of the translation came out amazingly well for those circumstances, Teddie, who had to be localized last due to executive meddling regarding his name and gimmicks, did suffer immensely from the crunch.
To make matters worse, for some ungodly reasons every localization team on Persona since then has decided to stay CONSISTENT with those localization errors and actively butcher Teddie's character for that purpose alone, and I honestly am baffled by the insane ripple effect this has had.
The damage done to his character was 3-fold:
1.) Miscasting
In Japanese, Teddie is voiced by Kappei Yamaguchi, a character actor known for his amazingly consistent falsetto, among other things. He was probably cast for his prior performance as Flappy in PreCure Splash Star and uses the exact same voice as for Flappy to voice Teddie. Accordingly, in Japanese Teddie sounds like a *creature*, not a person, a childlike, alien being that could never be mistaken for a regular person, voice-wise.
Meanwhile in English, Teddie has been consistently (mis)cast and misdirected with voices that sound like adult men doing an annoying falsetto that doesn't make them sound any younger. The voice actors themselves are incredibly talented, but they are completely the wrong match for the role and ruin the impression the character is supposed to give off, making him go from "cute but annoying and misguided" to "pest".
2.) Mistranslated jokes
God, if I went fully into this one, we'd be here ALL WEEK, but, like, every second joke involving Teddie, especially the running gags, was mistranslated in the English version. Like, his bear-puns in English? They're an attempt to carry over the fact that in Japanese he has a heavy vocal tick that causes him to replace sentence ending floskels and sometimes even parts of verbs and nouns with "kuma" the Japanese word for "bear" (which, incidentally, is also his name in the Japanese version, because in the Japanese version YOSUKE NAMED TEDDIE. Teddie didn't have a name until he met the party, and since Yosuke got so annoyed with how hard it was to get straight answers out of the awkward little creature, he just ended up naming him after his vocal tick. This is, by the way, one thing executive meddling changed. The localization team initially wanted to keep Teddie's name and vocal tick the same as in Japanese.). However, this does not necessarily come across as Teddie trying to make jokes in Japanese, and more as a cute speech impediment that makes him resemble typical Japanese corporate mascots even more than he already does. In the Japanese version, the only time he snaps out of this tick is when he thinks a dear friend of his has died (if you've played the game you know what I mean) and is in absolute despair over it.
But this isn't really the thing that ruins the character. The way his actual jokes were translated is a lot more damaging. Most strikingly, there is his infamous running gag about wanting to "score" with girls.
Now, as it is written in the English version of the games it does come off as very sexual and inappropriate, however you slice it...
The problem is: This is NOT how it is in Japanese
The word used here is not "scoring". It's "逆ナン" ("Gyakunan").
"Gyakunan" is a Japanese slang term referring SPECIFICALLY to women or girls aggressively flirting with men/boys. NEVER the other way around!
Why is Teddie saying it then? Well, he caught it from Shadow Yukiko. Shadow Yukiko talked about her concept of a person she could completely rely on and wanted to be with forever as someone she wanted to do a "gyakunan" on. And that STUCK with Teddie. Teddie has intense abandonment issues, so the idea of being someeone to someone else that they want to rely on and forever be with is something intensely powerful to him.
In other words: Teddie does not know what the word means. That is extremely clear in the Japanese version (and also goes for 100% of other "inappropriate" things he says. He's always just parroting stuff other people said or the media, never actually speaking out of knowledge. His voice actor pointed this out in a talk show even. He does that because he is a needy child.)
The fact that he doesn't know what it means is even directly spoken about in Ultimax, where this dialogue happens:
Teddie: "I wanted to Gyakunan so badly, I did my very best to grow this. Hi there, Junpei~!"
Junpei: "Ahh... Ahem... YOUR. JAPANESE. A LITTLE. BAD."
Junpei: "HUMANS CANNOT BE GROWN. ONLY GIRLS CAN GYAKUNAN"
Since P4's localization had completely messed with this joke, the second part of Junpei's second line here was completely dropped from the localization, as you can tell.
So why does he keep saying it even when it's obvious that the others are uncomfortable with it? Because Teddie wants attention. He's like a little kid who has no idea how correctly express their emotions. When he feels alone, he lashes out by making bad jokes, even when he doesn't realize WHY they are bad.
This also directly ties into ANOTHER mistranslated joke from Vanilla P4, which happens right before Rise's dungeon:
Kanji: "It's... a striptease, huh."
Teddie: "A "striptease"!?"
Teddie: "Aha! I get it... That's when you're all stripey, right!?"
Chie: "...."
Teddie: "I said... It's when you're all stripey, right!?"
Everyone: *sweatdrop*
Yukiko: "I hate these neon lights... I think not even these glasses can keep my eyes from hurting from that."
Teddie: *unhappy*
Teddie: "You guys, when I make a stupid joke, somebody is supposed to get mad at me for it like in a comedy skit! C'mon, one more time..."
Teddie: "So a striptease is... when you go all stripey..."
Chie: "I wish he'd stop talking..."
Yukiko: "...Huh, stripey? Sorry, were you talking, Teddie?"
Teddie: *sadly* "N-Nevermind... Let's just go inside..."
In English, this was mistranslated badly:
In English, it was played as Teddie genuinely thinking it was a funny joke, when in Japanese he himself says, that he is just trying to lighten the mood by making an intentionally bad joke.
This also messes with the reason WHY this scene is here: Teddie is feeling useless and out of place the entire time throughout this arc and is afraid that if he can't even keep the others' spirits high by being annoying enough to distract them from the seriousness of the situation, there is absolutely nothing left he has to contribute. That's why he gets so intensely sad when nobody reacts to his dumb joke. This is part of why his Shadow manifests at the end of this dungeon.
God, I could go further with how the localization also kinda messes with the way the shadow encounter is written too, but that belongs under another point, namely:
3.) Misunderstood Arc
The English localization messes up a lot of small details about how Teddie acts and speaks even aside from his jokes. He often says words in Katakana to make it clear he's hearing them for the first time and doesn't know what they mean. It's made very clear that, just like Nanako, he's prone to quoting TV and commercials after he comes to the human world. Sometimes the English dub makes him sound overly eloquent in dialogue boxes that had him basically just make toddler noises in Japanese.
This all combines to the complete misunderstanding of his arc:
Teddie does, in fact, NOT have amnesia in Persona 4.
He has dissociative symptoms.
This first becomes apparent in the Japanese version of his Shadow encounter, when Shadow Teddie says this:
Shadow Teddie: "At the bottom of your heart you realize [the truth]... But you cannot accept it. Therefore, all you do is trying to create another "you" to bury it..."
Shadow Teddie: "You never had any lost memories at all."
Shadow Teddie: "The only truth is that you are trying to make yourself forget that very fact itself."
Teddie: (shakily) "N-No... No, you're lying..."
This dialogue is still there in English, but the phrasing is off and less clear, and it sounds like Shadow Teddie is just clarifying the type of Amnesia Teddie has, rather than saying that he has *no* amnesia whatsoever.
What Teddie actually has is some manner of dissociative condition. His sudden gain of self-awareness as a Shadow was so traumatic to him that he completely dissociated and can't connect himself to his existence before that point in time, because being a Shadow, in his mind, would completely and entirely isolate him from humanity forever, which would force the desperate need for human connection that birthed his self-awareness in the first place to go eternally unfulfilled. So he can't allow himself to even for a second think of the fact that he's a Shadow, because if he did, it would break him. (And in the bad endings, it DOES. There's a reason his "goodbye" letter reads like an, ahem, certain type of note that starts with "s". It's pretty clear that Teddie is, in fact, not alive in the end if you get a bad ending.).
That's also why his Persona awakening status line is different from that of every other character.
He'd never actually "faced the truth about himself" at this point. He brute-forced his Persona awakening because he was so desperate to be with his friends that the feeling was strong enough to bring his Shadow under control.
The time when he actually DOES face it is when he awakens to Kamui, after a certain someone wakes up in the hospital in the game's endgame. That's because at this point, Yu had convinced him that, regardless of his nature, who Teddie gets to be is up to nobody but Teddie himself. He's not bound to any "destiny" prescribed to him by his "nature". He can choose to grow up into and become whoever he wants regardless of how he started out. In that way Teddie is a heavy foil to Ryoji Mochizuki from the previous game, who never got to have this revelation and, as a result, didn't survive. (RIP Ryoji, my boy...)
Teddie's dissociative symptoms are why he gets more and more bratty the later into the game we get, right up until stuff goes down in late November. He does not make a secret of it towards Yu that he's anxious and dissatisfied with his progress in "finding out" who he is, and all the time, his Shadow is pressing on the back of his mind, probably only exacerbated by the fact he actively has to keep holding it down, since he didn't have a proper, stable awakening like the others yet. So he tries to overplay it by acting EXTRA annoying in fall, and his characterization in the PQ games (both of which are set in Fall from P4's perspective) suffers from it, something he directly admits in the endgame of PQ1, when he apologizes to Koromaru for the way he was acting to him and admits he admires him.
(Note: I only ever played Persona Q in Japanese, so I have NO idea how this scene was handled in English. Given people only ever talk about how bratty Teddie was to Koromaru in that game, I assume it wasn't translated well, unfortunately. I at very least know that his dismissive nickname for Koromaru in PQ was badly mistranslated. In Japanese, Teddie calls him "Inukoro", a slightly dismissive version of "puppy". Not rude, just mildly dismissive and punny because it has "koro" in there. The English translation went with "mutt", which is just... No. Just no. That is NOT how this should have been translated.)
ANYWAY, this turned into a Teddie essay, so let me end this on:
Vote for Teddie. Unlike Koromaru, he has been actively slandered in the west for years, and I think if Koromaru knew about this, he would want it to stop.
People always told me he was just childish and didn’t understand what he was saying but I had trouble believing it. Also if he had blatantly said “guys you’re supposed to get creeped out cmon” in English too I might’ve actually understood (hell, I myself love annoying people for laughs)
From this it really sounds like he’s one of the most butchered characters I’ve heard of. Im tempted to feel bad for not knowing but tbh I can’t read/speak Japanese so I pretty much had no way of knowing he was mistranslated like this lol
EDIT: WAIT THAT ALSO EXPLAINS WHY HE KEEPS HITTING ON NANAKO
For one he has no idea what flirting is and just says things the teens around him say, and along with that it sounds like he’s basically meant to be her age
I was in the middle of learning Japanese when I first played P4 some 10 years ago, so I had more contact to the Japanese version than the English version right from the get go. It took me a while to realize just how much damage the localization crunch had actually done to Teddie, because in the Japanese fanbase he's actually fairly popular as a symbol of the "cute" side of the franchise. His Japanese character profiles always emphasize his loneliness and neediness too.
BTW, a lot of the genuinely creepy stuff Teddie does is kiiinda Yosuke's fault. (Sorry, Yosuke, I love you, but you suck at raising this child). Note how Teddie never mentions anything like swimsuits or nurses or anything genuinely sexual aside from the "scoring" joke (which I explained above) for the entire time, right up until he first leaves the TV World. Then... he moves in with Yosuke.
To drive the point home, Arena shows us what Yosuke's room looks like, and wouldn't you know: Posters of happy, smiling idols in swimsuits on the walls. Stacks of playboy magazines everywhere. Golden even added a scene where Yosuke gets mad at Teddie for bringing his (Yosuke's) playboy magazines down to the Hanamura family breakfast table with him and loudly asking Yosuke about them in front of his parents, at which point Chie even points out its Yosuke's fault for keeping stuff like this in his room when Teddie lives there too.
Yosuke is kinda Teddie's big brother figure in the same way as Yu is Nanako's, and while Yu is nothing but a good influence on Nanako, Yosuke is... Not someone you want a little kid to use as a role model. Which is unfortunately exactly what happened-
On the plus side, the same picture of Yosuke's room also shows that next to Teddie's bed there is a stack of what looks like Ribon magazines (a shoujo Manga magazine for grade and middle school girls). So at least when Teddie spends his own money on literature it's far more age appropriate.
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