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.
did the artstyle challenge with teddie as per friends request. might do more characters, tho its so difficult to imitate canon artstyles you hAVE NO IDEA
I really like the fun theory that joker is from inaba but its even cooler if u consider he and yosuke have similar weapons yosuke is just dual wielding
