Kim!! I have a gripe disguised as a question! The season 4 English dub is out, and the Miya twins don't have even a twinge of a southern/country boy accent. I am more than a little disappointed. I understand Japanese dialects cannot be mapped one-to-one to American ones, but given that class and privilege discrepancy is a major theme in Haikyuu, I would think that giving the twins an accent that USAmericans tend to view as "lazy" (since from what I've read that's how Kansai dialect is viewed) would have been a great move. What are your thoughts, if any?
Hi Moth!! I haven't watched any of the s4 dub, but I am actually a little surprised too that there isn't any accent change for the twins (and I'm assuming Inarizaki in general too), especially when I've watched a few interviews of the Japanese voice cast talking about how important it was to them to get the Kansai dialect right, and how both the sub and manga translation make a good effort to try and portray the difference in written English.
The subtlety of the class/privilege discrepancy is one of my favorite things about Haikyuu, and about the Karasuno vs. Inarizaki match as a whole, because I feel like it really does add a lot of depth and atmosphere and just, realism to the series and the hard work we see Karasuno put in. Like, the matches against Shiratorizawa and Inarizaki always had a fundamentally different feel to me, despite the fact that both teams are portrayed as behemoths of skill. But they way they're portrayed gives off a different impression of each of them, with us being told that Shiratorizawa is the ultimate powerhouse of stability while we also get a grand tour of their academy with its horses and multiple gyms and dedicated volleyball club buses, but then the way Inarizaki's level of class is shown to the audience is much more subtle (partly, imo, because their level of privilege is closer to Karasuno's and since they're our primary POV, there aren't as many differences to point out to our lead characters). Despite Inarizaki's skills as a team being told to us as being relatively on par with Shiratorizawa (they've got one of the top 5 aces in the country with Aran, and Ukai even compares him directly to Ushijima a few times I believe), they feel much scrappier—they aren't an academy, but just a regular high school, and they get identifiers like "the ultimate challengers" (again, something Karasuno is also called), and unlike Shiratorizawa, they don't seem to have a signature "time-tested" playstyle to maintain. And for me (even though I personally can't actually hear the difference when listening to the anime), the emphasis of their dialect in the text of the manga/subs adds to this portrayal. Of course, accents and dialects don't actually have any bearing or indication on work ethic, intelligence, or necessarily even class, but based on my (albeit very limited) understanding of Japanese culture, the average Japanese viewer would hear the Kansai dialect and it would add to that portrayal as well.
So I am a little bummed that viewers that only watch the English dub will be missing out on that aspect of their portrayal, especially because the class discrepancies in Haikyuu are already so subtle. I personally consider it a fairly major theme that drives and shapes a lot of the course of the narrative, but it is pretty subtle—the audience is never once directly told anything about Karasuno, or any of the other schools, being less well-off than others (the closest thing I can think of are the quick scenes of Yachi overhearing Takeda needing more funding so the team can get a bus), so my best guess as for why the dub wouldn't bother to give the Inarizaki players a different accent is because of that subtleness. That, and also probably because of what you mentioned about accents/dialects not being one-to-one translations/comparisons and it's probably just easier for the studio to avoid any potential negativity and leave out the differences entirely.
