Mokuba is arguably the most important person to Seto, but that doesn’t mean Seto knows how to be considerate towards him, and Seto certainly does not understand what it means to be his brother’s guardian nor did he truly bother to be a good parental figure to him (mostly because he does not get that this is either of their position - he does not see himself as a parental figure or Mokuba as a child, really. I don’t think Seto even knows how to properly treat a child at all for lots of reasons and abstracting from what he and others expected from himself when he was a teen, he just assumes Mokuba’s basically an adult and probably just fine).
I love some sweet Kaiba brothers moments, but. Seto is Not A Great brother and yeah, they work on it, and he improves and all that, but most Kaiba brothers content that paints Seto as Mokuba’s responsible guardian and emphasizes how much Seto tries to be a “good parent” is so ??? to me.
3. Dub or original?
The short version is: I watched the dub as a teen, the music makes me all nostalgic and the German dub is always gonna be the voices they all have ~in my heart~ What you guys gotta know is that, since most movies in Germany are dubbed, we have some high quality voice actors, and they also do voice acting for anime. And they’ll typically voice act anime with the same seriousness as a live action Hollywood movie. Seto’s VA is Leonardo DiCaprio’s voice, Pegasus had the German voice of Kevin Spacey, Yami Bakura that of Johnny Depp etc etc. I fully admit that the VAs made me fall for the characters :,)
This is also why the US voices will always be super weird to me? They talk like cartoon characters and try to speak higher and deeper than any normal person would and it’s a bit grating to listen to for me if I’m honest.
Anyway, the German dub is what I’m all nostalgic about. I’m really neutral on the sub - I haven’t really watched it much and I have no strong connection to the original voices, though they grew on me a little in DSOD.
That said, I vastly prefer sub canon, or rather manga canon, I guess, because I never managed to watch the sub entirely.
To explain why I really don’t like the dub, still, I have to direct you to the long version which includes my opinions ™ on the approach of 4kids dubs.
The long version is that while I’m here for occasional dub jokes, I actually have no real love for the way the dub was done. There are several problems I have with 4kids’ approach. I don’t necessarily mind censoring things per se - giving young girl characters longer skirts is something I can get behind, for example - but what really bothers me is often very unnecessary content changes that seem to have no other reason than to simplify things into a more black-and-white pattern. Or to change the dialogue into a bunch of jokes. What I mean is that it just twists meaning constantly for no good reason. In DSOD for example, Seto keeps going on about revenge in the dub, as if they were afraid him being less hatred-driven would make him less one-note and 4kids can’t have that.
What bothers me about this is, firstly, that this is not what a translation should do. Changes are fine, but trying to stay in the spirit of the original is arguably most important. But what really upsets me is how 4kids seems to think kids and teens are just uninterested in anything that is not goofy 24/7. They are apparently so certain that serious dialogue or even a moment of silence won’t grab the kids by their presumably super short attention span that they have to fill every second a character is not shown with their mouth closed with quips and jokes. It’s an awful trend in kids’ and teens’ shows in general. Kids are not stupid, and it’s weird for a dub to treat them like they are.
Secondly, YGO is ridiculous. It’s people in funny clothes and with silly hair yelling over card games. And that’s maybe just a personal problem, but the dub lampshading this makes it sort of redundant? Like, listen, I don’t need you to tell me this is silly af, it obviously is. But to me, it’s endlessly more hilarious and charming if all the characters and their dialogue take it so very seriously. Also, I’d like to have the little bits of character insight and development here and there between the card game dialogue. 4kids seems to think the only way to make YGO entertaining is to make tons of puns, but I rather want something genuine that is not afraid or even unaware of how weird and unintentionally hilarious it is.Like, Seto’s talk in the arena in DSOD? In the dub, he just talks a whole lot of empty nonsense that is highlighting how ridiculously huge is ego is, but do we need that? I mean, he just pretended a plane crashed and a guy got killed for shock value to then yell at an audience about his own problems and how card games will erase all boundaries and limits while several screens show his own face - I think it’s very CLEAR THAT HIS EGO IS RIDICULOUSLY HUGE I CAN SEE THAT. He jumps out of flying planes for chrissake. It’s already fucking hilarious without him making that abundantly clear through his speech.In the original, his speech isn’t even less absurd, but opposed to the dub, it carries more information about the character than just “he is really fucking narcissistic to the point where it’s just amusing”. There’s character development here, he talks about how winning is not the solution and leaves the winner still trapped. It gives us hints at his motivation in this movie. Because while, yes, all of this is silly, it’s still worthwhile to the viewer, 4kids. People who commit to watching this card game marathon probably care at least a bit about the characters. Strange, I know.
So, I don’t know how normal that kind of dub is for US audiences, but from my standpoint, it’s weird if a dub differs so wildly from the original? The worst part was how in German tv, we had our own Digimon dub that was actually close to the original, and I’ll forever be a bit miffed at the fact that 4kids owning the rights to YGO meant that the German dub was just the translated 4kids dub.
I had actually high hopes 4kids wouldn’t get the rights for DSOD, so we’d get a German dub not dictated by 4kids, but alas.
I admit that 4kids sort of not leaving the rest of the world a choice in this is what maybe bugs me most.
