Finally got around to watching the vnc English dub, and honestly, I’m having a lot of fun with it.
There was an adjustment period for the voices to be sure (especially Noé), and there have been a few lines and deliveries that definitely made me cringe, but as a whole, it’s pretty good. Before it aired, part of me was terrified we were gonna end up with something like Free!, and this is a thousand times better than that.
Though as good as it is, I have to admit that it does still feel inherently wrong for Noé to speak like a modern American. The others can get away with it, but Noé is so very much the Fancy European Gentleman type, esp in ep 1, so hearing his dubbed voice is just… odd. I know this wouldn’t have actually worked, but part of me almost wishes they gave him a British accent or something lol.
Also, I’ve realized that, at least for my casual enjoyment, it actually works in this dub’s favor that it’s so wildly different from the original manga translations sometimes. Watching the subbed version can be frustrating because everything about it, both audio and visual, is so close to the manga version that I know and love so well, but not quite there. The dub is just a completely different entity. It registers in my brain as its own thing that’s just approximately based on the manga, rather than something that’s trying and failing to be it.
Though that only goes so far, of course, and the one scene that’s really important to me in the first few eps was the one that I was by far the most annoyed with the translation changes in. (The chapel at the end of ep 1, for those curious). So I suspect that as things go, any changes made to the most important lines will continue to irk me.