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stillness-in-green · 8 months ago

Note

Minor advisor note: Katana Advisor was in episode S7EP15, for a brief still among the Villains captured...except they got his colors wrongs XD You still know its him from his head shape and neckbrace armor/but they still messed up his color scheme.

So I finally had the free time to go dig this episode up! I had to watch most of the episode to find the shot you were referring to, and then ducked back to the previous episode as well, as I’d always intended to at least watch Scarecrow’s big speech moment. Unsurprisingly, I have some thoughts.

Firstly, regarding Katana Advisor, I can only laugh and shake my head. Great job, Bones—add in a brand new shot of people getting captured, but the only established character whose capture might possibly be relevant has the wrong colors, so you can’t even conclusively say that it’s him. Impeccable work: Net Zero changes to the material.

(I agree that it’s obviously supposed to be him—that neck brace is very distinct—but I elect to ignore the implication because I will take any crumbs I can find that any given distinct MLA character is still in the wind at the end of the series. Not that I consider myself beholden to the anime’s garbage take on the MLA anyway, but still.)

That aside, hit the jump for the rest! There’s one particularly big one—a translation error in one of Scarecrow’s lines that in turn drew my attention to an issue with Viz’s translation of the same line in the manga—that I’ve saved for last.

O I enjoy that the anime makes it even more clear that Spinner did not run over any-damn-body. Like, that assumption was so omnipresent when people were talking about that chapter in the manga, but it never stood up to a close read of the actual details of the art. Does it make Pig Nose Guy’s crisis of conscience even more obviously dumb and contrived? Oh hell yes. But the hospital plot was that anyway, so I appreciate anything that makes it easier to explain why.

O Speaking of the human chain, chatting about the moment with Nal made me realize a particularly egregious thing about the set-up with the hospital. So like, the medical staff are willing to risk their lives for their patients, right? To the point that they’ll do a real damn stupid human chain instead of, say, trying to use all the chairs and benches and desks you’d find in a hospital to put together a fucking barricade, all for the sake of making a point?[1] But you know who very pointedly is not behind that human chain? You know who we never see a single person inside the hospital trying to defend? Kurogiri, that’s who. I guess the doctors just didn’t count him as a patient who needs to be protected, huh? Honestly, where is the brave whistle-blower hospital admin who’s going to give a bombshell interview about how Central Hospital begged the Heroes and the police to move Kurogiri somewhere else only to be refused, because one of the Heroes is personally attached to Kurogiri, and also because Hawks and Tsukauchi knew that Villains attacking a hospital would do irreparable damage to their cred, and that would be important for legal proceedings in the aftermath of all this? 1: Not at all how this would go in real life, especially given the conceit that the only patients left in the hospital are those whose condition is so delicate that they can’t be moved. But I guess Horikoshi was too busy asking his EMT contact about open-heart surgery on the battlefield to think to ask about hospital procedures in the event of an active terror threat. Also putting together a barricade inside the hospital would imply that the staff believe there’s any chance the defense force, who are outnumbered 75 to 1, could fail, and we all know from BNHA’s endgame that being proactive in the face of danger voids the Hero Protection Warrantee. Only those who are patient and wait for help to come actually deserve help; trying to help themselves makes them Villains.

O Scarecrow’s first appearance in the scene is so, so funny. He just floats downward into the frame. He’s not rappelling downwards using webbing, he’s not climbing down with his spider legs, he doesn’t have insect wings; he just drifts down like he has some kind of flight quirk. You know, the dude who will be defeated by knocking him off the roof of a tall building.

Why did you think it would help to knock this guy off a roof, Koda? He can clearly just hover right back up there. Perhaps his flight operates under similar principles as hot air balloons? Did attacking him with birds deprive him of most of his gas?

O WHERE IS HIS GODDAMN SALUTE.

THIS IS NOT THE LIBERATION SALUTE.

O I notice the anime kept the scene with the handgun—including actual bullet sounds!—despite the fact that that plot element goes absolutely nowhere, and in fact they also see fit to add police-issue lightning rifles. (Which, wow, that sure is a choice. Love to just make police look worse by electrocuting unarmed civilians. What, they couldn’t get a good supply of teargas ready in time?)

O It is so, so funny to me that the anime has finally, seven seasons in, started to care about dramatic lighting, but they’re stuck with the fact that the hospital attack happens in broad fucking daylight, before the other battles really start mucking with the weather. They do their best with a bunch of lit fires, using the orange light and smoke to suggest sunset lighting and distant stars, but that doesn’t change the fact that The BNHA Anime Cloudscape is lurking just beyond the haze.

This becomes extremely clear when the smoke instantly evaporates the red hot second the mob finally stops for good. Check the before and after here:

Hysterical. I guess all these people had to do for the light to shine on them was to stop rioting! Being good civilians who meekly endure their mistreatment and wait for salvation to be handed to them from outside can literally make the sun come out! Who needs One For All punches to change the weather? Apparently enough civilians can replicate the effect just by feeling bad enough about themselves.

O I was being fairly annoyed about the BGM scoring Spinner’s internal monologue right before he makes the last push through to Kurogiri. Like, it was so plainly ominous and scary, emotionally keying the viewer to view Spinner’s reflections as foreboding a horrible change of the tides. As someone who was mostly grieving for Spinner in that moment, it rubbed me the wrong way pretty badly.

...And then that music just kept on playing as the POV of the scene switched to Present Mic and I remembered that Spinner’s last push doesn’t actually come until after the incredible bit where Yamada Hizashi confirms that Spinner has been incapacitated and then apparently decides he needs to kill Shirakumo Oboro anyway, just so his existence can no longer trouble their mutual friend. And that, dear readers, made me way more forgiving of the ominous BGM!

O I would like to give Shimono Hiro, Dabi’s voice actor, a fucking medal for his line deliveries immediately before and after he goes through Kurogiri’s warp. The laugh when he realizes he’s going to get teleported to his dad is breathy, pervy, a perfect encapsulation into a single two-syllable sound of his deranged anticipation for tormenting Endeavor some more. Then his, “Otou-san!” as he appears before Endeavor is even better: high-pitched, off-balance, questioning and eager like he can’t believe his good luck. Truly, Shimono-san understood the fazacon assignment and he delivered.

O The closing sequence is…really strange. It’s like it’s pretending that it has a visual theme of reaching out to others, hands extended to those in need, and then the viewpoint cuts to a wider angle and you realize all the characters who were reaching out are actually just sinking down through clear water, their arms floating a little above their torsos. The last shot, of Deku settling to the sea floor and smiling serenely with his eyes closed, is especially bonkers. Like, what’s the message here? That no one involved has any agency in what they’re doing, but are just going with the flow established by other people? Deku reaches rock bottom, at peace with the knowledge that he doesn’t have to try to do hard stuff like “save Shigaraki” anymore because the grown-ups have sorted it all out for him?

I mentioned this in my chat group and Nal pointed me to the lyrics of the song, which use the word rokutousei, “sixth-magnitude star.” While a bit of research suggests this is actually a not uncommon bit of metaphor in Japanese songs—I found at least five different ones that used it in lyrics, title or both!—personally, I was immediately reminded of Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans’ third intro, Rage of Dust, which uses the same term but with a wholly different emotional tenor, and one that I dearly wish the Heroes could have emulated the energy of.

The difference is that BNHA’s closer, itself titled Rokutousei, is about the sixth-magnitude star (or rather, the singer who is comparing themselves to it) searching for someone else, with an overarching tone of wistfulness, while IBO’s Rage of Dust is about said star screaming defiance and vowing not to flicker out and die quietly, shouting its existence and will in the face of a system that would as soon grind it into dust without even noticing. Rather than dust, become stardust, proclaims the song, carrying on the dreams of others. And that defiance, that refusal to let themselves be exploited by the more powerful figures around them, fits perfectly with the struggles of IBO’s main characters.

And like, okay, sure, Rokutousei having a tone of, “I’ll do it, I guess, I hope, I mean, at least I’ll try, even though there’s such a lot against me, so much so that I’m already feeling wistful about how likely I am to succeed, but at least trying is beautiful and meaningful, right?” is certainly on-brand for BNHA’s endgame and Deku’s failures in particular, but good lord is it ever an odd tone to intentionally strike.

The essential difference between these two sequences: Deku letting himself drift aimlessly, eyes closed, arms lax at his sides vs. Mikazuki stubbornly dragging himself through the dirt with his one good arm, gaze fixed and hand grasping for the giant robot that allows him to fight for his future.

O While I think he performs it perfectly well—indeed, my biased heart found his Yamero, yamero! pretty wrenching!—I still don’t like that Scarecrow is clearly being interpreted by the anime as an older man. There’s nothing about him that looks especially old, insomuch as we can tell from his physical appearance, and neither is there anything I recognize in his word choice that suggests he’s a crotchety old man, either. It's a taste call, mainly, but man, I just like it better when he and Spinner and Shouji are all young men with diverging views on their oppression.

O Finally, the sub I watched had a whopper of a different translation of one of Scarecrow’s lines. @codenamesazanka turned up the raws for me, and we found that while the anime very obviously got it wrong, the Viz translation, too, was pretty eyebrow-raising. It’s one of those localization moments that leaves with the, “Oh, Caleb Cook, I want to shake your fucking hand….with a joybuzzer,” feeling I periodically had to wrestle with back when I was still doing chapter posts.

The line in question is this one:

Note how blatantly horrible this is, so nakedly manipulative that it stops even being very effective manipulation because no one could possibly say, “Don’t stop to think!” in good faith? Well, that’s probably because the line wasn’t originally that bald-faced. Even Translator Sis, who normally more or less agrees with C.Cook’s choices (certainly compared to the fan scanlations!), had a real :grimace_emoji: moment and said it was the kind of translation that could only come from a place of bias against the character.

The Japanese line here is, “Yamero yamero reisei ni naru na!” which would more literally translate to, “Stop, stop! Don’t calm down!” The first bit is straightforward: a simple repetition of one word that (particularly as delivered quite well by Scarecrow’s voice actor!) really gets across his desperation and panic that the highly important mission he was spearheading is falling apart in front of him. It’s much more openly emotional and unchecked than Viz’s, “Enough nonsense!”

The bigger issues is the second part. Reisei ni naru is basically a verb construction about cooling off, calming down, collecting or recovering oneself when emotions are threatening to cloud one’s judgement—Scarecrow’s line is telling the mob to not do that. I can certainly see where Caleb was coming from—it’s still a very Bad Guy thing to say!—but there is a clear difference between telling people to not let their passion evaporate and telling them outright not to think.

It feels a bit like a response to a tone policing argument, Shouji begging the crowd to be calm and think rationally because this sort of display of anger isn’t helping. And Scarecrow frantically tells them not to collect themselves and be rational because what has that rationality ever offered them? What is it offering them now? It’s just a prelude to telling them to go back home and endure their pain some more.

In much the same way as the idea of light/shadow/illumination is being argued between Scarecrow and Shouji, similar ideas of emotional temperature are implicit in the kanji used in the characters’ word choices. Netsu, 熱, literally meaning “heat,” is the word Scarecrow uses for the emotions of the crowd, their fevered zeal and passion—Spinner uses the same word later in the chapter when reflecting about how he was swept up by passion and followed Shigaraki. Reisei, conversely, contains the kanji for “cold,” 冷.[2] It's not about thinking or not thinking; it's about ferver vs. composure, passion vs. presence of mind.

2: The same 冷 is the kanji used for Rei's name, incidentally.

Notably, the idea of thinking does come up in the chapter also, and it's very much not Scarecrow telling the crowd not to think. Rather, he exorts them/Pig Nose Guy to think of the mistreatment they've suffered, to think only of that; Pig Nose Guy uses the same verb (考える, kangaeru, meaning to think about, to contemplate, to reflect on) when he replies that he is thinking about it.

Caleb correctly communicates the idea of thinking in that exchange, so it actually reads a bit weird to have Scarecrow, over the course of two pages, go from telling PNG to think to telling him not to. It comes off as Scarecrow's rhetoric failing him so him just desperately flailing for whatever words he can find, even if they blatantly contradict what he literally just said. That instant, hypocritical contradiction is not there in Japanese because he's talking about two different things!

I'm happy to know this—“Don’t stop to think!” is one of the very worst lines in that whole stretch of chapters to me!—but I do wish I'd known it much sooner. I was so cynical about Horikoshi's writing of the erstwhile MLA by that point that it never even occured to me to check the Japanese! So thanks for that, I guess, wild mistranslation by the anime subbers! XD

And thanks as always @shockersalvage for the ask! Who knows when I would have realized, if ever, if you hadn't given me the anime update to go check!

#bnha #bnha anime #a tiny bit of #gundam ibo #bnha translation nitpicking #plf advisors #heteromorph discrimination plot #(not a lot about that specifically but that tag is where all my hospital riot talk is)#stillness has salt #stillness answers #shockersalvage

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