(Pictured: One of the series' three recurring "standard speeches." I posted a video of this some while ago, but it was removed long ago, so the old post is half pointless. Other than the part where I explain what the heck "standard speech" means. EDIT: Hey, apparently it went back up. That's a pleasant surprise.)
I've been enjoying the show despite the fact that the subtitles took a nosedive after about ten episodes*, though I also must say that so far, I've been much less impressed with the writing than I was with J-Decker.
Admittedly, at least part of Might Gaine's problem is that when it gets silly, it gets really silly, to a degree that's a bit ludicrous. (Admittedly, J-Decker also gets really silly, but it happily wears it on its sleeve, whereas Might Gaine feels more like it's trying to be serious much of the time, and it really has a reputation for seriousness.)
Most of the show's silliness is linked to two specific villains, Shogun Mifune** and Catherine Vuitton. The following quote is a response to one of the latter's plots.
(Obviously, that's supposed to be "in order to attain your personal gains," or perhaps less oddly, "in order to achieve your personal gains," not "person gains." Whatever the heck that might mean.)
(Also, it should probably be "Nouvelle" Tokyo, as in "new" Tokyo, as opposed to "Nobel" Tokyo. The rest of it, though? Yeah, he just said "you turned [whatever] Tokyo into a city full of pumpkins, you sinner!" Probably has some oddities in the translation, but probably also still pretty close in spirit to the original meaning.)
Yes, she filled a city with pumpkins. Giant, hostile pumpkins that were crushing buildings. Never mind how she did it (there's no actual explanation), she did it because she wanted to build a pumpkin carriage because she had a dream about being Cinderella.
*Because the original subtitling group only did about ten episodes; after that, the subtitles have been not only bad but... really strange. Like, they get characters' names really wrong, and not even in a consistent or logical way. Current champ of bad names is translating "Ace no Joe" (which would be legitimately translated as "Joe of Ace" or less idiosyncratically as "Joe the Ace" or "Ace Joe") as "Driving King Kyo" and then suddenly changing it to "Wanyo" after a while.
Although a fairly close second is calling "Horn Bomber," a robot who is also a train and also also a Triceratops, first "Bull Express" and then "Cow Express."
**Shogun Mifune, since I didn't bring him up again, is a parodic Japanese patriot who wants to return the country to its pre-Western influenced social structure, with him as the boss. Aside from the fact that this means he uses lots and lots of ninjas, it seems from context that 1) he only superficially understands traditional Japanese culture (hinted at by the fact that both he and his minions are bad at reading and writing kanji in one episode), and 2) he may actually be an amusement park owner with delusions of grandeur (though I admit this is partly me reading between the lines, the park in question did in fact seem to be his organization's primary source of income). Despite these things, for the first half of the series he's treated as one of the relatively more formidable villains. Unlike Catherine Vuitton, who frankly can be pretty... bizarre and offensive at times (the pumpkin thing is one of her better plots), Shogun Mifune has a tendency to be funny while still being possible to take slightly seriously, so he's actually among my favorite villains from the series.
-Signing off.
No comments:
Post a Comment