Favorite Sega Character: Losers Bracket Round 4

OKAY, somebody in the comments called Teddie a "perv" again and NO NO NONONONONO I can't believe how much damage localization crunch has done to the perception of this character in the west. Teddie is CHILD. He's mentally no older the Nanako. He acts like that because he is lonely and wants attention by being mildly annoying and kinda funny, not because he's a predator! Vote Teddie to spread the truth. I love Koromaru, but I am sure best doggo would not stand for this slander of his bossom buddy.

It's not your fault, it's kinda a result of how the game was localized way back in the 00s... There used to be an article about it on the internet (the site has since closed down unfortunately), but the localization team for Persona 4 went on the record stating they were heavily crunched when translating the game, being given basically only 1-2 months for the entire job (which is insane for a game of that length), and while a majority of the translation came out amazingly well for those circumstances, Teddie, who had to be localized last due to executive meddling regarding his name and gimmicks, did suffer immensely from the crunch.

To make matters worse, for some ungodly reasons every localization team on Persona since then has decided to stay CONSISTENT with those localization errors and actively butcher Teddie's character for that purpose alone, and I honestly am baffled by the insane ripple effect this has had.

The damage done to his character was 3-fold:

1.) Miscasting

In Japanese, Teddie is voiced by Kappei Yamaguchi, a character actor known for his amazingly consistent falsetto, among other things. He was probably cast for his prior performance as Flappy in PreCure Splash Star and uses the exact same voice as for Flappy to voice Teddie. Accordingly, in Japanese Teddie sounds like a *creature*, not a person, a childlike, alien being that could never be mistaken for a regular person, voice-wise.

Meanwhile in English, Teddie has been consistently (mis)cast and misdirected with voices that sound like adult men doing an annoying falsetto that doesn't make them sound any younger. The voice actors themselves are incredibly talented, but they are completely the wrong match for the role and ruin the impression the character is supposed to give off, making him go from "cute but annoying and misguided" to "pest".

Well now I feel robbed wtf

People always told me he was just childish and didn’t understand what he was saying but I had trouble believing it. Also if he had blatantly said “guys you’re supposed to get creeped out cmon” in English too I might’ve actually understood (hell, I myself love annoying people for laughs)

From this it really sounds like he’s one of the most butchered characters I’ve heard of. Im tempted to feel bad for not knowing but tbh I can’t read/speak Japanese so I pretty much had no way of knowing he was mistranslated like this lol

EDIT: WAIT THAT ALSO EXPLAINS WHY HE KEEPS HITTING ON NANAKO

For one he has no idea what flirting is and just says things the teens around him say, and along with that it sounds like he’s basically meant to be her age

Yeahhh, pretty much, lol.

I was in the middle of learning Japanese when I first played P4 some 10 years ago, so I had more contact to the Japanese version than the English version right from the get go. It took me a while to realize just how much damage the localization crunch had actually done to Teddie, because in the Japanese fanbase he's actually fairly popular as a symbol of the "cute" side of the franchise. His Japanese character profiles always emphasize his loneliness and neediness too.

BTW, a lot of the genuinely creepy stuff Teddie does is kiiinda Yosuke's fault. (Sorry, Yosuke, I love you, but you suck at raising this child). Note how Teddie never mentions anything like swimsuits or nurses or anything genuinely sexual aside from the "scoring" joke (which I explained above) for the entire time, right up until he first leaves the TV World. Then... he moves in with Yosuke.

To drive the point home, Arena shows us what Yosuke's room looks like, and wouldn't you know: Posters of happy, smiling idols in swimsuits on the walls. Stacks of playboy magazines everywhere. Golden even added a scene where Yosuke gets mad at Teddie for bringing his (Yosuke's) playboy magazines down to the Hanamura family breakfast table with him and loudly asking Yosuke about them in front of his parents, at which point Chie even points out its Yosuke's fault for keeping stuff like this in his room when Teddie lives there too.

Yosuke is kinda Teddie's big brother figure in the same way as Yu is Nanako's, and while Yu is nothing but a good influence on Nanako, Yosuke is... Not someone you want a little kid to use as a role model. Which is unfortunately exactly what happened-

On the plus side, the same picture of Yosuke's room also shows that next to Teddie's bed there is a stack of what looks like Ribon magazines (a shoujo Manga magazine for grade and middle school girls). So at least when Teddie spends his own money on literature it's far more age appropriate.

It is what it is

It’s Media

HAPPY 413 time for my yearly tradition of being too lazy to think of an Epic Composition and instead doing a silly crossover pic instead

bonus labru doodle under cut:

I was born hungry

trying to describe black sails to people is my personal sisyphean task. “it’s a pirate show” bad. “it’s functionally a prequel to treasure island but also it’s not at all” bad again, and also confusing. “it’s about pirates trying to destroy western civilization” mostly only true of the second half of the show and also doesn’t fully capture what i love about it. “it’s a pirate show about the power of stories, how civilization uses shame to keep people in line and turns them into monsters, and the power of queer rage. it’s got some of the best acting, writing, everything of any show i’ve ever seen.” the most accurate, but way too long and makes me sound pretentious and insane. send help i just want to talk about my favorite show.

STAR.SUN.MOON

i KNOW i’ve said it before but the delivery of “well what the FUCK did you think was gonna happen” sends me EVERY time

CHARACTER DOOODLZ 🏴‍☠️ 🌴 ❤️❤️❤️

Persuasion Check of all time

hey who has a screenshot of that toby stephens tweet about his earring. you know the one,, it contains the words "an old hole, still open, from my youth." i need it for science purposes

black sails elysium

YOU- "We must unite under our own king."

BILLY- "We have no kings here." He is looking at you with unease. The fact that Richard Guthrie is lying in this boat and bleeding out unsettles him, more than he'd say in words.

PERCEPTION [Challenging: Success]- No, it's not the sight of Richard Guthrie that unsettles him. It is the sight of you.

AUTHORITY [Trivial: Success] - What does he know? Remind him who you are!

SUGGESTION [Easy: Success] - He is a smart man. Surely he understands what is at stake here. You can reason with him.

AUTHORITY [Heroic: Failure]- Time to remind him of how Great the Cause is and who runs the damn show here.

YOU - Wait a second, won't that make me sound like a delusional megalomaniac?

AUTHORITY - Oh, is there anyone more qualified around? What is this, a tea party? Come on, have some backbone!

YOU - "I am your king."

BILLY - He is looking at you in disbelief.

SUGGESTION - Maybe you shouldn't have said that.

AUTHORITY - Maybe you should say it again.

Black Sails (2014-2017) is the prequel to Muppet Treasure Island (1996) to me btw.

2 years on T / 20 years on T

[ID: 1. Luke Arnold as Black Sails’ young John Silver in a plain white shirt. 2. Tim Curry as Muppet Treasure Island’s Long John Silver, in fancy pirate hat and coat, with a lobster muppet on his shoulder.

END ID]

[image ID: A Twitter reply from @LongLukeArnold on Jul 28, 2020:

‘Evolving into Tim Curry’ is my birthday wish every year]

In discussions about the finale of Black Sails, one of the things I often see is folks hard-focusing on Flint's fate, in an either-or binary fashion, usually presented as "Which do you believe-- that Silver killed him? or sent him to the plantation?"

Now, for posterity's sake, gonna mention a few things-- first off, that's simply not thinking broadly enough. There are farrrr more than two options here and I've come up with my share of the reallyyyyy bad ones for sure. Whatever your mind chooses, none of those are happy endings anyway, there are bittersweet, bad, and worse endings all the way down. (They are paused, they are in a time loop, and also all endings and no endings are happening simultaneously)

But also, the more cogent point is that, it doesn't actually matter what happened *to Flint* The story is... not actually about him at that point. We have transitioned from Flint as protag to Silver as protag, setting up for (the fanfiction that Black Sails has ended up making of, ugh, king shit) Treasure Island.

And so, I just, don't find it to be of particular interest exploring what we think Flint is actually doing or if he's alive for real. What is EXTREMELY interesting to explore though is how Silver's speech at the end to Madi is sort of giving Thomas back to Flint as a pacifier/comfort object, but how... Silver is giving Flint that thing in his own mind as his own type of pacifier/comfort object.

That's the REALLY chewy bit. What actually happens to Flint is not the purpose of that scene for me, of Silver's recounting of events to Madi. It's more about... projection. It's about how Silver is dealing with whatever happened to Flint/whatever he did.

And I just feel like it's missing the point to focus so hard on if Flint is alive or not.

He is the ghost of the story regardless, that's what's important. He's going to haunt the narrative for the rest of everyone's lives. No one has been untouched or unscarred by coming into contact with Captain Flint; he has a forever legacy. I'm not the first to call him this, but he's Schrödinger's Flint and he's staying that way.

But this?

This is the speech of a man who is self-soothing, who is spinning himself a tale, who is projecting, who is coping.

and THAT is just, way chewier, innit?

you watch black sails, it rewires your brain, and then what. what now. every queer abalysis of media sounds superficial. I want - I need, sometimes - to compare movies and TV shows to black sails so I can make a point, but I can't, because like, five people have watched it. And now what. I try explaining the monster metaphor and how minorities shouldn't conform, but no one gets it. so I just sound like I'm being insane. Which I am, but it has a point and a rationale. And then some media comes out and everyone treats it like it's revolutionary in how it portrays queernes but you've seen it before and you've seen it done better, more carefully, more genuinely, but you can't say anything lest the fans of this new media accuse you of being a prejudiced asshole. And maybe you are. Maybe you're expecting too much of media that should just be allowed go exist as it is. But if that media is putting itself forward as some kind of metaphor for how queer people are treated in society, and it comes to a certain conclusion, and you're queer, aren't you allowed to disagree with that conclusion? Aren't you allowed to think it's shallow at best and homophobic at worse? So you just watch black sails and go insane. and let the cycle repeat over and over. and it's still just you and those five people.

black sails syphilis spread chart