(Which genre? It's up to you.)

I don't usually participate in pile-ons, but this one is relative to translation issues I've discussed previously in this space. A YouTuber and voiceover artist wrote a long Patreon post extensively trashing a recent anime release he helped localize. The licenser subsequently released a statement that they would not be working with him in the future, citing disappointment at his "lack of professional discretion."

Simple cause and effect at work, but the reason why the story's picked up steam, I think, is how utterly unhinged the author comes across in the blogpost, both in his rampaging ego and utter lack of self-awareness. I have never seen anyone shoot themselves in the foot so spectacularly. The very idiom seems painfully inadequate. He missed the foot and instead blew out his entire brain cavity.

• Outside of the ego on display, the blogpost is a superb argument for why this individual should not be writing anything, much less a dub script, where editing and time constraints are of paramount importance. It goes way too long for the little it says. His argument that the anime sucks consists of him just repeating that it sucks over and over, with the expansive vocabulary of Homer Simpson from that "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" segment. There are a few objections where he affords a degree of detail, but for the most part, he considers evidence beneath him - he's so self-evidently brilliant, after all, that any reasonable person would instantly agree with whatever he says! No one but someone completely blinded by their own narcissism could write this and believe it portrays their argument or themself in a good light.


• I've said it before, but: These people are always hell with whom to work. Their ideas are always terrible, and they insist that they are brilliant with unwarranted Dunning-Kruger confidence. They never get any better at their jobs, because they consider other people ants beneath their notice and therefore disregard any feedback. Their egos suck all the air out of the room. You cannot explain their suckitude to them, such is the magnitude of their suck. They actively detract from a project, and they are such hateful headaches with whom to deal personally - completely uncooperative, kneejerk dismissive, and profoundly ignorant of the most basic aspects of their jobs. And yet, like our Hemingway here, they can't stop bleating: "I'm so great and everyone else sucks! My genius is the sole saving grace of this project! You're so lucky I'm so spectacular and that I filled it up with me, me, me!" (Actual quote: "I am a romantic and love writing Actual Good Romance (tm) because nobody else on earth seems to know how to do it.")


• Incidentally: I've seen claims in forum discussions that the author was not, contrary to his credit-jumping, the head writer but that the "Marissa" mentioned was. I do not know if this is true but can completely believe this dude's rapacious ego and complete narcissistic disrespect for anyone who isn't him would lead him to steal credit from someone else.


• In a rare glimpse of self-awareness, the author admits that it's normally unprofessional to disparage a project on which you've worked and your coworkers by name immediately after said project's release, but he explains that he has what he believes to be a complete Get out of Jail Free card: he's an independent contractor, which oh, my God, you fucking idiot. (One: The vast majority of translation and localization-related work, game-related or otherwise, is done under independent contract. Nintendo's Treehouse and its stable of full-time employees, while one of the most visible faces of game translation, is an extreme exception, and even Nintendo uses independent contractors for some projects. Two: Even as an independent contractor, you will typically be under an NDA, which usually excludes disparaging the company or project by name for a set period of time. Three: Even if you're not under NDA, or your NDA does not have a non-disparagement clause, it is extremely inadvisable to advertise yourself to potential employers and coworkers as a toxic, narcissistic, backstabbing jackass without a shred of discretion or self-restraint when it comes to discussing your professional projects.)

The author does manage, despite himself, to let slip a few bits about the project that seem like genuine cause for concern - such as the oddly-offhand claim that the dub was localized and acted primarily through uncompensated work from professionals doing it piecemeal as a "favor." I have a lot of questions about this, but the info is coming from such a thoroughly unreliable source that I doubt anything is going to get usefully resolved without clarification from other quarters. Likewise, perhaps the heroine is indeed a complete sociopathic train wreck, but the author is such a demonstrably poor judge of appropriate human interaction that I'm going to need outside confirmation. (He's so emotional in ranting over and over about her, in a manner not commensurate to the misconduct of which he accuses her, that I have to think personal issues are involved to some degree.) The claimed treatment of the trans character is what gives me the most genuine pause: the show comes from the mid-2000s, a time when popular attitudes in the U.S. and Japan toward trans people were largely ignorant, but the "running joke" cited in the text sounds really...indigestible, let's say. I've seen discussion that the character was considered a historic stepping-stone in trans representation, but what was historic doesn't always sit well in the modern day. I'd have to watch the show itself and get more context to have a useful opinion, but I will say the author's discussion of how to handle material in this vein that would be considered inappropriate today is the closest he comes to acting as a professional, responsible localizer.

Outside of that, let me say this: As a translator, you're going to handle source material with which you don't get on perfectly. I have had projects where I actually kind of relieved I ended up for other reasons going on to something else, as I indeed didn't like the franchise. And if you feel really strongly that a project is irredeemable trash, you need to quit. (Even if it's only for self-preservation, to ensure that trash isn't associated with your good name!) Once you are committed to a project, though, I feel that being a translator or localizer imparts a duty of custodianship: to try to understand what those who like a piece of media see in it, and try to bring that out in your work. This guy is so full of himself that I can't imagine an attempt was even made in that department.

The guy needed to be fired, and I hope he doesn't work in localization for a long time. People like him plow projects into the ground, and I feel so sorry for whoever had to clean up after this chucklefuck.

Created: 16 February 2024

• translations
• translating

It's called Seeking Mavis Beacon (and that website is pretty great). Sadly predictable: "The model for Mavis is a very real Haitian immigrant named Renée L’Espérance, who was paid $500 for her likeness before falling off the grid."

Here's another review, from Engadget, that seems to embrace the film's vibe better than the Slant one I linked above. The articles claim the filmmakers are big on making themselves characters, and that seems to be true, but it also seems to be true of most of these documentaries following filmmakers as they unravel a real-life mystery, and few people had a problem when, say, the Toynbee tiles documentary guy did it.

Created: 13 February 2024

It seems, however, that while I wasn't looking, the world decided otherwise. I was watching a stream archive of a popular recent horror release. Eventually, it got to a plot point involving subject matter that was a bit too close to real-life horror for me (a parent having a very potent and realistic reaction to watching their small child die horribly), so I turned it off. The game had seemed close to the end, though, so I Googled to spoil myself on what was happening, and it turned out, "oh, it was all fairies." Which is just about the most unscary thing I can imagine, collective gamer flashbacks to hearing "hey, listen" 20,000 times notwithstanding.

I would think this revelation would be widely panned, particularly among an audience where those raised on SCP creepypastas enjoy disproportionate representation, but no. People seem to be taking it in stride.

It reminds me - to switch gears here - of a modern fantasy title written for a middle-aged female audience I ended up reading a few years back. The plot: Woman moves back to small Vermont town; discovers that she's a descendant of witches and that her neighbors are all supernatural creatures; is challenged by the local grown-up mean girl, who's secretly some sort of faerie queen. It seems - I did some research after being perplexed here - that the whole Big Bad Tinkerbell thing is not just a idiosyncracy of this particular author: fairies are the go-to villains in that subgenre. Their Sugar Plum appearance is not a secret front for more eldritch entities or more sinister powers. They're just...fairies, but bad. Like, individual fairies will announce their presence through signature hues of glowy multicolor glitter - which the author means to be sinister, and man, is that a miscalculation.

Now, I did some thinking, as one does in the wake of disconcerting revelations, and I ultimately concluded that, while nothing outside of glitter bombs is going to make glowy glitter scary, the whole fairy villain thing could be kind of understandable, in a skancewise way. The conflicts in these books frequently seem to be metaphors for clashes with the mean girls in town, and fairies, all fluttery and pretty and surface glamour, are the least-disruptive analogue for that cohort among the better-known fantastic creatures. (These books are not written for the curious, so only the most mainstream monster types need apply. You're not gonna get stuff like, say, the Huldra in here.) The thing is that we're supposed to be terrified of these fairies, of their powers and capabilities, viewing them not as twee, cutesy sprites, as these flitty little wee things, but as mighty, awesome creatures, and I'm sorry, I just can't make that transition. Yes, so far as they're beings with supernatural powers, they command vast destructive forces, but so does, say, erosion, and I don't see any horror movies on the premise of limestone weathering. Maybe they work with the modern fantasy target audience because of the mean girls thing, but I would think the gaming horror community would be made of slightly sterner stuff.

Then I thought of another possibly relevant media experience of mine, with the game Firewatch, about a man taking a job as a fire lookout after a long bout of caring for his dementia-stricken wife. Despite dealing with a couple plot points that resonated with me personally - taking care of a family member during a long illness and sorting oneself out afterward; working as a fire lookout, a job that's always intrigued me - I didn't finish it or get along with it. The breaking point came with was initially a special moment after the long hike through the beautifully-rendered interior on the way to your post: my first moment in the lookout tower, the wild expanse of nature that my character would inhabit for the next few months spread out for the first time in its full, panoramic glory before me. Aglow in the twilight, it was a glorious sight, the perfect capper to a beautiful hike. After taking in the scenery, I spotted a poster on the wall illustrating the local flora. What wildflowers could I discover in this region? Enchanted, I drew close to look - and, immediately, the moment was shattered by a screech from the radio: a fellow fire lookout who called to mock my character for his presumed mental problems (claiming that anyone who took a job in nature was obviously unstable and running away from something, signposting the game's attitude toward the great outdoors and those who love it). I was extremely irritated - and then I learned that I was expected to form a positive and loving relationship with this individual over the next few hours that would serve as the focus of the entire game. I dumped Firewatch soon afterward.

It wasn't news to me that my opinion of the title was at odds with conventional wisdom, as the game was highly-praised before I tried it out. But months later, happening across player discussions of the game on Giant Bomb, I discovered that most gamers had had an acutely opposite reaction to the particular moment that turned me off. Everyone else found the nasty radio call, name-calling and all, deeply comforting. They had all been frightened by the walk to the lookout tower - at being alone in the wilderness, a sensation the panorama atop the lookout tower only punctuated. The other lookout, no matter how abrasive or antisocial, was a comfort, a handhold, solely due to being another human presence.

So, given all the above, here's my question: are fairies viable figures of horror in gaming because they represent gamers' fear of nature?

I don't want to fall back on the stereotype of the gamer cocooned in gadgets, as averse to analog pursuits as Dracula is to sunlight. But the evidence ain't exactly pointing elsewhere.

---

Created: 06 February 2024

• analysis

With which game, though? The killer DS app Dawn of Sorrow? Curse of Darkness, starring a popular character from the show? The very first game in the chronology, Lament of Innocence, or the very first game, period? Well, friends, I marshalled my usual excellent priorities to tackle...the Game Boy titles. (Um, though I guess the neon green gives that away.)

I actually finished the first two previous Game Boy titles a couple years ago. I have more extensive notes somewhere, in some woebegone file, but what I remember is that I concluded Adventure was just too rough to matter and miserable to continue, and about Belmont's Revenge: a) it was solid; b) I liked the Mega Man gimmick with the themed castles, though I wished more were done with it and the levels were more extensive; c) I liked how Debussy's exacting "Passepied" was used to great effect as a final level theme, bringing Debussy to my attention as one of the few classical composers whose work doesn't (I'm sorry) bore me; and d) the final boss battle took more time than the entire rest of the game.

More recently (in a relative sense), I took advantage of the Halloween update to Switch Online to polish off Castlevania Legends. While I'm prepared to write a more complete article on this title, I note most of my opinions are reflected in this piece by the estimable VGJunk. My overall view is that it's really a nothing game. It has a number of original ideas, but it doesn't build on them, and very little comes of them. It's not a disgrace to the Castlevania name; it just is not remarkable in any way that you identify with Castlevania games. Which I suppose means that it is a disgrace? Not worthy of the name in a low-key manner, I suppose. Very, very soft disowning, though. It's one step above being a Castlevania game in the way, say, a Tiger game with the Castlevania license is. It has the aesthetic, but the guts and soul aren't fully there.

It doesn't know how to design smartly-hard encounters in the mien of Castlevania, so it settles for being persistently annoying. The respawn rate is wholly unreasonable - move a pixel, and defeated foes reappear. As VGJunk notes, it loves having enemies who home in above you, where you can't hit. And there's no escalation of difficulty; the game just keeps on being persistently annoying. As with the original Seiken Densetsu on this platform, there's big "just put a bunch of fuckin' blocks here" energy, where the developers want to expand their Game Boy title beyond the platform's typical scope but don't have the design chops to know how to do that.

The bosses, on the other hand, are generally cake. The is the easiest incarnation Death ever; he just jumps from side to side in an arc safely above you and chucks a scythe over your head occasionally. As for the "Owwww!" incarnation of Alucard, you can get the boy caught in a pattern like money.

The jumping is bad. Every jump is in the vein of the last stage of Castlevania Chronicles has to be with one of Sonia's feet off the surface. I died more to jumping over standard pits or onto ropes that anything else. This is why Belmonts shouldn't wear high-heeled boots. It's a good thing we never had to play Trevor when he went through his own high-heels phase. Wait, is he an extra mode in Curse of Darkness? ...Dammit.

The special abilities seem like patches for certain problems whose implications for the rest of the game the developers didn't wholly think through. OK, it's Stage 3; we want to make things harder now. Hold on, we made the enemies too annoying. Well, just give players a healing spell. Wait, isn't that unbalancing? Well, I dunno; just make fewer candles then, I guess. Sonia also has Burning Mode, a special meter you can activate once per life that makes her invincible and gives double damage, which I imagine would have broken the game near-completely if I had ever run into enough resistance to remember to use it. (I think I used it on Drac, though.) Why didn't you hand that down to your descendants, O Venerable Matriarch? I'm sure Juste would have been happy to exploit it, along with the rest of his 37 superpowers.

Again, it's not a bad few hours if you have Nintendo Switch Online. "It's not bad" is probably the most damning thing you can say about it, in the good and bad senses. The delights are found in smaller elements:

Created: 02 February 2024

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