In further proving that the Western anime industry cares more about huffing up their own ‘in-group image’ than actually doing their jobs properly, prominent public-facing Japanese-to-English localizer Katrina Leonoudakis has declared that, like many, she is unhappy with the recent revelation that a now-former Lovely Complex dub writer intentionally butchered the anime’s entire narrative for ideological reasons – but unlike the masses, her issue lies not with the blatant disrespect to the original work, but the fact that the entire situation has given validation to the many criticisms of “culture warrior weirdos” (i.e. regular anime fans).
As previously reported, following his publishing of a lengthy manifesto in which he bragged about how he “definitely hated” the series and went out of his way to alter its entire narrative – from changing character personalities to turning a feminine male into a transgender woman – Discotek fired Lovely Complex localizer Brendan ‘JelloApocalypse’ Blaber from their roster of in-house translators.
“Frankly, having the dub come out this good in the end is a little frustrating,” bragged Blaber in the Patreon post which led to his firing. “Anyone who watched this show as a kid and has fond memories of it and revisits the dub will think ‘Wow! It’s just as good as I remembered!’ No it isn’t. We made it good. This show SUCKED!!!”
However, rather than condemn Blaber for his absolute failure to properly do his job, Leonoudakis – who many may remember for either her work as a localization coordinator on the recent current gen ports of Atlus’ Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden or for proudly boasting about how she ran roughshod over HIDIVE’s English subtitles for My Life As Inukai-San’s Dog – instead chose to chastise him for giving ammo to the “culture war weirdos” who regularly chastise her industry’s ideological graffiti.
Taking to Twitter on February 12th to share her opinion on the matter, the localizer began, “Do I know it’s in my best interest to not say anything about this bulls–t? Yes. Is anything I write only going to be taken the wrong way by culture war weirdos? Obviously. So I’ll say this: You aren’t going to love everything you work on, but it’s your job to do justice to the work and its audience, and remain professional about it all.”
“And for f–k’s sake,” she added, “don’t s–t where you eat. You’ve hurt a lot of careers today.”
Further proving that she cared only about the realities of her industry being made public and not the fact that her peers, as a whole, have lost the plot when it comes to their jobs, Leonoudakis then lamented, “Every time you give the culture war weirdos fuel, you make things worse for the people they harass.”
“Not only are you out of a job,” said the localizer, “but you’ve given them a brand new reason to send us death threats.”
“It’s so tiring, man,” she continued. “I just want to share my passion for translation theory and localization philosophy. Instead, I’ve got to stay quiet, pretend nothing affects me or that I don’t care. Don’t fight back. Don’t look. Just smile and take it.”
“But then someone has to fire back at them,” Leonoudakis then declared. “Someone has to get the last word. Someone has to prove to them they’re wrong. And they all get new fodder to harass us ALL again. I grew up on 4chan. I watched them milk ‘lolcows’. I know how this s–t works.”
“And now THIS? REALLY???,” she continued in her protestations. “You know they’re still using that single scene from the Dragon Maid dub nearly a decade later as a reason why we should all be lynched, right? What do you think they’re going to do with this, idiot?”
Finally bringing her thread to a close, Leonoudakis concluded, “Anyways, I’m sure they’ll be here shortly to tell me why I deserve to get hate or slurs or death threats because (checks Fox News ‘article’) I translated ‘gyaru’ as ‘bimbo.”
“Remember, loc comrades, they don’t give a shit about translation,” she then disingenuously claimed. “They just want to be mad at the ‘libs’.”
