Hello,
/r/evangelion,
I'm a Netflix subscriber since the day 1 and I know this is not the first time they take a hugely popular show and make a (questionable) new adaptation. But this, ladies and gentlemen, is really over the top. We survived asshole politicians and economic crisis, but people are gonna riot for an anime adaptation. Fans are flooding Netflix Italy Facebook and Twitter pages with jokes, memes and insults and crying their grief all over the internets.
Little foreword: along with French and Spanish fellows we are the country that dubs the highest number of foreign media per year. If you consider the total number of speakers, Italy probably ranks #1 in the world for number of dubbed media per capita. We're also used to top tier quality, because of the long voice acting tradition, and even if we could probably watch The Simpsons, or Scrubs, or any anime with subtitles, we're used to hear Homer, or JD, or Shinji speak our own language. Which as you know is really cool (except when the adaptation or the acting suck).
So, here we go: we had a perfect adaptation with a top tier voice acting, but Netflix just changed everything for the future generations of streaming-only watchers. Not only the overall quality is lower (which is just incredible, if you think how much money Netflix can spend compared with the little distributors of the 90s), but they also entrusted the adaptation to a guy who is really well known for his choices of very archaic wording and weird translations. Which could work well in a middle ages-like fantasy world (Like Kiki Delivery Service, for instance). But the guy clearly can't do otherwise and Netflix didn't care enough to double check if he did a good job. Or, even worse, they checked and gladly endorsed this new
adaptation insult to the fans.
So, here's what we have now. I just wanna list 4 main things, but I swear they're enough:
• A post-apocalyptic futuristic world has now people who speak like late XIX century countrymen. This is the most difficult to explain, but trust me: it sucks. I looked throughout thousand of comments on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and forums with good faith and willing to find a single person who appreciates the new translation, but I simply couldn't.
• Angels are now called APOSTLES. Holy shit, WHY. Also, can you see the criminal intent here? Apostles were 12, Angels 17; you had one job. I know, the literal meaning of 使徒 (shitō) is apostle, but the international version curated by Anno himself has been very well established for over two decades so they are definitely Angels (Angeli in Italian). But apparently they didn't care.
• EVA Units are now called with ordinal numbers: even worse, numeral and noun are swapped, so no more Unit 01, now it's something that in English might sound like Unit First (again: WHY in the world you would choose something so degenerate).
• Names and surnames are now swapped. They do that way in Japan, I know, but what's the meaning of adaptation then? It just sounds weird if you call a person by their family name first in Italian.
I wanted to find some more examples (there are plenty), but those new dialogues are too painful to hear.
May the anime gods forgive Netflix for its sins.
EDIT some grammar hopefully fixed; better explanation of unit names
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