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same old ghost 🌿🪻

Look this is such a weeb circa 2009 thought, but I rewatched the first few episodes of Death Note recently and it's such a shame that the dub version misses the linguistic nuance of "boku wa" vs. "watashi wa" in the first episode's culmination of Light and L both saying "I am justice"

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2 прямых ответов · 9 сообщений

same old ghost 🌿🪻

I heard that and was like OH that's the core of the whole show!! It's English's fault, really

Ответ для same old ghost 🌿🪻
Cat Manning

I would like to hear the distinction!

Ответ для Cat Manning
same old ghost 🌿🪻

Completely from memory, but "boku wa" is how you'd say "I am" if you're a child or an older boy. "Watashi wa" is "I am" for older girls and adults. By middle school (which is when I took Japanese), I'm pretty sure the girls were already on "watashi" while the boys were still on "boku"

Ответ для same old ghost 🌿🪻
same old ghost 🌿🪻

So to hear Light say "boku wa [justice]" in contrast to L's "watashi wa [justice]," it felt like a v clear differentiation of their ideologies by relative maturity

Ответ для same old ghost 🌿🪻
same old ghost 🌿🪻

Which L realized IMMEDIATELY, like first deduction of the investigation (lmao)

Ответ для same old ghost 🌿🪻
same old ghost 🌿🪻

(And like. To be clear, "boku" / "watashi" is "I," not "am." The very word Light uses to refer to *himself as a person* is childish explicitly)

Jacob

I don’t have any real background in Japanese but I do very much remember when first getting into that how frequently subtitles and dubs out there didn’t match on potentially important thematic details.

Ответ для Jacob
same old ghost 🌿🪻

Same, my middle school Japanese didn't even hold water at the time, but translation is such an interesting and tricky territory. Sometimes languages just don't have corresponding words!

Ответ для same old ghost 🌿🪻
Jacob

I think the show is also in kind of a complex cultural space in that it is both clearly very rooted in its Japanese folkloric origins (shinigami tropes and all that) but also definitely internationally aimed with a lot of gestures to English and a larger Anglophone international environment.