For the love of subs

Back when anime was a slight (ha!) obsession of mine, I came to be particularly fond of Yuu Yuu Hakusho. At first I fed my fascination with fanfiction, then the manga, available in French, and I awaited each new volume with bated breath. The anime, on the other hand, was a slippery little bastard. The anime club had up to episode 20 or so, then two tapes (eps 50-58, I think) later on in the series featuring Hiei and Kurama at the Ankoku Bujutsukai. I think I wore those two tapes out because: Kurama vs. Karasu. Rowr! Other than that, I managed to find a random bunch of fansubbed episodes online, but that was about it. Which is why when on a trip to Pacific Mall in Toronto in the summer of 2001, I bought Chinese bootlegged VCDs of the second half of the series, original Japanese dialogue with English -- and I use the term loosely -- subs. The image quality is so-so, with unfortunate digital cubist effects in places, but it was better than nothing, right? Besides, at the time I still held firmly to the belief that "This will never be commercially distributed in North America. Neither will Marmalade Boy. Neither will..." Ahem.

Surprisingly, I did not get home and spend three solid days in front of the television. In fact, until last week, I had only watched up to episode 75. But I'm trying to remedy that situation and this time, I'm taking notes! You see, I've come to the conclusion that the horrible quality of the subtitles is due to the fact that they were written by non-native speakers of English who translated a Chinese script without ever having watched the show itself. I'm reasonably certain about this, as evidenced by the fact that the subtitles randomly use the following "versions" of the characters's names: the original Japanese version*, the misspelled original Japanese version (Senisu instead of Sensui, Kurabara instead of Kuwabara, etc.), the Chinese version (Itsuki is Jiu/Jyu/Jyuu, Shizuru is Seiliu, Kuwabara is Washin -- sometimes) or a direct translation (Koenma is "King of Hell jr.", Genkai is "Master Spirit"). Oh, and Puu is sometimes Baby, sometimes Kid B (hommage to Radiohead? ^_^). And the one that may very well annoy me the most, which is something I've seen in North American commercial releases, the first name/last name issue. For example, most characters refer to Yuusuke as Yuusuke; others, most notably Kuwabara, call him Urameshi -- but the subtitles always say Yuusuke! Because the viewers are too dense to understand it's the same person, apparently.

Anyway. ( Want to read some funny subtitles? If anyone who still cares about this show hasn't gotten to the end of it yet, here be spoilers )

One other thing, is it just me, or didn't youko-Kurama have a man's voice during the tournament? Not that I have anything against Oogata Megumi, but it just seems weird for that sexy fox demon to have the voice of a soft-spoken teenager.

Once I'm done watching the series, I suppose I'll have to write an ode to why it's one of my all-time favourites and why Kurama is a total bad-ass and one of the coolest characters ever.

* Though they get even this wrong. Up until the last couple of episodes I watched, Hiei and Kurama's names were consistently substituted for each other. As in, every single time someone said "Hiei", the subtitles informed me they were in fact saying "Kurama", and vice versa. O_O