Japanese Translators Made a Subtle Change to 'Transformers' Kids' Cartoon That'll Have Leftists Fuming
In today’s world, progressive dogma seems to infect pretty much every entertainment product imaginable.
Video games, movies, comics — heck, even kids cartoons are parroting strange far-left talking points. Take “Transformers: EarthSpark,” for example.
The children’s show faced intense scrutiny in 2023 for giving one of its characters — the Transformer Nightshade — “they/them” pronouns.
In the children’s’ t.v. show “Transformers: Earthspark” Optimus Prime learns about being “non-binary” and using they/them pronouns.
Woke activists are flooding kids shows with gender and trans content so that “woke” gender ideology becomes the cultural air your children breath. pic.twitter.com/yoX4wAD7Gc
— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) May 11, 2023
Well, apparently the Japanese localizers responsible for dubbing the show for Japanese audiences found a solution to this problem — they simply removed the character’s “nonbinary pronouns” entirely.
As reported by comicbook.com, a bilingual fan posted a clip of the Japanese translation, revealing that “Nightshade’s gender has been completely removed.”
The outlet goes out of its way to try to explain away the creative decision as nothing more than a disconnect between languages, noting that “translating is hard” and that Japanese “does have some gendered pronouns, but they aren’t used in the same way English does.”
But then, after all that blustering, the site was forced to admit that the translation does seem to give Nightshade a male gender.
“Reportedly, Transformers: EarthSpark uses the pronoun ‘Boku’ when referring to Nightshade, and this pronoun is considered masculine traditionally,” the site reported.
In recent months, Japanese entertainment companies have shown little tolerance for Western woke-ism.
After it was revealed that American localizers were inserting political progressivism into translations of Japanese anime, several Japanese companies began replacing those localizers with artificial intelligence programs, according to Fox News.
On Dec. 21, the Japanese manga known as “The Ancient Magus’ Bride” announced it would be moving to AI translation.
Around the same time, Funimation — an anime streaming service — announced it would be introducing more AI localization as well.
Fans of Japanese art seem to be happy with the decision.
“Get your tiny liberal hands away from my fave animes,” one fan said in reaction to the news, per Fox News.
“It’s not even mistranslations: it’s blatantly changing it to something that wasn’t there in the first place,” another said.
Hollywood may have yet to turn its back on wokeness, but the rest of the world — Japan especially — appears to be moving on.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
