(no subject)

[yvannairie]

Played up to where you can get in Iron Kingdom on the first visit, and up to the second movement upgrade of Kaanul, which puts me squarely out of the very, very long prologue to the main game. It bums me out that Qadira's plot will have to wait but I'm already quite impressed with the sheer variety of the areas so far.

I'm tired out on gaming for tonight, so I'm getting started on Oban Star-Racers and there's been at least one moment of "oh! Oh, this is gonna be good :D" visuals, even if the dub is. Hm. I don't exatly dislike it, but it doesn't impress me yet.

Comments

[rhodanum]

Hear that sound? That's the sound of me vibrating at high frequency in the background. :D

And hah, here's a funny thing. Neither the ENG or the FR audio-tracks are dubs. They're both the original audio for the show (got recorded near-simultaneously, with the director/producer/showrunner guy overseeing both, flying between Paris and Toronto to do so. Even the scripts in both languages were written directly by him). It's actually the Japanese audio (and the other languages after) that's the dub, since it was recorded over six months after the show's Western premiere and didn't have the showrunner's direct input.

Out of all three versions of the show I've watched (ENG, FR, JPN), I'd say that the English cast ends up being the best, when all is said and done. All three are good, but the two key players (Eva and Don) are exceptional in how their ENG VAs handle them and their changes across the series (and I've only just now realized that their voices change in opposite directions -- Eva's VA plays her harsher and darker the more the series goes on and the more she has to deal with the brutality of the race. Meanwhile, Don's VA softens his tone and makes him express far more than just anger and disdain, as time goes on).

[yvannairie]

(Your enthusiasm is 75% of the reason I forced myself to get started this weekend :D)

Haha, I had assumed the French one was the original one, like with Wakfu :D I honestly don't have anything bad to say about the dub, and I definitely enjoy Eva's performance way more once she gets to start shouting (plus her vocalisations during racing are very well done, which is super rare), it's more just... I'm not a native English speaker, right? So very... performed English, like voiceover in animation, falls into a bit of an auditory uncanny valley for me. I have this problem with a ton of English dubs for animesque shows, Oban isn't unique in that regard.

[rhodanum]

Haha, Eva is a ton of fun once she gets to start putting those vocal-cords to use! She and her father basically trying to out-shout each other through the audio transmission system is one of the most fun parts of the early series, along with the fact that they seem uniquely suited to stomping on each other's metaphorical tails at every turn. It's really something, listening to them both in the last third of the series and realizing how _different_ they sound, as compared to the start.

I've found that I've got the opposite problem -- very performed English is fine, but obviously flat and phoned-in one makes me want to run for the hills. This is also the reason why I end up disliking 95% of Romanian dubs, they very rarely have the necessary care and attention put into them.

[yvannairie]

Man, Finnish dubs from when I was a kid are still super good but the Finnish dub scene has been going downhill since... maybe the 2010s anywhere that isn't throwing around Disney money :( I'd watch way more Finnish dubs but a lot of times they're just soooooo lifeless.

Eva's performance in races, both the vocal and the animated, has been the best part of this show so far, honestly. God, I love her, she's just filled to the brim with rage and it's great.

[rhodanum]

"she's just filled to the brim with rage"

Ohoooo, wait until you hit episode 11, you haven't seen anything yet!

A very funny thing with Eva is that a lot of people underestimate her, both in-universe and out of it. A lot of new viewers approach her as Your Standard Shounen Protagonist. Sure, hot-headed, rather angry, prone to outbursts of temper, but nothing darker than that, right? Nothing worse than that, right?

And then episode 11 arrives like a freight-train and shows exactly what all that rage and hurt and trauma results in, once she's given a target she believes is foremost responsible for the destruction of her family.

[yvannairie]

YEAH EPISODE 11 WAS PRETTY WILD NGL she was 110% down to Do Some Murder, no matter how disqualified it would get them. One of her flaws is just a profound lack of foresight and being led by her emotions and only realising it when people start pointing out her behaviour is quite literally taking her off-track. Racing as a metaphor living with the highs and lows of emotions really works for these characters.

[rhodanum]

It goes even darker than Down to Do Some Murder. She was fully willing to kill both herself and Jordan (who was stuck in the star-racer with her) just to be able to destroy Spirit and obtain vengeance. She outright states "I did what I had to do" at the sight of the wrecked ship lying in pieces all around her (without even knowing if Jordan is gravely injured or not) before passing out due to the physical trauma. That is honestly amazing from a characterization point of view, you rather rarely get female heroines (and young ones, at that) who are allowed to go to this depth of selfishness and viciousness.

This is one of the many reasons I love the two Weis so much, they're both very flawed people, in a raw and believable way, struggling through their circumstances, in a way that hurts both themselves and those around them.

[yvannairie]

Oh man that's a good point. I guess I sort of assumed that since the shooter's pod is separate, Jordan would likely be just fine after a crash, but it makes more sense that Eva just did not think about Jordan's presence at all, she was that fixated on getting her vengeance. That episode is a tad confusing because Spirit both crashes the Whizzing Arrow but apparently for the purpose of giving Eva's closure out of a sense of sympathy? So I haven't made up all my minds about it and will probably need to rewatch it first before I can.

[rhodanum]

Spirit is complicated. The most simple and succinct way to describe them (I'm very fond of the headcanon of the Phils being agender) is "Good Is Not Nice." They will attempt to save the life of an opponent or will work to give another opponent closure, but won't hesitate to answer force with force, without going to lethal extremes. As we saw -- Eva, after all, was making all effort to kill them, for a reason initially unknown to Spirit, so Spirit very likely concluded that the best course of action was to neutralize her as a threat by destroying her racing vehicle, but making sure that both she and her gunner made it out alive.

We also saw Spirit not hesitating to injure G'Dar, Aikka's mount, to win a race. In episode 21, Don describes Spirit as having "the reputation of a very aggressive pilot" and we see in flashbacks that, in the rounds preceding the race with Maya, Spirit made another one of their opponents crash and wreck their star-racers -- though, once again, the opponent survived. The image is that of a very pragmatic and complex individual, who will race aggressively and will not hesitate to remove rival racers' ability to win, but will also go out of their way to try and save an opponent or figure out why another one wanted to murder them and give them solace.

[yvannairie]

Ooooh interesting. That also puts a bit on why Spirit would find giving Eva closure also cathartic themselves -- because not hurting people while being forceful with them is hard, and requires even more skill than hurting them does in the majority of cases. Maya's death could have also been traumatic for Spirit, except Maya went out of her way to go "don't mind, go win, good race" as her last deed, acknowledging that Spirit's principles, while inscrutable, were real and admirable to her.

(Like... that moment alone speaks to what kind of a person Maya was, I feel. She was gonna die, better let the other guy know they should prize their victory in her stead.)

(Also how could the Phils not be genderless with a design like that? x'3c Spirit is wonderfully inscrutable and inventive in design. Good spooky racing ghost.)

[rhodanum]

(Like... that moment alone speaks to what kind of a person Maya was, I feel. She was gonna die, better let the other guy know they should prize their victory in her stead.)

It very much does! We see so little of Maya (tallied up, I don't think she has more than 25 minutes of on-screen time in the entire show, with most of those being in the flashbacks during episodes 11, 18 and 21) and yet, even in those small glimpses we get of her, she's a remarkably well-developed character and we can get a relatively decent reading of her.

This reminds me of a peculiar trend in fandom, of almost always writing her as a sort of simplified 'Eva 2.0' in pre-canon works (usually by giving her a sharp, fearsome temper, like that of her daughter). I never say anything, because I don't want to be That "stop having fun!" Person, but that's never the reading I got of her. She always struck me as a very calm, balanced person, with a warm and playful inclination. That volcanic, mercurial temper Eva sports? Along with being compoinded by her various issues, that comes from her father, not her mother.

[yvannairie]

If Maya has that rage we see in Eva at times, it definitely only comes out in how she, like all star-racer pilots, is an adrenaline hound with quite a cavalier attitude towards her own safety :D But yeah, it's absolutely clear to me that Eva's temperament is a part of her maladjustment and trauma, because it's so consistently retaliatory. You always know why she's angry, you always know why she's yelling, and you always know when she wants to fucking deck you, and whether you think you deserve it depends entirely on to what degree you agree with what the situation actually is.

That's not Maya at all! She's got the same potential, but like Rick, it's honed to a fine point -- and because she's confident, secure and successful, she can keep that thing sheathed when she's anywhere that isn't the track.