Values Dissonance around the World.

So this is an idea I had in mind for some time.

For some reason, Values Dissonance is one of my favourite pages, although most of the examples deal with temporal dissonance, thinks that used to be different. But for some reason I find the geographical dissonance more interesting.

So this would be for tropers to bring up some attitudes we might find on media, likely foreign, and how it contrast with our own experience and/or culture. From some important and deep ideas, to very minor things.

Something I find very curious is how coffee is shown in some shows. Kids are not supposed to drink coffee, they shouldn't be given any, they aren't even allowed to buy it, and when anyone under 15 is shown drinking coffee, they obviously don't like it.

Yet, in my country, (Guatemala) while coffee is not something you want to give kids all the time, is not something that would be looked in such a bad way. Kids can have their own little cup so they can soak some bread in it. Something very minor, but I always find it very weird when I see such attitude on US media.

Someone else has noticed something like that?

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic had a similar situation happen with cider. According to the Bowdlerise.Western Animation page, Italy, Spanish, and Latin America either cut out scenes and episodes heavily featuring cider or edited them to be about apple juice instead. This is because it's the norm in many countries for cider to be alcoholic. However, in the U.S., we treat cider as non-alcoholic by default and refer to the alcoholic variety as "hard cider" (according to the other wiki).

Then again, it doesn't help that the show has a character act practically addicted to the allegedly non-alcoholic cider...

In Persona 4, Major recurring character Nanako Dojima, a 7 year old girl, is shown to love the coffee her dad makes as long as there's sugar and cream in it.

While probably not the norm in Japan, its still rather weird to most North American audiences.

Isn't that Separated by a Common Language rather than Values Dissonance? The difference is what the word means, not the appropriateness of giving children alcohol.

Obviously the ubiquitous of guns in America vs. their near absence in the public's hands in other countries.

For a time, Never Say "Die" was straight up Averted for the Latin American dubs of various animes and series aimed at children, if not added by the dub in some cases; I'm not sure if that is the case anymore or not.

Not really, today some things tend to be Bowdlerised more, including death.

Also Values Dissonance within the US. Not really a lot of gun culture in much of the urban Northeast, for instance.

Sometimes even in state. I know gun culture in Michigan (as well as hunting/outdoorsman) culture is far more prevalent in the mid-lower peninsula to the UP than in say Ferndale, Dearborn, Ann Arbor, or Royal Oak.

Edited by MarkVonLewis on Aug 13th 2020 at 3:06:49 PM

At least I'm aware that the 90s and the first decade of the 2000 went uncensored in that aspect.

Same thing happened with dubs here in Brazil, at least of anime.

Dunno how it works today, haven't watched a dub in years.

It depend, a lot of thing were censor, one of the most glaring case was salior nepture and jupiter, the dub said they were cousins...without removing their interactions that were clearly very close in nature.

So they move for gay relationship for a gay incestial relationship.

thanks censorship, one step back for LTGB, one step forward for stright man degeneracy.

Two things the Brazilian dub was (and still is, I think) notable for is for both saying "die/kill" pretty liberally (the Brazilian dub of Anastasia famously has Rasputin scream literal bloody murder liberally, with the BR version replacing the final "SHE'LL BE MINE!" scream with "I'LL KIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILL!") and with lacking the G-word taboo of Americans (the whole "Gosh" thing, resulting in a lot of BR cartoon dubs having characters fairly openly refer to God, Jesus and the like).

Raziel: It was pretty funny, I think we also sometimes got the original versions without toning down the blood, right?

Far as anime goes, I think it depends primarily from where we got the rights from.

For exemple, very little was censored from Dragon Ball or Saint Seiya (besides the name, and Os Cavaleiros do Zodíaco/Knights of the Zodiac is cooler anyway) because the originsl footage was brought over from Japan.

Meanwhile, we dubbed One Piece over the 4Kids version and, well, I'm sure you know how that song-and-dance goes.

Inuyasha and the first four seasons of Digimon are pretty glaring examples of that, the only thing the dubs did was to change some names while keeping the spirit of the meaning or use voices that were more in tune with the age of the characters.

It's interesting that with regards to anime, the US seems to be the one with the most values dissonance. Europe and South America are more aligned with Japanese values than American ones, despite less direct cultural connections.

European TV vs American TV.

In American TV having anyone show any amount of skin on live TV is considered verboten, in part due to the shrieking moral guardians. Yet for some odd reason violence is considered okay right and even good in some circumstances so long as it doesn't go against the rating of the product.

In European TV...well, one of the shows I had in mind when making this post was a British reality tv show called "Bromans" where the men are stripped naked outright and no effort is made of concealing their sex organs. And with that there's also an opposite view on violence, a much more stringent view on it than in the US.

Yeah the dubs down here mostly depends on what version they get. I think we got basically all the 4Kids versions of the respective animes as the base for dubs except for Shaman King, while some other series like Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Saint Seiya, Cardcaptor Sakura, etc were either based on the japanese or another localization that didn't censor much if anything. It seemed like it was mostly a matter of convenience rather than any concerns of violence or anything like that.

I do believe we are at least somewhat accustomed enough to violence that dubs and editors don’t really see the problem with blood or death.

Note that Shaman King was the dub 4kids tried going easy on.

And when I was visiting the UK, I once saw a commercial on late-night TV that said the word "penis." I don't think America would allow that.

I think you're probably overestimating American censorship on that one. Especially if it was late at night.

Well, I don't watch much late-night TV.

To my understanding, with anime censorship, some countries run into an issue of Animation Age Ghetto actually working against censorship: Basically, the assumption that it's children's entertainment is so strong they don't even think to censor it. For example, there are some animated films that got a kid-friendly rating despite obviously not being kid-friendly, because they're animated.

To be fair most anime is meant to be watched by younger audiences, there are just different ideas of what is acceptable for children to watch.