Beam's Blog of Writing and Other Things.

So this evening I fished out my DVD for the Noir anime series and decided to watch a little bit of it. And since I had vaguely fond memories of the English dub from years past when I first watched the show, I decided to keep it in English because I really didn't see the harm in it.

Until I watched episode 19.

Now, for the unaware: Noir is an anime by Bee Train, the first of their Girls With Guns trilogy, which also features Madlax and El Cazador de La Bruja. I've watched El Caza and never had the chance to check out Madlax (SOON), but Noir has always been my favorite of the trilogy. The show is focused on a pair of assassins for hire: Mireille, whose parents were murdered by the Soldats when she was only a child, and Kirika, a Japanese school girl with amnesia and only an identification card to her name. The two are bound together by the common point of their goals, and agree to work together to solve the mystery of the Soldats, why Mireille's parents were killed, and Kirika's past.

I love Noir simply because it's an utter goldmine when it comes to rewatching it; thing I miss or didn't appreciate the first time I watched, I can pick back up and enjoy. And the character development and relationship development in Noir is very subtle, defined more by the small actions of the characters themselves than anything major, which is a thing I love.

Kirika's identification card and identity in general are important; hell, when she's on a mission she gets agitated upon discovering she's lost her card, as even if it isn't really who she is, it's all she has to prove that she exists at all. For much of the series, while Mireille certainly grows fond of Kirika, she never once calls her by name. Until episode 19.

I'm not going to spoil what happens in episode 18 for anyone who wishes to watch the show, but it's a major turning point in the relationship between Kirika and Mireille. And come the start of episode 19, there's a minor change: Mireille is calling Kirika by name, acknowledging her and becoming another person who believes she exists.

And it would be very heartwarming had the dub NOT CHANGED THOSE LINES ARGH.

I get it, it's small talk. It's chatter ("Oh, Kirika, I didn't know you were home"/"Kirika! That guy says he knows something about the book!", which becomes "Oh hey, I was wondering where you were"/"Are you there? This guy knows something about that book!"). But you know, even if it's a small thing, it's Mireille calling Kirika by name for the first time and doing it of her own free will, and actually seeming to get a minor kick out of it.

It's a small thing, but it annoys me. Noir is built on small, subtle character moments like that, and I feel like something is lost when the dub changes it.

Needless to say, I watched the rest of it Japanese with subtitles.