Hello, my name is Julienne, and I'm an addict. I've been clean for about 14 hours, but that won't last.

Anime is one of my favorite passtimes; I even have "Anime Expenditures" as a primary category of my budget. Amazon loves me because I'm constantly ordering box sets of my favorite series. Currently I've been ordering and going through the Sailor Moon series (Japanese version, of course) and my next marathon will be of the Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure series. I occasionally watch television, but only when it's Anime or standup comedy.

I was struck recently by how awful Americanized anime is compared to the original Japanese versions. Not only is the dialog hideous (though it's gotten better. It's very noticeable with Sailor Moon because it was an early convert to English), any time song lyrics are translated it makes me grind my teeth. I won't even get into how the subtitles seem to choose words at random rather than translate the meaning. This is a problem even now, but nobody notices because they don't understand Japanese. This is fortunate for companies that do translation, but unfortunate for us few who can actually understand what's being said and recognize that it's completely different from the English subtitles.

The of course there's the issue of gratuitous editing. Apparently I'm the only one in this country that WANTS uncut, unedited anime direct from Japan. Of course, Americans are sensitive weenies with weak constitutions, so the only way to get raw anime is by ordering it from Japan or hoping that subtitled versions don't make annoying changes. Hell, that's the reason I learned Japanese in the first place, so I could watch the Japanese versions and actually know what's going on.

And am I the only one who finds English seiyuu annoying? Oh well, I can get around that by reading manga. :-D

*This random topic brought to you by Root Beer and Fuji apples*