Bleach and Demon Magic

Zillah

I've watched like... 70 episodes of this now. Love it. But one thing strikes me as a little strange. Does anyone who has seen more than me, or who speaks Japanese, or got better subtitles, have any idea what exactly they're doing when they use "Demon Magic"? They're aren't even any "demons" in the setting!

A friend of mine made the very amusing suggestion that maybe the Death Gods defeated all the Demons millenia ago, and now they're all enslaved and forced to power the magic

sharingan

This is a case where there is no direct translation and correlation between the japanese term and the english term.

The word they are translating is (probably) youkai, which is basically a supernatural entity, usually depicted as malevolent in anime but isn't necessarily so in folklore. Demon, a christian term really, is a good translation for the malevolent sort. In fansub convention its basically what is used ever since Inu Yasha. Or the fansubbers leave it alone in japanese.

But Death God isn't necessarily a good translation for shinigami which aren't 'divine', its just about the only thing that nearly fits.

monkeyfudge

Well on the fansubs that I watched they gave up on Death God about half way through the run of episodes and started using Shinigami... Really confused me for a while.

Zillah

So when they say "Demon Magic", they actually mean "Magic thingie magic"...

I want a more subtle primary language.


I never took the term "Death God" very seriously, I always assumed it was a clumsy translation of an infinately more elegant title.

EDIT: And confusingly enough, the closest thing to a Christian style "Demon" in the setting are the Hollows.

Crash

I actually had a tendency to blank out everytime i read "death god" and just substitute shinigami in my mind - much nicer

sharingan

Zillah wrote:

So when they say "Demon Magic", they actually mean "Magic thingie magic"...

Well they mean youkai magic. Its probably best to think of it in its japanese context rather than translate it when there is no english correlation.

The idea of there being lots of gods/spirits in the natural world is implicit in japanese folklore and religion. So these things are not necessarily as 'fantastic' to them as they appear to us. Hence why there is so much anime based on them - its fruitful story territory and the audience already has some basic familiarity with it.

Plenty of other examples of this - Kami-chu! is probably one of the best examples of it - I got a real chuckle when Yurie (the lead) met the God of old home video formats (now in retirement).

Makaveli

monkeyfudge wrote:

Well on the fansubs that I watched they gave up on Death God about half way through the run of episodes and started using Shinigami... Really confused me for a while.

Are you sure that wasn't just a swap from Lunar to Dattebayo subs?
DB don't translate the words for somethings such as reiatsu, which I think is spirit force, and zanpakto (sp) which is soul slayer iirc. They also leave it as shinigami. [Anime-Keep] used to call them Soul Reapers when they subbed it which I preferred to Death God tbh.

What annoys me about DB is the way they name people. Like those three characters

Nova, Claude and Lilin, which they have as Cloud and Rinrin.

Also,

they call bounts bounto and any name that was German (that fire doll Goethe, they had some weird spelling too)

. It's a bit annoying that Lunar dropped Bleach after the licensing considering how far ahead they were of anything that would be shown on tv in the States.

Zillah

I miss Lunar subs tbh.