FAQ

• Do you have to be fluent in Japanese to do comparisons?
  • No, but it certainly is nice. Some of the contributors listen to the Japanese without subtitles and do their comparisons based on what they hear. Others who aren’t fluent use subtitles, usually created by other fans. Either method works, as the goal is to talk about the differences and to offer sarcastic critiques.

• If some of you don’t speak Japanese, how can you do comparisons? Do you really think your fansubs are accurate?
  • It really doesn’t matter if it’s Japanese, Spanish, Sign Language, or Arabic – translating and interpreting are not exact sciences. Sometimes it comes down to subjective interpretation of tone and inflection, sometimes there are homonyms and homophones that get in the way. There’s simply no perfect way to translate different languages word-for-word or sentence-for-sentence. We believe that those who make these fansubs are as passionate about the franchise as we are and do their best. We also believe they can make errors too (an episode of Frontier comes to mind when a fansub mistranslated a note and a visitor to the site offered a correction). If you disagree with an interpretation, comment or go on the forums! We’ll talk it out and discover the truth together. Or at minimum, we’ll discover a mystery that simply can’t be solved.

• Why do you hate the dub so much?
  • That “question” assumes a false premise, but I don’t hate you for it. We here at Digimon Uncensored do not hate the English dub of Digimon. Most of us grew up on it and it holds many fond memories. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect. That doesn’t mean the Japanese version is perfect either (and we do take the time to point out when we feel the dub did something better than the original). It means we like to poke fun at the dub for the silliness and a lot of the bad decisions made. Honestly, there are far worse dubs out there than Digimon’s. It’s a statement to how much we love this series (and yes, its dub, too) that we’ve spent so much time building and maintaining (and in many cases, rebuilding) this site.

• Whoa, hold on there. What do you mean “the dub did something better than the original”? The original is… the original!
  • Digimon is an entertainment franchise, the anime included. We’re not solely judging the dub based on how close it is to the original (though in many cases we are), but also with how entertaining it is. And sometimes the original version just isn’t that entertaining. If a scene comes across dry or weird in the original, and the dub’s version comes off as legitimately (or at least mostly) funny, or if the dub corrects a gaping plot hole the original had, then we’re going to give credit where credit is due.

• What’s with the constant editorializing? Can’t you list differences without the commentary?
  • No.
    
    Look, if you came here looking for a numbered, itemized list of differences between the English and Japanese versions of Digimon, you made a wrong turn at Folder Continent. Closest you’ll get is on each season’s Summary page. If such a no-nonsense site doesn’t exist then… sorry, but we’re not it. Best I can offer is to look for the bright green “Digimon Analyzer” boxes in each episode for the big changes.

• Do you guys compare toys, games, or other media?
  • We can! We haven’t. Aside from a few old comparisons, we don’t have anyone comparing the Japanese and English releases of virtual pets, Digivices, or games like Cyber Sleuth or Next Order. Doesn’t mean we couldn’t! Post up in the forums if that’s something you’d like to do!

• I saw an error you made in episode number…
  • Each comparison allows for comments, so you can post your corrections directly to the page. We’ll investigate, and if you turn out to be right, we’ll append the comparison and credit your username. We appreciate it, believe it or not.

• What’s with all the damned spam?!
  • We at Digimon Uncensored have been using our patented flamethrower to remove spam as quickly as we can but… even with all the tools at our disposal, it sometimes seeps through. We’ll report it to our spam filters as quickly as possible and try to remove it, just bear with us. If the option appears to allow you to report something as spam, please do so.

• This site has been a roller coaster for years. Sometimes it’s up, sometimes it’s down. What’s going on?
  • Digimon Uncensored has been around since the early 2000s. Sometimes things just happen that make it difficult to keep a site running. When Dario passed the site to Gear on May 5, 2010, he tried to update it to a more modern website (it still had quite the mid-2000s website sensibility about it).

• Okay, but that was years ago. You just–
  • Can I finish, please? Thank you. Trying to update the site proved to be a vexing task, if only because there was no way to automatically transfer the many, many long comparisons from one site to another. It was a massive time sink he simply never had the time for, and it started to languish. He attempted another revival in 2018, but he and the domain holder got into a fight that resulted in all of Gear’s websites being deleted. The files were backed up, however, and now the site is up and running again with a larger staff and more comparisons going up.

• What kinds of social media does Digimon Uncensored have?
  • The quickest and easiest way to connect with us is by commenting on posts or writing in the forums. You can also find us on Twitter under the handle @ohmygennai, or visit our Facebook page.