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In the original series, the _Egyptian gods_ remained as they were, and later
in the very same series a set of cards is called the _Nordic gods_ ; what
makes the _Earthbound Gods_ so different?


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2016-08-28T00:32:41.530
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2016-08-28T02:23:55.217
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question
yu-gi-oh censorship
Why, in the dub of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, were the Earthbound Gods renamed the Earthbound Immortals?


I don't really follow Yu-Gi-Oh anymore, but I think this can be explained on
purely linguistic grounds.

Leaving Obelisk (and "Slifer") aside for a moment, Ra and Osiris take as their
namesakes beings that we, in English, call gods. Ra is "an Egyptian god"
because he was worshipped by the Egyptian people, and the same is true of
Osiris. So we call their Yu-Gi-Oh counterparts "the Egyptian god cards".

Likewise, we conceptualize Loki, Odin, and Thor as "Norse gods" because they
were worshipped by pre-Christian North Germanic peoples, and so we call their
Yu-Gi-Oh counterparts "the Nordic god cards".

But do we call the figures drawn in the Nazca lines "gods"? No, we do not.
Perhaps the Nazca people who created them did worship them (though it's
difficult to tell, given that they produced no texts), but _we_ \- the target
audience - think of them as "just" a spider or a bird or a tree, not as
targets of worship. It would, in my opinion, be weird to use the word "god" to
describe the Yu-Gi-Oh versions of these Nazca figures. I suspect that whoever
made this translation decision followed a similar line of thought.

I hardly think this has anything to do with censorship. If they cared about
not offending monotheists, well, that boat sailed _long_ ago.

(It is perhaps worth noting that though the Japanese word 神 _kami_ is
typically translated as "god", there isn't a one-to-one equivalence here. The
English word is heavily colored by the Christian sense of capital-G God, while
the Japanese word is colored by indigenous worship practices that treat a
wider variety of entities as _kami_. Just because the Japanese name of the
Nazca figures is 地縛神 _jibakushin_ , that doesn't mean that the "correct"
translation of it must involve the word "god".)


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2016-08-28T02:10:31.433
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2016-08-28T02:23:55.217
2016-08-28T02:23:55.217
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