Green Blue Color Blindness: A Short Meta
Made on: 28 Sep 2023
Rating: General Audiences
Word Count: 528
Characters of Focus: Green (both), Blue (both)
Metadata: Meta, Commentary on Translation, mention of OriginalShipping (Not actually about OriginalShipping)
Warnings: None.
Summary: Blue or Green? Who is Who? A short meta on arguments for either side.
Beginning Authors Note: OriginalShipping is Red x Blue(m), for those unfamiliar with the ship name. It's mentioned offhandedly a couple of times.
Pokemon Special, or Pokemon Adventure, the main manga tie-in for the Pokemon series, is not unique in its translation mishaps, although its evident double title can certainly cue one into the translator's more Laissez Faire take on the source content. The main conundrum coming from this being: Who’s Green and who’s Blue?
Well, for the japanese version, Blue is the young tricker girl and Green is evidently Professor Oak’s grandson. However, in the English, and several other languages, version this is swapped. (Italian notably has both depending on which publisher the book is from for bonus confusion!) This decision was most likely due to the color blue being more associated with boys, although this is just a guess on my part.
So what do fans call which? Well, it boils down to personal preference, usually paired with a helping of whether the person in question read a fan translation or the official one, but there’s some arguments I’ve seen made for either one.
For Green(f) and Blue(m), there was a fan fiction I read about a decade or so ago detailing the author's personal preference for that because it matched the type match ups. Red (who doesn’t have any of this name confusion going on), is a color associated with fire and his starter is Bulbasaur, a grass type weak to fire. The logic goes for Green to be the gal with the water type and Blue to go to the boy with the fire type, so that all of the original trio have the type that’s weak against the type associated with their color. Makes sense, right? Otherwise Red and Green(m) would be the odd men out, with types that differ from the one that’s associated with their names. (Although this could just be bonus points for good old OriginalShipping!)
There’s also, of course, the eye color! Blue(f) has blue eyes, Green(m) has green eyes and Red(Red) has red eyes. They all match now!
However, to address the elephant (or Phanpy) in the room, obviously Green(m) and Blue(f) was the original intention of the writers. Particularly, there’s a moment in the manga directly calling attention to Green(m) and Red’s name in order to make a reference to FireRed and LeafGreen, which doesn’t make all that much sense in the official english translation! (More bonus points to OriginalShipping for this choice, I suppose.)
Certainly you can make the argument that Green (m) and Blue(f) is the capital r Right choice for these two! The original authors obviously intended for that to be their names, heck they even deliberately call attention to it! However, in making that argument a person is forgetting one key thing: Death of the Author.
Sure, that’s what was intended, but I’m writing fanfiction about these guys! Do you think I care about what the author intended? Do you think people who care about OriginalShipping getting bonus points care about what the authors think? Do you think anybody making transformative works would be stopped by what was “intended”?
Thus the conclusion, as always, is do whatever works best, or is the most fun, for you.
Ending Authors Note: (Sources: Bulbagarden.net, my own faulty memory (apologies for any errors, I’ve tried to keep them to a minimum, but I’m only human… (;;^_^) ))
Thanks for reading!! This is probably a pretty old and tired argument these days, but I was thinking about some arguments I've heard for and against it and wanted to compile some of them for those who haven't heard them yet!