OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)The captured Negator is revealed to be a boy named Chikara, who possesses the ability Unmove and was kidnapped the day after all languages were changed to English. Rip and his crew arrive and try to kill the kid, but Andy and Fuuko make it in time to save him. Rip throws a knife that injures Fuuko, who jumps in front of it to save Chikara. More guards show up, shooting a wave of bullets at them, but Chikara uses his ability to stop all of the bullets at once.OUR TAKEWe’ve now made it to the halfway point of the season and are waist deep in this current arc! This episode is pretty much just to introduce the character of Chikara, who is both a victim of human/Negator trafficking AND of that “reward” the Roundtable got to change all languages of non-negators to English. As mentioned last episode, it’s basically made every Negator stick out like a sore thumb and become much easier to kidnap, which Fuuko clearly doesn’t like, so what exactly was the benefit of this? Well, maybe we’ll see if this was actually part of a long game down the line, but we also need to discuss how the episode, specifically the dub of it I watched, handled this change. Because this was made for an English-speaking audience, naturally every character already speaks like they normally speak English. For other shows I’ve seen where characters having different languages are plot relevant, they usually do something to denote that a certain character speaking English is actually meant to be thought of as a different language, or just have them speak that language. What’s odd here is that Undead Unluck kinda does both separately for two different scenes.In the scene explaining how Chikara was captured, we that he goes to a Japanese school, so even if we HEAR English, these characters are speaking Japanese. Except NOW everyone is speaking actual English…EXCEPT for Chikara, who is still speaking English but is complaining about not being able to understand English TO HIS FRIEND who now does only speak English. Then later, in a scene that is not just his perspective, Fuuko speaks Japanese to him to show they still speak that language, with the actors speaking actual Japanese. We’ve also seen characters like Shen speak in other languages, which he then used later to demonstrate how he still remembers Chinese but his assistant doesn’t. I haven’t seen the Japanese dub of this to see how it was handled there, but it just felt worth bringing up how this was worked with and around in the English dub. Other than that, the episode just kinda continues on from last week, with Rip and the Negator Hunters being revealed to want to “take revenge on the world”, whatever that means. We’ll more than likely get some further development and explanation of all that in the remaining three episodes of the arc, but it’s still odd they haven’t yet. Just twelve more to go!
