It's not uncommon for a fandom to fight over a Japanese word. The OP fandom has Nakama to fight about.
Hito, could you tell us what nakama means
It's the people with whom you do something together
The only OP thing I've seen is part of the first episode years ago when this shit came out as tiny RealPlayer files and I don't think I even watched the whole thing
But I think people confuse the significance they give the word in the show with the significance it has as a word in general. A word doesn't need to have this kind of super importance all the time for a writer to use it that way in their stories.
It's a pretty mundane word, really. In FFVII during the Lifestream scene, Cloud talks about not being able to ask Tifa and her friends to let him be their 'nakama'. But I think that's more 'let me join in with you' than it is 'DIE FOR ME PLZ'
But it does seem like a pretty typical thing to say in fiction as a kind of 'we've got this bond and will stick together'. But I don't think your 'drinking nakama' are expected to take a bullet for you.
.... But then after I finished writing I noticed you said what I said. I got distracted
I really don't like the whole 'leave as much in Japanese as possible' thing. I don't even like it when people leave honorifics in. '~nee-chan' is meaningless in English, the language you're supposed to be using
The only reason people know these things is because
they watch too much anime people insist on leaving them in because they are some kind of sacred thing that you just can't get in English. Like the difference between a character using 'ore' to one person and 'watashi' to another. Oh wait, no one actually cares about
that important difference. Only if someone says 'chan' instead of 'san'
I don't mind so much if it were an attack name or something like that. But other than that, if the setting isn't Japanese enough for it to fit in, then do some bloody work and think of something else to put
For OP, you probably could have just translated it as 'shipmate' or something pirate-y like that and have it build up significance as you go through the show, instead of being lazy and not even trying.
Ninira said:
Doesn't nakama basically mean friends that are closer than family?
In which case Case of Tifa no longer makes sense, as it has "家族という仲間" ('friends you could call family' in English?). If 'nakama' was already closer than family, then modifying that with 'family' seems redundant to me.
But it's Nojima, what does he know. The Japanese bastard used 'koi bito'.
In the Kanji!! Silly manga-ised fangirl Nojima.
