Last year I watched a YouTube video by Hazel about the anime film Penguin’s Memory. Towards the end of the video, she explains why a lot of websites mistakenly refer to the movie as A Penguin’s Memories: “fandom.com search engine devilry and the general decay of the Internet as we know it pushes to the top of Google search results and previewed sidebar information The Ideas Wiki.” — The Ideas Wiki being a website where people just write believable Wikipedia-style articles about things that could be real but aren’t. In this case A Penguin’s Memories as a recut Americanized dub of Penguin’s Memory. But it isn’t immediately obvious that that’s what The Ideas Wiki is, especially given what verifiably real hacky 1980s anime dubs were like and the incredible amount of meticulous detail The Ideas Wiki has about A Penguin’s Memories, you could absolutely believe that it’s a real dub.
I have also on occasion stumbled upon obviously fanon wikis about fictional characters, but in that case it quickly becomes apparent that it’s fanfiction, and the harm in believing it is also limited because it’s just somebody’s interpretation of a fictional character, right? But today I decided to look into whether any animated shows or movies had ever been dubbed into Greenlandic, and I was very excited when the top search results pointed me to fandubdb.fandom.com articles like “Digitalimik Cirkusimik Pissanganartumik”. I was immediately like “Woah, you mean to tell me some Greenlanders got together and recorded a fandub of The Amazing Digital Circus?! That’s awesome!” — I mean, there’s an Esperanto fandub of Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated season 1 (sans episode 14), made by a team of no more than three people (where >90% of the work was done by the one guy)[1], and SDMI has a way longer runtime than The Amazing Digital Circus. So it would be entirely feasible for a particularly dedicated TADC fan in Greenland who loves their native language to make a Greenlandic fandub of their favorite show, the whole thing adds up to like 4h20m, right? There’s probably at least two or three TADC fans in Greenland, if not dozens or even hundreds, but even if there’s only one TADC fan in the whole country then it’s still feasible that something like that could exist.
But then I started reading the article more closely and things stopped adding up. It seemed like it wasn’t actually a fandub but was rather a professional, official dub with a full team; there was even a whole bunch of screencaps showing that on-screen text in the show had been edited out and replaced with Greenlandic translations. Which is still not a dealbreaker, since Spirited Away and Moomin (1990) were dubbed into Northern Sámi, and that’s a much smaller language than Greenlandic. And then I looked up “CoGtv”, the supposed streaming service that the Greenlandic TADC dub aired on, and I could only find results for “Church of God TV”… So this was evidently a non-existent streaming service. Huh. I was also starting to think that the Greenlandic translations looked suspect (not that I know Greenlandic), and then I noticed that there was misspelled English text on the supposed poster as well, and I said, “Goddammit, I’ve been had, haven’t I?” — And then I noticed that there’s a disclaimer in the lower-left corner of fandubdb.fandom.com saying that everything on the website is made up, and then I noticed that despite the address being fandubdb.fandom.com that the wiki’s logo in the top left said Fanon Dub Wiki. Very different from a fandub wiki!
…So yeah, this is a website where people just write out their fantasies about non-existent foreign dubs of shows and movies that they wish existed but don’t. Which is perfectly understandable, my interest in small language dubs was why I was looking into this topic in the first place, after all. It’d be awesome if every show or movie or video game was available in every language. But because of the Fanon Dub Wiki’s address, I’d assumed that it was a database of fandubs, i.e. real dubs made by fans. So it was frustrating to discover I was wrong. I can respect the hell out of the creativity and effort that’s gone into the Fanon Dub Wiki — God knows that I’ve done similar things on !fakenews@hexbear.net — but when I’m looking for actual information on a subject and all the top results are people telling deliberate untruths… Well, this sort of play shouldn’t get in the way of actual research, right?
I just think about how much LLM-generated garbage has flooded the Internet in recent years, making it more difficult to research niche topics as you end up reading plausible-sounding Statistically Likely machine generated text; and now even in these bastions of human-generated content, you still can’t escape reading plausible-sounding fabrications. Obviously we should always be critical of the sources we read, but I just really wish things like The Ideas Wiki or Fanon Dub Wiki would, like, give you a full-screen warning message that you have to click “OK” on before it lets you read the article, this tiny warning in the lower-left corner goes completely against a normal reading flow for most people. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with publishing plausible-sounding fictional encyclopedic content, but in the modern day anybody can just do it without any regard for responsibility whatsoever.
Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.
There was also more recently an Esperanto fandub of Over the Garden Wall with a team of exactly two people, where >90% of the work was done by the exact same guy as the SDMI fandub. ↩︎
would, like, give you a full-screen warning message that you have to click “OK” on before it lets you read the article,
Problem is then they’d have to start doing the same to the New York Times
I fail to see the problem here.
The wikification of media in general is one of my biggest pet peeves. No, your favourite fantasy book isn’t good because the wiki has a dozen novel’s worth of text describing the lore of the setting. Anyone can write endless paragraphs of nothing, especially now with AI. I hate how everything seems to be built for this sort of thing these days. Just make a good story with interesting characters, the “lore” is the set dressing, it should never be the main focus. There’s a reason Lord of The Rings is beloved but the Simarillion is only read by the biggest Tolkein fans.
While looking into the topic, I also ended up finding the Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation’s article about the KyoAni arson attack of 2019. Based on this article and its text-to-speech, it looks like:
- As I thought I heard when listening to Greenlandic radio a while back, Greenlanders really do just switch to Danish when saying bigger numbers.
- Greenlanders probably don’t say “anime”, at least not in formal situations, instead calquing it as e.g. “Japanese animated shows”.
After a lot of poking around Greenlandic dictionaries, it specifically looks like the sentence “Japanimi titartakkanik isiginnaagassiat nuannarineqarluarput.” means “Japanese animated shows are extremely popular.”
Japanimi = “Japanese”, locative of Japan(i)
titartakkanik = “(traditionally) animated”, this appears to be an instrumental plural of titartagaq (“a drawing”)
isiginnaagassiat = “shows”, this is the plural of isiginnaagassiaq which ordbog.gl calques to Danish as “teaterstykke, skuespil, tv-spil,[1] tv-stykke”. So this Greenlandic word may refer to both stage plays / theater performances and TV series. Based on some similar words in the dictionary, it seems like it might also refer to cinema?
nuannarineqarluarput = “are extremely popular”. Ordbog.gl provides the sentence “isiginnaartitsisartoq nuannarineqarluartoq” for “an extremely popular actor”, -toq is an agentive so nuannarineqarluartoq evidently means “an extremely popular person”, “one who is extremely popular”. Elsewhere in the dictionary nuannarineqarpoq (whose regular plural form would be nuannarineqarput) is translated to Danish as things like “make oneself loved” or “be well-liked”. Putting all of this together I can only assume that I’ve translated nuannarineqarluarput correctly.
Evidently, this also means that the article’s title doesn’t even refer to KyoAni as an “animation studio”, but rather as a “TV workplace”:
“Isiginnaagassianik suliaqartarfimmut ikuallatsitsisoqareersorlu 33-t ajunaartut”
“A TV workplace was attacked by an arsonist, killing 33”
isiginnaagassianik = “with shows”, the instrumental form of isiginnaagassiat from earlier.
suliaqartarfimmut = “to a workplace”, this is the allative singular of suliaqartarfik, presumably from suliaqarpoq (“be employed”) + -tar (habitual) + -vik (place).
ikuallatsitsisoqareersorlu = “someone who has already been an arsonist and” = ikuallatsitsisoq (“arsonist”) + -a (“to be”) + -reer(poq) (perfective) + -soq (agentive) -llu (“and”). I’m pretty sure these are the morphemes and how they fit together, at least.
33-t = “thirty-three”, obviously.
ajunaartut = “victims, casualties”, based on context and dictionary examples seems to refer to fatalities more specifically. Plural of ajunaartoq. From the verb ajunaarpoq (“to be hurt, injured”) and the abstract noun ajunaarneq.
Might gloss some more of the article later.
Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.
It’s worth noting here that in Danish, tv-spil means “TV show”, whereas in Swedish and Norwegian, TV-spill (NO) or TV-spel (SV) means “video game”. ↩︎
It’s worth noting here that in Danish, tv-spil means "TV show
No one would ever say TV-spil to refer to a TV show in this millennium. It is a totally outdated term. Its use as an outdated term for videogames is more prevalent and that is also outdated and unused.
Edit: Rewrote the post because i sounded a bit hostile accidentally.
Edit 2: This made me look up some stuff in the Greenlandic dictionary. There is an old distinction in Danish between an arsonist (No casualties) and an arsonist (casualties), that is much less relevant in modern use. One is brandstifter (Burn-founder literally) and the other is mordbrænder (Murder-burner). This is interesting because the 1960s Greenlandic dictionary has separate entries and translations, but the 2003 one doesn’t. Both languages evolved to a similar simplification.
I see, thank you for that clarification. After I saw that entry in the Greenlandic dictionary, I thought, “…Video game? That can’t possibly be right.” and inferred that there had to be a difference in meaning between Danish and Norwegian to explain it. How I checked to confirm was by looking up “tv-spil” on Danish Wikipedia to see if there were any hits clearly using the “TV show” sense, and there were quite a few, although it did seem to still be a far less used term than e.g. tv-serie, which would be the main term used in Norwegian as well. A trend that struck me about the uses of the term “tv-spil” on Danish Wikipedia was that the term was more or less only used in reference to, well, shows and actors from the previous millennium. Which makes me wonder if either Danish Wikipedia uses the dated term because it’s copying from dated sources, or if “tv-spil” is maybe less a dated term for a TV show as it is a term for a dated TV show — like some Danish TV movie from the 1960s could still be called a “tv-spil” today because the term has come to evoke a Quaint image of the mid-20th century, but you wouldn’t call, I dunno, Black Mirror or something, a tv-spil. But you’re the Dane!
Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.You’re sorta right on both counts. Okay so. Uhhh. History lesson? Kinda?
In Denmark televised fictional entertainment produced locally developed rather awkwardly, and consisted initially of literally televised theatre plays as the primary artform (The “spil” is from “skuespil”, as in “a play”, rather than “spil” as in “to play a game”) before developing into what we would now call made for tv movies as the primary artform. In the early transition to what we would now call a tv-series as the primary artform the term was initially retained as a holdover (I assume this bit) but tv-serie became more popular until tv-spil was totally supplanted.
At this point I imagine it would mostly be used as a result of using old sources, or as some sort of anachronistic term to refer to tv movies produced at the time (But it would be weird. It would be like insisting on calling an old movie a “Talkie”)
If I had a time machine one of the things I’d do is hop on wikipedia and sprinkle references to my stupid Rats of NIMH fanfiction into various places. Would be one hell of a prank that’s for sure.
No I don’t have an unhealthy obsession with my brain child, you do!
You’re frustration is valid, it really is, but that is the most amazing thing I have ever seen.
Me and a friend once had the idea of making a wiki for a real tv show, make it almost totally accurate to stsrt with, but we would then keep writing articles about stuff that happened in subsequent seasons that didn’t happen, characters that werent in the show, spin off shows that weren’t real, articles about the difference between the show and a fictional novelisation, etc.
Luckily we got bored and didn’t follow through with it after we had written outlines for about a dozen articles.
Idk I liked learning about Supreme Ayatollah Geddy Lee https://cybernations.fandom.com/wiki/Geddy_Lee
“Wanna learn about how SEK studios made a bootleg version of RWBY after seeing Monty’s trailers?”
One time I got really excited about some supposed Pokémon anime spin-off starring Team Rocket, only to realize that it was on one of these fictional wikis. In hindsight, I should have realized that there’s no way someone who’s spent as much time ingesting random Pokémon trivia as me would have managed to miss something that huge, but I really wanted to believe
Yeah, that would’ve been a very fun thing if it was real.
Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.
