Actually I'm not really militant about subs or dubs. There are works where the English dub is just better and makes more sense to have the characters speaking English, like Black Lagoon. There are others like Slayers, where I like the English voice cast better as an ensemble, but goddamnit is Hayashibara Megumi brilliant as Lina in the original. Truly a master of the craft. And then there is Sailor Moon at the other end of the spectrum, where the less said about the English scripts and acting, the better.
Utena is kind of a special case. I do like the original Japanese because there is so much subtlety of meaning. But the fight scenes are really cognitively taxing to watch, because I'm trying to translate both dialogue and music while reading subtitles while figuring out what all of the symbolism is, and hey there's also a fight going on. And I can't really shut off the translation part of my brain, nor the musical part.
-- ∇×V
Utena is kind of a special case. I do like the original Japanese because there is so much subtlety of meaning. But the fight scenes are really cognitively taxing to watch, because I'm trying to translate both dialogue and music while reading subtitles while figuring out what all of the symbolism is, and hey there's also a fight going on. And I can't really shut off the translation part of my brain, nor the musical part.
-- ∇×V