Well well well. I started watching this anime out of curiosity, what I found was a surprisingly fun and engaging anime! with a twist involving a lot of tears. So far I have watched only the first season and I'm not sure if I'm going to watch the second season anytime soon.
While I'm watching this anime I noticed that some subtitles didn't match what the characters were saying. It got me pretty confused, as I would hear a character call a name and the subtitle just wrote a whole different name!
This series be it anime, manga or novel is based on a historical story from China. Originally the people were Chinese and had Chinese names but, the ones telling the story are Japanese! While I never read the manga for this series, I understood quickly that the problem with my subtitles weren't due to negligence or malice from the people doing the fansubs. Rather, it was a pretty controversial problem amongst the Kingdom fans. As I understand, the whole work is made with Japanese names for Japanese consumers. Some fans of the series refuse to use the Japanese names; as the story is about historical Chinese characters with Chinese names, and that explained the difference in what the voice actors were saying and the subtitles.
I totally understand where these people are coming from but, personally I couldn't keep up with each character having two names and the name that I would read being something like "Piao" and hearing "Hyou" I simply couldn't handle it, so I opted for different subtitles that wrote the Japanese names, not because I disliked the original Chinese names but, because the audio and subtitle discrepancy as I mentioned earlier.
There are a lot of reading material for this particular topic, away from the plot of the story. So I would say it's ok to check them out without fear of spoilers:
- r/Kingdom Chinese vs Japanese names, and how this affects Kingdom's popularity
- Retired Kingdom manga translators "Turnip Farmers": A Note on Naming.
- Spreadsheets of character names.
- Wikipedia - Hanyu Pinyin
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