I had never heard of Brendan “JelloApocalypse” Blaber before February 11, 2024. Until that day, he was best known by the general public for the webseries Epithet Erased, plus his “So This is Basically…” Youtube series commenting on and parodying nerd media culture tentpoles like Tumblr and Pokemon and had a burgeoning career as a voice actor. However, my introduction to his work was a lengthy public Patreon post he made entitled, “Marissa and I Wrote an Anime Dub,” in which he wrote 5,000 words about the localization process for the official Discotek English dub of Lovely Complex, which he allegedly was heavily involved in writing and directing. This post included significant in-depth discussion of his hatred for the series, the protagonist Koizumi Risa, and the artist, Nakahara Aya.
Frankly, Blaber’s post infuriated me. It started with him stating confidently that Lovely Complex, a series I’ve loved since it first aired in 2007, “is considered a grandmother of the shoujo genre, mostly because it’s old,” and only got worse from there. Each paragraph brought a fresh insult as he revealed details about the dubbing process that doubtless was never meant to be public knowledge and insulted the characters, story, and artist, and threw fuel onto the blazing tire fire that is current localization discourse with his brags about how he had altered the characters. Most baffling of all was his inability to understand the story and heroine of this fairly straightforward romantic comedy, who he proclaimed to be “psychotic.” The way Blaber talked about the show and his inability or refusal to unpack even its most basic themes spoke to the sort of misogyny that pervades critical analysis, in which female characters and creators don’t get even the slightest grace for being messy, imperfect beings.