Metallic Rouge sparks debate after apparent changes by Crunchyroll

The Metallic Rouge anime kicked off in January, and now that we’re a month in, the storyline for the sci-fi show is really starting to solidify. As we learn more in the series, fans are starting to question some of the changes that have occurred in the translation.

Kicking off on January 11, 2024, Metallic Rouge is an intriguing part of the current anime season. The sci-fi anime concerns an incredibly advanced android called Nea, and her human partner, NAomi, on a mission to take down a rebel cell of robots on Mars.

Their mission proves difficult – as you’d expect – and as we learn more about this dystopian future, some context has come into question between the Japanese and English-language versions. Particularly, how some terminology has been changed.

Metallic Rouge has different terms on Crunchyroll

You might have noticed that in Metallica Rouge on Crunchyroll, Naomi is an agent of Aletheia. Another company is known as Ochrona, a word with Polish origin. These aren’t the original terms.

Aletheia represents the Ministry of Truth, while Ochrona now the title for the Protection Bureau. Fans have mixed feelings on what seems like pretty drastic changes. Aletheia was a Greek Goddess who represented something no longer being concealed, fitting the ministry in the show. Ochrona broadly means protection, also making it a befitting term.

But fans are wondering about why the choices were made in the first place. It seems like a creative choice that doesn’t have apparent justification. The conversation has come up across a couple of different threads on Reddit between people who know Japanese and can get into the weeds on what the original terminology and scripting may have wanted.

It’s easy to see why such alterations would raise eyebrows. You hope, going into a localization, to experience something as close to the original vision as it can. But translation is a tricky, imperfect art. Jokes, dialog, mythology – they all require translators to infer what the creative team was going for, and make sure it all lands for people in English-speaking territories.

This would’ve just been more of that, and although it seems odd, the new terminology might actually be giving us further insight into Metallic Rouge. Could there be a suggestion here that the Neans, the robots living alongside humans, are related to the alien Junoids, since Aletheia is the daughter of Juno? Something to ponder while we await the next episode!