I don't know how to feel about 4Kids Pokémon dubs, to an extent I understand some decisions and sometimes they're pretty insulting. There's censorship that makes sense because at the end of the day they had to adhere to American conservative broadcast standards but wiping any hint of Japanese culture in a story that takes place in a fictionalized version of Kanto? This bugs me about the games as well.
The name changes, as much as they rubbed me the wrong way at first, were an effort in translating puns for the most part so they had the Ace Attorney excuse, I still don't like changing Satoshi and Shigeru's names to Ash and Gary respectively. Those characters were named after real people, it just feels like whitewashing, I get it would've felt "strange" to have these two boys with Japanese names next to the American ones but... it's complicated. There's plausible deniability but given the cultural context I get the vibe another motive was that "a show with a bunch of Asian kids isn't going to sell" so give the main boy a racially ambiguous cartoon name and he'll appeal to a wider demographic, it won't be weird to kids because his design is abstract enough and doesn't adhere to US standard cartoon racial coding conventions so he can be interpreted in many ways.
People complain about censored bento boxes and other crap like that, which annoys me as well, but it's the least of the 4Kids issues considering everything else, though it's another thing that highlights the underlying philosophy behind changes like I've talked about so far, USAmerican children could never grasp anything outside their cultural bubble. Of course, that idea's stupid, not only because, like, Japanese Americans exist and denies them a chance to see bits of their heritage on TV, but also like, kids know what food is, kids know what holidays are, kids know people have different kinds of names. I hate that the media I grew up with tried so hard to keep me away from learning more about the cultures of the people who created some of my favorite pieces of art, pop culture left me seeing them as mystical and mysterious figures of a strange land and not as human and informed by their surroundings as me. Like, I'll forever get bullied for being a weeb by insecure kids like I used to do to others but I'm grateful it eventually wound up expanding my worldview, though a teacher or some other authority figure should've corrected my orientalist idiocy way sooner than myself around my late teens or so tbh...
Sonic for Hire is a funny show (to me) because it's just dumb humor and raunchy jokes. It's not meant to be art or something profound or meaningful, it's meant to be a Family Guy and Robot Chicken-esque web cartoon, something you can watch for a quick laugh.
I certainly don't think Dorkly is in anyway "malicious" for their lowbrow humor. Family Guy is what I think of when I think "lowbrow" comedy, it's irreverent and doesn't really try to do anything emotionally impactful or awards-worthy (no matter how much they say they want an Emmy).
Yes, I think there are some Family Guy jokes that are a bit too mean-spirited or not really funny, but that doesn't really ruin the show for me.
And that's what I think Dorkly is all in all: lowbrow comedy designed to give you a short burst of off the wall humor, no matter if it's media literacy is bad or attempting to make satire.

Reactions: Wallace Ulysses