Who Is "Overseas," Exactly? Jaadugar Through Iranian and Mongolian Eyes, and Yasmine Through Filipino Ones

The comments that open with a passport

On a normal night, almost nobody in a comment section tells me where they are from. The animation is insane, I cried, I cannot wait for next week. No country anywhere. So most nights I write the word overseas over a pile of English comments without actually knowing whether I am reading the English-speaking world or the whole world writing in English.

Jaadugar was different. Near the top of the main PV comments sits a line that opens with As a Mongolian, holding 2,758 likes, and under it the introductions keep coming. Iranian here. I am Palestinian. Saying this as an Indonesian. As a Muslim. Name your country first, then say what you think. That order was new to me. It looked like nobody felt they could talk about this show without first saying who they were and where they stood.

I sat up a little straighter while translating. This was not the English-speaking world reacting. This was the people being depicted, reacting.

The Muslim comment section starts with thanks and splits at the bathhouse

The line that gathered the most likes was Fatima's. Slave or no, it is the duty of every Muslim to seek knowledge. On the main PV a comment quoting it holds 1,862 likes, and on a reaction video the same line holds 1,177. Beneath it, a comment explaining that Fatima was quoting a hadith of the Prophet has 995. I only understood the weight of that one sentence after reading the explanation. You probably did not need it.

Proud. A breath of fresh air. For once, something non-problematic. Gratitude runs down the whole page, and the only place the section clearly splits is the bathhouse scene. A long comment worrying that the scene was not orientalism so much as a blind spot borrowed from Japan's own bathhouse culture holds 1,220 likes. A woman from a Muslim country answered that in her hammam that is simply how it is, and got 316. Someone in Tunisia said the same and got 241. And the correction that the sound at the start is not desert music but the adhan, the call to prayer, sits at 170.

If you came here for the Muslim reaction, this is the part I want you to take away. There is no single Muslim reaction. Iran, Palestine, Tunisia and Indonesia watched the same show in the same comment section and disagreed about the same scene. My job is to fold overseas reactions into one voice, and this is the moment it feels most dishonest.

The Mongolian reaction, as watched from the Japanese side

What stood out in the Mongolian comments was disbelief. Never in my life did I imagine there would be an anime about Mongols, at 84 likes. They actually speak Mongolian and it is understandable, at 48. A comment explaining that the Mongolian lines are voiced by Mongolian-born sumo wrestlers, and that the only professional voice actor speaking Mongolian is the translator boy, at 37. And one line saying they had never seen a perfect representation of Mongolia in animation until this show.

What follows is a view I think only someone translating both sides gets to see. The Japanese comment section was watching the Mongolian one.

In the same section, a reading that if the Middle East had made this, Mongols would be monsters, and if Mongolia had made it, Fatima would be history's worst witch, and that the show earns its depth by leaning neither way, holds 56 likes. On a three-episode-rule video, someone wrote that it was refreshing to see anime impressions from the Mongolian-speaking world, which you almost never see, at 21.

Japanese fans are imagining how Mongolian viewers feel. Mongolian viewers are watching their own ancestors drawn by a Japanese author. And I am the one person translating both. I noticed the shape of that halfway through a batch and laughed out loud.

Yasmine's nationality was answered by Filipinos before anyone asked

Now the game. The comments under Yasmine's Street Fighter 6 gameplay trailer took on the colour of one country within hours. Half Filipino and I have been waiting for a character like her, at 146 likes. Sampaguita is a type of jasmine, hence Yasmine, and sampaguita is the national flower of the Philippines, at 664. Her hair is the crest of the Philippine eagle and the karambit is its talon, at 750 on a reaction video. Someone even translated every move name from Tagalog for the rest of us.

If you searched for Yasmine's nationality and landed here, I am not going to paste the official bio. What I can tell you is that Filipino commenters pointed at their national flower, their eagle and their language one by one, and while translating it I thought, there is no better answer than this. A Filipina wrote that watching Max try to pronounce Tagalog and then give up completely was very amusing, at 279 likes. A comment that is nothing but FILIPINOOOOOS and a scream holds 453.

If the introductions under Jaadugar were pride with a bit of tension in them, the ones under Yasmine were a party. Happy for all our Filipino friends, looks like they got a great character, at 319 likes, from someone outside the party. The people celebrating and the people being celebrated were in the same thread. It was a good night to be the translator.

So how do I tell where a comment is from. I do not

This is the part I most want to get right. A YouTube comment has no nationality field. The handle is in Latin letters and the text is in English. Guessing a country from that is not inference, it is profiling. So on this site a comment belongs to a country only when the writer says so. Iranian here means Iran. No introduction means it stays filed under overseas, and that is where it stays.

Still, translating does show me things. The moment another language leaks into the English. A comment that signs off with salam from Indonesia. A comment that can write the Tagalog move names from memory. A comment that can say the Mongolian is understandable. And in the other direction, I know less than I pretend about what I call the English-speaking world. Without an introduction I cannot tell an American from a Brit from an Australian, and I do not try.

So every night I use the word overseas with a small guilty feeling. The honest phrase would be the whole world, writing in English. The summer of Jaadugar and Yasmine was the rare season when that whole world stepped forward holding its own flag.

If Japan had had no sea

I will end with one line from the Japanese side. It sat under episodes 1 and 2 of Jaadugar with 149 likes.

A descendant of people the Mongols came for, watching the Mongol side of the story, muttering that it could have been us. Ask me now which country overseas means, and this is the answer I settled on this summer. The country that was drawn, the country that drew it, and the country that very nearly ended up drawn too. All of them in the same comment section. The translator belongs to none of them, and just reads it all.