Animisery – A Blog About Living Miserably with Anime (Among Other Things)

The past week or two there’s been so much discussion on Crunchyroll’s lackluster subtitles that started off the Fall season of anime. They were either too tiny or too big and didn’t feature the classic drop shadow that was a prominent feature of Crunchyroll’s subtitles that helped visibility. There’s also been the obvious discourse of Crunchyroll switching to a new platform to encode and embed their subtitles, OOONA, which is in itself a can of worms for multiple reasons including the nation which the company resides in. That isn’t even mentioning that OOONA is allows for integrated AI utility (from my reading it isn’t automatically equipped with it for the record) which seemingly raises more flags that Crunchyroll will soon eventually break their word (a common occurrence including acquiring RightStuf only to close it down which Crunchyroll had said in a now deleted FAQ that it would not do) and start including AI as part of their translation practices. Crunchyroll has obviously degraded in quality over the years (this Mother’s Basement video honestly does an amazing job of summarizing) but I don’t think I’ve ever really hit it as bad as I realized until I watched Gintama: Mr. Ginpachi’s Zany Class.

I’ve talked about Gintama before (and I’ll do it again if you don’t stop me) but this new series really personifies why Crunchyroll has forgotten to care about subtitles. I don’t want to go through the process of getting Crunchyroll screenshots because it is quite difficult to do so but let’s set the scene. Gintama is an anime heavily reliant on pop culture references… from Japan. You can, if you’re a resident of the Western world, see how this would easily manifest as a problem since Gintama is also a comedy. You’re going to need to be equipped with a certain knowledge to the get the full effect of the gags that you’ll be bombarded with in Gintama. Crunchyroll, however, has you covered. If you go to the original Gintama on the site, you’ll find subtitles that add notes from some of the most extreme references like classic Japanese drams to some of the most basic for anime fans like Gintoki using a Kamehameha. It’s almost as if the original subtitle writers for Gintama didn’t want to exclude anyone in the antics so they didn’t risk anything being too easy to grasp and I applaud that. We can’t assume that a viewer might have a complete encyclopedic knowledge of everything Japanese and Gintama‘s sub team was willing to put the effort in. They even encoded special subs for the text so that, for example, if you saw white text with a red outline then the subs would be the same color as well so you knew what exactly you’re reading.

Mr. Gintoki’s Zany Class adapts a spin-off novel of the Gintama franchise and as such is not overly essential to the core experience if you want my impression so far. That said, it’s fun enough but the Crunchyroll subs prove the sheer laziness they’re employing for their upcoming shows when compared to where they were at. Zany Class has a throw away bit of dialogue halfway through the episode where a famous actor is mentioned (partially bleeped out as is the Gintama way) after their work is seemingly referenced. I use seemingly because I wouldn’t know as Zany Class had no notes to aid with this joke. What was once a common courtesy of the original series is now no more as Crunchyroll can’t bother with that it seems. I know that it’s probably because they’ve swapped from using Aegisub to OOONA (even if they won’t confirm it when asked) which uses a different subtitle file that isn’t so keen on multiple typesets on the screen at one time. There were also several sight gags such as one character showing another a long erotic fanfiction (which I’m sure was meant to be humorous since it stayed on the screen for a small time) and several text doodles on the chalk board that were struck through. Maybe I’m really just nitpicking and finding reasons to loathe Crunchyroll more but that really just let me know that Crunchyroll really is slipping further and further into losing the special charm which once was the highlight of their anime treatments.

Obviously Crunchyroll has had plenty of issues before this one and I’m sure they’ll have plenty afterwards if trends continue which I know and you know that they will. What made Crunchyroll my preferred anime platform was that dedication to ensuring that the subtitles were of the same quality you could find from competing fansubs who loved what they were doing as well. You could watch the same anime on Crunchyroll and Netflix and there would be an obvious difference in quality and dedication to providing legible and full subtitle packages. Nowadays though, it seems as if Crunchyroll will just be providing the same quality as Netflix and fansub groups have almost been rendered asunder by Crunchyroll as they just can’t compete with the quick turnaround that Crunchyroll. If Crunchyroll can release anime within an hour of its Japanese release then that forces fansub creators to end up using Crunchyroll’s middling sub translations and foregoing that extra mile since they’ve been forced into a race for quantity and not quality. That in itself is the crux of this entire issue for me: anime has become a quantity medium and not a quality medium in the west. If you can knock out an episode for a series as quick as possible then you can add it to your streaming site’s platform with ease and have another piece of cheese in your trap to entice subscribers or retain them. You don’t need great subs when a good enough sub will do especially as dubs become more and more popular. I don’t particularly like dubs except for certain series so if you’re a dub enjoyer then this whole discourse is just rendered moot but I know that subtitles still matter to a huge group of people and I hate to see this decline in real time over the past year. Maybe Crunchyroll’s continuing degrading services will be the spark that starts the wildfire that brings back better fansubs? I’d love to see it if it does but until then I’ll just cancel my Crunchyroll and hope that my drop in the bucket will matter. We’ll see.

I’ve just been so irked by the recent subtitle choices so I needed a little vent after trying to watch the new Gintama show on my friend’s Crunchyroll. I really love the accessibility of just being able to pull up a show on my TV and lounging casually so I’ve never been a huge fan of watching via my computer. It feels like I’m doing work if that makes any sense.

Regardless, thanks for reading my rambles and go listen to my podcast, the Anime Brothers Podcast, if you want! I’ll see you soon!