I miss the old fansub era
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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It's wild how much better random fans are when compared to official slop. And people just accept the slop!
The random fans care about the show and want to do the best job they can (although I've seen some pretty crappy old fansubs, with broken Engrish and/or outright missing lines, so the best the fans could do wasn't always necessarily enough).
The corporations only care about how much profit they can make from the show and thus want to do the cheapest job they can while shoving it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Most viewers accept it because it's convenient and they don't know just how bad the quality is because they have no basis for comparison. Those who do know how bad it is . . . complain on the Internet because they have no leverage to get anything fixed.
The thing is, fansubs had a whole host of problems and weird translation shit too. Our standards have just dropped because a multimillion dollar corporation with a near monopoly of the industry can't be bothered to hire people.
You don't like GG memesubs?
Me too.
beat me to it lol
The reason is money. The reason is always money.
Crunchyroll on their previous way of subtitling:
Customer on Crunchyroll's new way of subtitling:
It's one more consequence of the current copyright regime being self-servingly catered to business owners. I don't have a solution to this without either (a) exposing yourself to ruin or (b) consciously killing your interest in any commercial creative medium.
It's unlikely you can "save Crunchyroll from itself". It's better for your peace of mind to leave them be and do not participate. They're confident as the "only source of legal consumption of anime" in many places that they do not have the incentive to... ironically... be more creative (which copyright claims to incentivize). It was good while it lasted.
It's one more consequence of ~~the current~~ copyright ~~regime~~ being self-servingly catered to business owners.
Copyright was invented by Brits and spread worldwide by Americans; if it didn't cater to business owners they wouldn't have done it.
I don't have a solution to this without either (a) exposing yourself to ruin or (b) consciously killing your interest in any commercial creative medium.
Or (c) piracy.
Copyright was invented by Brits and spread worldwide by Americans; if it didn’t cater to business owners they wouldn’t have done it.
I have the emphasis on "current" because of exclusive licensing and the lengthening of copyright terms before lapsing to public domain.
Or © piracy.
That's potentially exposing yourself to financial ruin (see: Nintendo)
Piracy can be pretty safe if you have the first idea what you're doing.
If you're really worried, streaming copyrighted content is legal in most of the world, but really the only risk involved is when torrenting (and even then only in certain cases), in which case just use a VPN*. In other words, it's not a crime if you never get caught.
*Courts don't magically know when you're pirating; the bottleneck is that the IP holder has to somehow catch you up/downloading unlicenced content and know your IP address. This is impossible for normal downloading and only possible if you're torrenting and the IP holder is seeding in order to catch IP theft, and even then a VPN obfuscates your IP address, making this a moot point.
That it's illegal/a crime in the books to begin with is a problem. Even more so if the punishment is disproportionate to the damages an owner can claim. There's a reason for that: the current copyright implementation is the closest thing to an infinite money glitch in real life.
More seriously, WTF Crunchyroll? There's literally no reason not to pirate anime if they're not even going to bother with subtitles.
Crunchyroll went to shit the moment they made a profit.
Enshittification isn't just a problem for social media.
So glad I gave them the boot when they killed my Funimation grandfathered plan.
Heyo yee. I cancelled when they made their web UI shittier in like 2019 or something.
No reason ? Increased value for shareholders is not enough of a reason for you ? You should feel ashamed.
Subs are so bad now that I leave them on with dubs for comedic effect. Helps me rope in family-members to watching with me.
On the other hand, I can no longer trust them enough to just keep watching while others in the room have loud conversations, unless I want to switch to the original audio, which annoys them.
There is a good reason to move away from a image based subtitle vs a text based one. It CAN look better, but not always. The problem is that their player or your web browser needs to allow changing the fonts sizing and typeset. On Apple's devices this can be done in system settings, but will be different on other platforms if possible at all.
CR subtitles were never image based, they used to just simply be better but now they've given up and used the industry standard.
I mean, is this really worse than the subtitles being AI generated? In fact, I imagine the two things are closely correlated; it's likely cheaper for them to display the AI generated subtitles in this manner.
I mean, is this really worse than the subtitles being AI generated?
No, but that's an awfully low bar.
They already are using AI generated subtitles though. My point is this isn't really "destroying their subtitles," their subtitles have been destroyed. This is just some extra shit smeared on the corpse.
I haven’t watched too many subs recently, however I have a bug where CC is enabled on every episode, even after disabling it in settings, and I can tell you that’s gone to shit. Especially with names or Japanese words that aren’t translated.