terry_barnes•3d agoMost Upvoted

Hot take: Subbed anime is better but I just spent 9 hours searching for a good fansub group for a 90s show

I got into a debate with my friend last night about subbed vs dubbed Ghost in the Shell. He said the dub is fine. I told him the original Japanese voice acting has more soul. But then I went to find a decent fansub for the 1995 movie and it took me over 9 hours across three days just to track down a version that didn't have typos or weird timing. Ended up on some obscure forum from 2008. Was it worth it? Maybe. But now I'm wondering if I'm just being a snob. Does the effort actually make the experience better, or are we all just pretending the subs are superior?

2 comments

2 Comments

mary_patel593d ago

Oh man, this hits close to home. My brother refuses to watch any anime unless it's dubbed, and we got into it over Cowboy Bebop last week. He kept saying how the English voices are iconic. Which sure, they are. But then I spent hours trying to find a proper subbed version of an old OVA and ended up on a site that looked like it was made in 1999. The fonts were all pixelated and the timing was off by like two seconds. It kinda ruined the whole experience for me honestly. Sometimes I wonder if the hunt makes you think the show is better than it actually is because you put in all that work to find it.

mark_cooper3d ago

Yeah @mary_patel59 the font thing kills it for me too. One time I spent two hours adjusting subtitle settings on VLC because a fansub group used some weird gold text with black outlines that was impossible to read. Got so frustrated I just watched it muted with the subs off and pretended I knew what was happening.