I like to actually concentrate on the animation rather than splitting my attention between it and text. Since I don’t speak Japanese I get absolutely nothing out of the Japanese audio voices such as the importance of inflictions in dialog. I’d rather hear a language I understand so that I can understand performances. I’ll only chose a sub if the english dub is outstandingly bad, but in most cases I find the dubs perfectly fine.
I think that while some non-Japanese speakers genuinely prefer the Japanese audio, I suspect there is a large group who only claim to prefer it for performative reasons or people who stay quiet because they know if they voice an opinion preferring dubs they’ll get dogpiled by the rest of the fandom.
Hard agree. Most of the hatred of dubs comes from back in the day when they were terrible but nowadays a bad dub is the exception
Bad dubs or reading were all we had, and now I guess it’s muscle memory
Dubs have gotten better, and the decline of fansubs means no translation notes that really helped some oddities.
I think even without speaking Japanese you can understand some of the choices the actors make with their tone of voice. It’s admittedly less that you get out of your native language, but sometimes the English actors make different choices.
For example, I don’t like the dub of Cowboy Bebop because the Jet actor made him sound more like a meat head than I think the character actually is.
Is that a common criticism of Jet? I never thought he was much of a meathead, more like the oft suffering father figure of the crew.
I dunno, I just didn’t really like the English voice. Seemed too disjointed from his true character
I think the trope of “Subs are better than dubs” hails from an era where dubbing was generally cheaply done. Or the dialogue is completely changed for broadcast (lots of the stuff from the 4kids era are like this).
If we press play and it auto picks English audio the entire room starts searching for the remote.
Maybe it’s what we watch, but English dubs are jank. Compared to the original audio they sound flat and amateur.
Because it’s an afterthought. Imagine going to see a painting, but then the venue owner coming up and being like "my favorite color is blue, so all the red is going to get repainted over as blue.
The production wanted and worked and casted and directed and mixed and timed and animated all of the audio and people and visual together., and some asshole comes along and is just like “fuck all of this, people don’t want that, replace it with my buddies on staff that are cheap. We’ve been doing it for years, the dummies won’t notice”.
And to address the subject of why subtitling is different from that, it’s not entirely so. Subtitling is just less destructive.
My rule of thumb is that I’ll watch dubs of anime that aren’t purely Japanese.
Fullmetal metal alchemist, ranking is kings, attack on titan, jojo, gurren lagann, Gundam, most isekai, I’d be happy to watch in dub.
Demon slayer, jujutsu kaisen, kaiju #8, hajime no Ippo, all blatantly Japanese settings that would throw me off watching the dub so I stuck to the subs.
Just chiming in so there is someone that prefers subs in the comments…
That said, dubs have on average gotten better over the years, and the sloppy subs they put on streaming services are inferior to fansubs
FINALLY. SOMEONE LIKE ME!
Jesus fucking Christ, I don’t know how people prefer a perfectly reasonable dub to subs. Like, yeah, if the dub is crap, fine, I get it; but if it’s even halfway decent, why would you want to have to spend half your attention reading text when you could just be focusing on the gorgeous animation you probably selected this anime for watching in the first place? I don’t know, maybe this has to do with people who are slow readers vs fast readers. Maybe my mild dyslexia is the problem here. But I just don’t get it. Subs are work; why would you want to do work while watching an anime for enjoyment?
I’m a fast reader but still watch the dub unless it’s garbage, because if I want to read an anime I’ll just pick up the manga
One punch man is so dependent on comedic timing and tone to get its story across that I couldn’t watch it with subs at all. But dubbed it was just great.
I have been learning to listen to Japanese just to see if the actual Japanese is better than English because I have always preferred dubs to subs not just becsuse I want to focus on the animation and not the subtitles, but becsuse the subtitles always lack depth and character. The actual audio does not, and you get way more depth and nuance if you actually understand the language.
This is not an unpopular opinion. Netflix and Crunchyroll have both confirmed that more viewers watch dubs than subs.
Skill issue.
I’m also a middle aged man with kids and responsibilities. Sometimes I want to watch Anime and I have to fold Laundry or cook dinner at the same time.
In an average day if I’m really lucky I can maybe find a whole hour to sit and WATCH something.
I just rewatched Evangelion, and the dubbed dialogue actually made more sense idiomatically than the subtitles. I know there are cases where the translation is not great and the voice actors are doing 5th grade class play level overacting, but that’s not universal.
I agree. For example: URAMESHI!
To me, Japanese is too fast and I can’t read subtitles, don’t have time to learn Japanese and for me at least is not worth time, maybe sometimes in the future. But English i actually understand.
