Watching Anime Fansubs

hey come one in the same Oh key down the tobago subs Naru toe episode 134 think about how you personally got into anime first got fully immersed and involved in the community and I'm guessing if you got into anime before the 2010 a large portion of you would have fansubs to thank for that right [ __ ] you're going to jail whether we like to admit it or not fansubs have played a massive part in the International anime community especially when it comes to the exposure and spread of the medium a l

ot of us wouldn't be here today if not for fansubs my very first experience for them was the very first time I bought anime so I bought off eBay what I thought was a very cheap boxset of Naruto and what arrived wasn't even one of these cheap Chinese knockoff box sets which this is a story in and of itself but what came was just a CD case full of blank DVDs where someone had just written the episode numbers on and what I didn't realize was that I had just paid someone to burn some fansubs on to s

ome blank DVDs and that's how I got into anime the early days of fansubs in anime seems like this on the ground trade deal you could have 8th generation VHS tapes being circled around anime clubs and conventions by what I imagined to be like some kind of black market anime dealership where you approached this shady guy in a trench coat and you asked for a gram of coke along with episode 4 it's a yatsuha anime in general was a lot harder to get hold of you needed the physical copy of the anime wh

ich back then was rare enough as it is a bunch of VHS recorders tons of wire and this new fancy schmancy thing called a computer all just so you can fansub a single episode of anime this is before my time so I can't even imagine how expensive and clunky such a setup would be back then for those of you living in the sleek optimized smartphone era of Technology you needed to apply much more force logic to the technology back there for example if your game suddenly crashed back then there was no da

y one patch you needed to apply your own fix and it went something like this I will now show you the sound of my childhood it was very limited in what you can do when how you could distribute it there wasn't much variation in how subs looked at how they were formatted in fact there was only one sub format that mattered and that was watching subs with old crusty ass outlines in a color I can only describe as urine yellow and the hold of the generation of subs the crustier the outline a pattern th

at would remain with modern fansubs however is that translation quality could vary greatly depending on who was doing it so you could find some fansubs that let's say had a little less finesse in their translations now my Japanese isn't the greatest but I don't know but Jeter from Dragon Ball Z and action show aimed at children really said that it wouldn't be until the digital age that fansubs and well distribute economy in general got a lot easier thanks to the rise of p2p file-sharing sites an

d you may be thinking oh which one did you use first for anime Hyuk BitTorrent or maybe it was hanging out in IRC chats well it was actually climb way so small tangent about hi first accidentally discovered my first downloaded anime through LimeWire even before Naruto because one time when I definitely wasn't downloading what I thought was Papa Roach underscore last underscore resort or mp3 and for once didn't get 2 billion viruses or Bill Clinton talking about his sexual relations but instead I

got a certain scene from a certain OVA which um let's just say it had this sound effect in it [Music] oh [ __ ] me is it possible to get nostalgic over porn that's right basically my twelve year old self made a discovery that would stick with me till today that I like my coffee the same way I like my Bibles plan so yeah I accidentally discovered hentai before he discovered anime this is theater video hopeful and subs right distribution wasn't the only thing that got easier though as software la

rge pretty much anyone with a working computer to subtitle any episode of any show resulting in an explosion of groups who could work to translate and sob more anime than anyone ever had before welcome to the age of digits mid-2000 anime fan stops was essentially subtitles going through insecure high school phase where I cared a little bit too much about its image what professional subtitling standards was about leaving a smaller footprint as possible as to not distract from the thing is transla

ting subs didn't quite do that in fact what defines mid-2000 anime fansubs was the complete lack of any uniform standards cuz [ __ ] everything went one of the biggest trends was that fanservice would just arbitrarily choose to leave some Japanese words untranslated with no pattern whatsoever in what words had the honor of being untranslated and left in Japanese and you know what I get it there are times when a word is hard to translate and requires further explanation there are times when attac

k names just sound cooler in Japanese and then there are times when you are just writing zetsubou which literally means to spare and you explain that it literally means despair and you are still writing zetsubou what this is how you end up getting the famous just according to keikaku meme translator note k-cup means bland because to facilitate all these untranslated words you would have translator notes which were like little footnotes that would give you little bits of extra information to help

add context to whatever being translated on screen seems simple right well they weren't explaining translations explaining jokes explaining completely useless piece of information the viewer didn't need to know sometimes I was such an absurd amount of information on screen that unless you had a [ __ ] Sharingan you aren't actually following that [ __ ] I think fansubs really contributed to this weave culture that made anime this really inclusive fandom you didn't get unless you are properly in

it like I remember people legitimately refuse to watch anything but fansubs because it kept into honorifics like sam and kern and how dare they translate or nee-chan into Big Brother which sounds really dumb when I say it out loud but we all ended up learning a lot of useless Japanese because of it like okay be honest how many of you would have never heard of the word Nakamura if he didn't watch one piece but he was being fair self so if you're an anime fan back then you could form these ridicul

ous sentence no normal person would be able to understand like oh yeah I saw a Shinigami with Annie Channing's Empire a used car Givenchy no Jitsu before becoming mine Akuma and congratulations if you just understood that sentence perfectly you two had fallen into deep another staple of fansubs back then were of course subtitle effects if you've ever searched up an opening on YouTube and I had these fancy effects that ironically made it harder for you to keep up with the karaoke than if it just

have plain subtitles congratulations you found some fansubs openings this wasn't just limited to karaoke effects however because anyone who watched one piece back in the fansub days would know that the true one-piece experience is watching luffy shouts gamma-gamma no with bat green animated subtitles and no attack would actually be complete unless it had a corresponding color and font that was time to the attack doesn't have its own special animated forms is there even an attack was it attention

-grabbing it completely against professional standards yes do I still find it awesome to this day [Music] yes I think the whole art of subtitle effects peaked with this group called commie Serbs who basically perfected the art of ship hosting while still technically subtitling the work as they ask the question can subtitles go too far have we not gone far enough then there would be times when they just straight-up stopped giving a [ __ ] [Music] and then there is their magnum opus which is when

they served Sao to's Opie I don't know how [ __ ] my sense of humor is that I [ __ ] lose it when I just these subtitles that go so far they're not even legible translations anymore because what do you think you can't get more ridiculous it's just like [Applause] [Music] I really shouldn't find this as funny as I do it's just it's just artistic cancer okay you can't find this gem on YouTube anymore but Google is your friend and see that's what I miss about fansubs they had personality even thoug

h yeah they really shouldn't nowadays subtitles are far more for lack of a better word claim as they completely should be the reason fansubs were like this was because fan subgroups wanted to carve out a distinguishable identity and some of them actually succeeded hi I'm John I am one of the co-founders and on the staff of dr. vo fansubs thank you what [ __ ] gang wars between various fan subgroups about who had the best quality translations who are the Fancy's effects you can get translations o

ut the quickest because if you stood out more people will download your subs and if more people downloaded your subs you'd get this thing called internet attention which as we all know is is completely outdated idea because no one on the internets does anything stupid just for attention anymore nowadays simulcast is pretty much cured mainstream fansubbing most of the fansubs now you find I just ripped straight from legal translations and the only time you do really see fansubs anymore is when a

movie comes out on blu-ray or a show is stuck in Netflix jail or for some reason the streaming company accidentally realizes that they've just license the hentai but that will never happen and that's because beyond all the fancy effects or translation notes or even pristine translation quality the thing people most care about is speed and now in the era of instant streaming where pirates lights and literally just rip off official translations fansubs don't really have a place anymore and I know

what some of you may be thinking Giga aren't you a hypocrite for talking about watching anime illegally when you've worked with a lot of these bigger legal anime companies or no and I'll tell you I because this video is actually sponsored by book walk now I'm just kidding I'm kidding or am i yeah yeah I'm I am kidding also congratulations if you also recognize that soundbite here's your senior discount guard while I do promotes many legal ways you can get your anime or manga now I think you woul

d be blissfully ignorant to ignore how big an impact fansubs have had on our fandom and culture I probably wouldn't be an anime fan if not for fan subs or at least nowhere near as big as I am now and I don't think anime would be as widespread internationally as it is now if not for it either Alice Concepcion fansubs was about allowing other people to experience this great show or medium that they would have no access to otherwise and looking at the landscape today it's definitely achieved that t

here was a point where without fansubs we wouldn't have gotten an opportunity to discover some of our favorite shows but the landscape is very different today now accessibility is no longer an issue at all while anime is far easier to access than it ever has been before there are still plenty of people who are region-locked our services or can't afford them or unhappy with them or just want free [ __ ] piracy is something that is never going to disappear but it has been proven that if there is a

product or service people want sold in a way that maintains integrity people are willing to pay for it look I didn't want this video to be a discussion about piracy I just wanted to tell people about that time I downloaded Bible black/off LimeWire as a teenager whatever your stance fansubs is something that has played a massive part in my fandom and I just wanted to take some time to look back at an era gone by basically what I'm saying is if you watch Naruto at 53 1/3 in subs on YouTube then y

ou're not a bad person but what I am saying is if you still watch anime on YouTube and it looks like this what the [ __ ] is wrong with you how is it that you're determined enough to watch anime for free on YouTube but you're not determines enough to use a [ __ ] Google search you know what [ __ ] this [ __ ] I'm gonna steal the car [Music] hey guys hope you enjoyed that video as you can tell I recorded that when I was briefly back in England a while ago don't worry I haven't been travelling bet

ween countries anytime recently not that that's possible even if I wanted to right now firstly I wants to give a quick shout out to crossing void disclaimer this video isn't sponsored they were just kind enough to sponsor my interspecies reviewers video a while back which got [ __ ] in views thanks to it being a districted within the first few hours so I set out give them a free shoutout if you didn't know crossing void is a turn-based mobile RPG with a lots of big anime franchises including sao

devil is a part-timer toradora index and many more as they are all together in this big crossover game where you can use other iconic moves and even special collapse skills so if that sounds interesting to you I'll leave a link in the description where you can try it out and you can get any STI character for absolutely free I also wanted to give a shout out to Ella for an oder king's anime fan sub documentary video series here on YouTube the reason I had to show my lovely face ball a lot of thi

s video is because it's really really hard to find source footage of OG fansubs nowadays so most of the footage came from them anyway though that's it for me hope quarantine has been treating you well I've been gigging and I'll see you all next time