July 25th, 2024
Dubs are inferior. (clickbait 🍖 but no really they are)
Dubs are inferior. This is a statement of fact. Not subjective.
WHY?!!
Because they have to be inaccurate by design to match the animations and time.
You have to match the words to the lipflap and or the amount of animation you have. So things will have to be shortened or lengthened. Often changing the tone or intention of the line.
Now today they CAN match the lipflap to the English (digital art technology), however for some scenes that are too fast or slow, you can’t cover it all. Also most times they don’t want to change the runtimes as the subs have to match the original video.
The solution is to have the sub video separate from the dub video, but that takes up space.
Because they have to have any Japanese culture stripped out of them to be palatable to a children’s audience. And also be the ONLY choice you can view that animation in.
Corporations feel that children (and sometimes adults) cannot fathom another people’s culture and that it’s so foreign as to be incomprehensible to the audience. Who… will include children from that culture because, hey America is a ‘melting pot’. So any references to Japanese things are changed to be things like Onigiri to Jelly Donuts (Pokemon), Melon Bread to Hot Dogs, Ramen to spaghetti (less so now that ramen is popular, but that is another issue), tanuki (a dog) to raccoon (not a dog), etc.
This of course makes the listening experience different.
for a time: Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Medabots, Sailor Moon. Were dub only officially.
Beyblade, Pokemon, Hamtarou etc. still dub only.
There’s some corps out there that are trying to get subs for the dub only stuff. Mon Colle Knights is one.
Because they are edited, cut, rearranged for said children’s audience.
Sometimes scenes will be flipped so that the cars are driving on the ‘correct’ side of the road. Sailor Moon is known for this, but DiC and 4Kids were perpetrators. Gory scenes removed. etc.
Digimon was known for adding dialogue where there was none. All of this changes the run time where subs are rarely EVER edited. The experience of someone watching a dub will be vastly different than a person watching a sub.
Because the company thought having an offensive misogynistic dub would be more funny than just dubbing it properly (Gakkou no Kaidan)
The disc does have accurate subs on it, but the dubs is some gross fucked up nonsense. So someone who only watches dubs will not get the correct accurate experience as someone who watches the subs.
Shineman also has a parody dub to itself as well.
Because the original scripts are missing. (Samurai Pizza Cats)
Samurai Pizza Cats is the way it is because the Japanese scripts weren’t provided to even be translated so they literally have to wing it. Thus the dub and the sub are going to be vastly different experiences.
Because a AAA company decided to double down on pronouncing character names incorrectly and thus dubbies will ONLY be pronouncing the names wrong and look ignorant AND/OR racist.
Yeah I’m talking about Cait Sith here (Yes it IS Ket Shee. Yes you are a fucking bigot if you continue to say Kate Sith. Yes Cait Sith DOES exist out of Final fucking Fantasy.) But I’ve also heard nuh-ROO-to, Sack-ura, and a few other “official” pronunciations. English speakers like to do this thing where “Oh yes you can pronounce something that has a set pronunciation wrong because ENGLISH”. I’ve seen it before. No, there is ONE pronunciation for foreign words. It’s how they pronounce it. Japan is a very regular language to pronounce, no “gotchas” like German or especially French.
(German’s w’s are v’s, j’s are y’s)
Because they often cast the character voices wrong, because of budget and not a real love of the original media.
This one is a little bit subjective, however overall correct. Most times they just get the cheapest talent they can get and then match them up to a character rather than looking at the original voice. Thus male characters voiced by women to sound younger, ambiguous or even meek. Get voiced by the deepest voice they can find making them sound brasher, older and more annoying. (One example is Cecil from FF4 that went from softspoken to deep-man-voice)
Mostly this is subjective because the people that just want to hear a certain person’s voice don’t give a shit about the original character’s design at all and simply want to swoon over a voice. Which is a BIG THING in Japan too where you can get CDs of your guy’s voice to lull you to sleep.
However still the character is changed and the original experience is altered and thus giving people who like dubs an altered and incorrect experience.
Thus people that need are getting the inferior experience as it’s inaccurate by default.
While some try to preserve what’s there. A lot of dubs are just way off.
So subs are superior?!
They are the default you start with and thus they are the de facto, the baseline. And like and original VS a copy, they are superior by default. Like how places want to see the original notarized version of a document and sometimes not even a notarized copy.
Now there are inferior subs as well, mostly because they take the “dubtitles” and all their inaccuracies and run with it.
And there have been times where BOTH are just horribly wrong. ADV was kind of known for that.
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