Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
EDIT: Link was taken down thanks to someone in the comments here’s the archive for the page https://web.archive.org/web/20251004184506/https://fandomwire.com/crunchyroll-faces-cancelation-why-anime-fans-are-choosing-piracy-after-latest-update/
https://bsky.app/profile/lamhfada.bsky.social/post/3m2c3udxnjc2u
Fansubs have always been superior.
Remembers all the fan sub opening/ending Karaoke so I could actually understand songs too. 🥹
Steins Gate fansubs were amazing.
Agreed, It very noticeable how bad the subs are. I remember watching an the terminator anime and the subs were atrocious.
https://reddit.com/r/television/comments/1f4cj61/netflixs_wellanimated_terminator_zero_starts/?
I’ve been an anime of crunchy roll with those auto ai subs and the main character is called Kun. Holy shit half the time it’s censoring itself because it’s trying to say something racist, but not always…
That‘s how Crunchyroll itself started out if I remember correctly. Now look at it, completely unrecognizable. It‘s exemplary for how things have been progressing or rather regressing this century so far.
My daughter got into anime through friends and I got some street creds by talking about how things used to be. Buying laserdiscs in Japan, subbing them and showing them at conventions. I subbed two episodes of some show I don’t remember. Or shipping VHS tapes across continents. My daughter doesn’t care, of course. But her friends were impressed. I fear that that was my last hurrah, though. I got nothing else.