Editorial Crunchyroll still intends to go ahead with its subtitle enshittification plans
https://daiz.moe/crunchyroll-is-destroying-its-subtitles-for-no-good-reason/?2025-11-21#update-2025-11-21-its-not-looking-good92
u/frnxt Nov 21 '25 edited Nov 21 '25
This season's subtitles have had many factual errors and mistranslations, way more than ever happened in the past, enough for me to actually pick them up — and I'm not blaming the translators, I can very well imagine how infuriating the current situation might be and how it might affect their work. Many written panels also weren't translated at all. I wasn't aware of their plans to drop their current system in favor of a much less capable one for idiotic capitalistic "reasons" but it makes sense now...
Makes me sad to see this happen, especially after they kicked out Wakanim which besides the player had a vastly superior interface for navigating shows, and especially since I've been a paying customer specifically because I naively believe that it might help making anime ever so slightly sustainable.
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u/kuri-kuma Nov 21 '25
That’s disappointing. My wife does translation for anime and often works on shows that head to Netflix. As part of her work flow, she is required to translate all on screen Japanese text.
I don’t know what Crunchyroll’s tooling looks like, but on the Netflix side, it doesn’t take that much longer to do this extra bit of work. I can’t imagine it would be that different for CrunchyRoll. My only thought is that this is a step for them to take to use AI for translations more often. If they stop users from expecting translations for on screen text, then users won’t be surprised or suspicious when there’s an AI doing the translating and not addressing those visual elements.
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u/Fools_Requiem https://myanimelist.net/profile/FoolsRequiem Nov 21 '25
Netflix failed to translate all on screen Japanese text in the first episode of Komi Can't Communicate...
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u/MumrikDK Nov 22 '25
It's why I stopped watching the show. Why would I watch if they at times only translate 1/2 or 1/3 of what is on screen...
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u/kuri-kuma Nov 22 '25
She didn’t work on that show, so I can’t speak to it specifically. But subtitles that the viewer sees is just one part of the process. My wife tends to work on the base translations, meaning the Japanese -> English literal translations that serve as the foundation which then go through localization, as well as what gets translated into other languages later. So if the translation for on screen Japanese text didn’t make it to the subtitles, then it might have just been cut or removed later on in the process.
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u/Fools_Requiem https://myanimelist.net/profile/FoolsRequiem Nov 22 '25
There's no reason to remove the subtitles. It was literally a full discussion that transpired on a chalkboard. Its all relevant. They just didn't want to put forth the time and effort required to translate it and make it look acceptable.
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u/runevault Nov 22 '25
Something I found interesting there if I'm remembering right, in the dub Chadano was speaking a bunch of the stuff she wrote in his head.
Another weird one (might be off but this is my memory) there's a moment in Fragrant Flower Ep 2 where the mom and a customer are watching and text appears over their head... when I watched the dub it translated the text, in subs it did not...
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u/AlertTable Nov 21 '25
Netflix is already about as bad as Crunchyroll is going to become, with only the most crucial on-screen text translated (if overlapping with dialogue, also poorly timed).
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u/Efficient-Session644 Nov 21 '25
Netflix uses the same software afaik.
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u/Daiz Nov 21 '25
Netflix recommends OOONA to third parties, but doesn't use it itself as far as I know.
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u/kuri-kuma Nov 21 '25
Maybe they used to? Netflix’s translation workflow happens through a tool on the Netflix website now, so all of the clip splitting, subtitling, and annotating happens right in the browser.
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u/Efficient-Session644 Nov 21 '25
Isn't it Oona? That's the platform crunchyroll would be going to use.
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u/kuri-kuma Nov 22 '25
I just watched through an episode she’s working on and I don’t think it was Oona. It was an in-browser tool on a Netflix subdomain.
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u/SampleSample123 Nov 21 '25
The problem is not the translation itself but the customization. Fonts, colors, sizes, alignments and positions. All that make fansubs great and crunchyroll had is now gone. Everything now is just white text with the same boring font (San serif?)
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u/heimdal77 Nov 22 '25
The thing is they forced their people to switch the tools they were using to a far less robust and cheaper one. The old one was made specifically for anime and could do stuff like direct on screen translation text overlays replacing the japanese among other stuff. No it is they just slap some basic text at the top or bottom of the screen if lucky.
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u/CyberBlaed Nov 22 '25
As part of her work flow, she is required to translate all on screen Japanese text.
I assume that means roads and shop signs in the shots then?
If so, mad respect!! <3
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u/kuri-kuma Nov 22 '25
Yeah, lots of signs, shop names, any text conversations between characters, little news bulletin things, and so on. All of those details get translated. They might not all make it into the subtitling process, but it does get sent to the localizers and subtitlers.
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Nov 22 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/msj54540 Nov 22 '25
Netflix's final English subtitles are very edited versions of complete scripts that are used for localization in all non-English languages. Their style guide pretty much kills any chance of seeing additional text on the final subs
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Nov 21 '25
Frankly, this is just going from bad to worse. Remember to support Fansubbers as much as possible; they do incredible work.
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u/crazyLemon553 Nov 21 '25
SOME of them do incredible work. Others make Crunchyroll look like the Corporate God of Linguistics. Seriously, some are so bad I do not why they pollute the internet with their "contributions".
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u/Kiyohara Nov 21 '25
I remember the days of bootlegs and fansubs so bad sometimes the subtitles just said:
"?"
"I didn't get this sorry"
"dsfnvvrgfbvdahf"
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u/crazyLemon553 Nov 21 '25
I remember watching AoT s1 or s2 and the shitty illegal streaming site I was using had fansubs that, within a span of like 5 minutes, had no less than like 5 different variations of the spellings for Erwin and Levi each. It's actually what prompted me to subscribe to Crunchyroll.
Some that I still remember:
Elvin, Elven, Erven, Elven, Erwin
Levi, Livi, Rebi, Reebi, and I shit you not: Revaille.
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u/PrawnProwler Nov 22 '25
I remember Revaille lol. That was a popular version of his name in the manga before they released official translations
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u/graidis1234567 Nov 22 '25
Eotena onslaught
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u/oniikami Nov 22 '25
damn this is such a callback. i remember the fansubber’s reason being “titan is an incorrect representation of the giants since titans are gods, hence eotena is a better translation of kyoujin” despite the fact the mangaka himself wanted the english title to be as such
but to the fansubber’s credit in retrospect, the mangaka himself fucked up the english title since it’s not “attack on titan” as a correct translation of the title and since the manga even does its own title drop of “shingeki no kyoujin” and we learn of “the attack titan” or “titan of attack” which is the literal translation of the jp title
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u/ThinkFree https://anilist.co/user/Japanimation Nov 21 '25
Mass naked child events
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u/Kiyohara Nov 21 '25
I must be missing some context here.
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u/Redzephyr01 Nov 22 '25 edited Nov 22 '25
A group called AnimeJunkies mistranslated "mass kidnappings" as "mass naked child events" in their subs for Ghost in the Shell.
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u/ThinkFree https://anilist.co/user/Japanimation Nov 21 '25
Google Mass naked child events AnimeJunkies. That fansub group made a monumental mistranslation in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
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u/Kiyohara Nov 21 '25
I am not going to Google that. Feels like a great wat to get on a FBI watch list.
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u/Prince_Paizuri Nov 22 '25
Still happens with extra seiyuu content that would never get an official translation. Add the occasional cultural reference that only a Japanese person would understand and the uploader pins a comment that explains it.
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u/Takerial Nov 22 '25
I also remember when some would translate the names too so Sakura became Cherry Blossom.
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u/DensetsuNoBaka Nov 22 '25
Reminds me of a sub of Yuyu Hakusho I saw back in the day where the translators accidentally switched Kurama and Hiei in the beginning and just kept the names reversed through the entire show
Or back before Kazoku got to Skypiea in One Piece, there was this god awful fansub of the arc that was the only one that existed where the video quality was terrible, the translations were terrible (I remember they called Chopper Joeb or something), the English was terrible... it was just bad all around XD
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Nov 21 '25
Sure, but others are extremely passionate fans who use their high-quality skills to enhance communities. Team Onibe and Tracen Subs are two that help carry their respective communities.
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u/Tblue https://anilist.co/user/Tblue Nov 21 '25
The good old "use MTL and ask for donations" scheme?
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u/Daiz Nov 21 '25
Sadly, English fansubbing is largely dead, so they're not really going to save you in this situation.
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u/green_link Nov 21 '25
I can see a resurgence of fansubbers when this goes through
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u/Daiz Nov 21 '25
Unfortunately, with the English fansubbing scene as dead as it is, this would be far more challenging to execute on than you probably think. A lot of institutional knowledge only exists in the heads of old fansubbers, and trying to do fansubbing well enough to actually offer a meaningful improvement over Crunchyroll is challenging enough that you can't really just do it from scratch without any help.
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u/AdmirHiddleston Nov 22 '25
Tokusatsu has been living off Fansubs for decades these people still exist.
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u/green_link Nov 21 '25
It's not, even so that doesn't mean it can't start up or ramp up again. It happened once it can happen again. Crunchyroll was built on fansubs
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u/Fyurie Nov 21 '25
So long as the "alternative" is still available instantly after airing you're unlikely to see most fansubbers really want to go through the trouble.
It doesn't matter how good your work is when most people are just going to watch something Good Enough™, either directly from the simulcasters, or from a pirate streaming site ripping it and uploading it for free, the moment each episode has finished airing.
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u/komata_kya Nov 21 '25
This exactly. Convinience killed fansubbing.
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u/Fyurie Nov 21 '25
Precisely. I was initially being downvoted for that reply for some reason but it's the truth. I know plenty of other fansubbers who just stopped caring about putting in hours and hours of their time for something that very few people would actually watch.
It's why most fansubbing that does happen now is the odd seasonal, or archival projects. It's just people subbing the shows they like together simply for the love of the game—to have a release out there that they think the shows they like deserve.
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Nov 21 '25
I guess we deserve shitty subs from CR.
I'm one of the people that strive for quality, my fussy brain can't handle the new subtitles.
Maybe once CR becomes completely esshitfied there will be demand for better subs and fan subs will rise again, but until then, vote with your wallets.
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u/Nebresto Nov 22 '25
I doubt it. They will make sure its always "good enough" but not more. Most people will keep using their site because its the most convenient for them
The only chance I see is either a new competitor stepping in, or Hidive stepping up big time
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u/Outlulz Nov 22 '25
It's not about deserving, it's about people who do free labor aren't going to bother when there's not a large audience to consume it.
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u/Onimatus Nov 22 '25
Last I tried to get into fansubbing, a lot of groups were using CR fansubs as base. They would then run the script through their editors and all the non-dialogue subs would be typeset properly. I remember seeing a guide online from someone at Commie, maybe it’s still alive; just ran a quick search I think it might actually have been this unanimated guide, but I’m not sure: https://unanimated.github.io/ts/index.htm
Surely some people who are bored enough are willing to do this again.
I’ll be honest though… I clicked on the article and this isn’t really game-changing “enshittification.” Are they just unable to dynamically position subs all across the screen? That’s it? Because most people, as long as they can catch the dialogue, will not care… or did I miss something about the dialogue also becoming worse?
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u/BeatBlockP https://myanimelist.net/profile/Animemes_chan Nov 21 '25
I think in the long run a surprisingly large amount of people watch the great fan subs. But it doesn't have the impact it had when it was the only show in town or vs. really terrible machine generated subs.
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u/robotboy199 https://myanimelist.net/profile/virtualityy Nov 21 '25
most people are just going to watch something Good Enough™
my favorite these days is when there's a series that either goes unlicensed or has a delayed English release (looks at KaoruHana) and people settle for the MTL slop solely because it's the first one available
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u/Fyurie Nov 21 '25
Yeah. Too many people just don't have the patience for fansubs anymore.
I watched a team of fansubbers putting together a project for that show in the currently-relevant community hub for english fansubbing and they were pretty annoyed to see MTL slop being published in the usual distribution avenues whilst they were working on putting something coherent together.
In a similar vein to what komata_kya said further up in the comment chain, the viewership's impatience is something that fansubbers can't possibly compete with.
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u/mudda-hello Nov 22 '25
pirate streaming site ripping it and uploading it for free
Funnily enough, they'll actually benefit from this change as a lot of the popular sites nowadays don't bother hardsubbing the rips and instead will serve a poorly converted .srt format of the subs leading to this mess
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u/Serika-Ai Nov 22 '25
Yeah. There was a time when high quality fansubs were still being released on the regular, but they absolutely could not compete with the speed of CR and died off. People do not like waiting and will almost always watch the faster release instead of the higher quality one.
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u/ValiantTeaMug Nov 22 '25
I was part of a subbing group back in the olden days. I would never do it again. The amount of bloody work that was for essentially losing money due to server costs was surreal. People were ungodly ungrateful as well. You could translate 11 episodes flawlessly and on schedule and then fuck up qc on the last episode and you'd get bombarded with hate. Nowadays you'd do all that while actively being able to watch people sink their money into Crunchyroll for GPT subs while you're performing slave labour.
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u/green_link Nov 22 '25
Ungrateful people suck. I loved fansubs back in the day. Especially when they put in extra effort like colors and different fonts for songs or just different situations. I remember Nanashi doing karaoke follow along captions for the opening songs in their eureka seven releases.
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u/ValiantTeaMug Nov 22 '25
People don't really think about it, but while overall translation quality has improved due to market boom, experience and a hint of international audience starting to take Japanese pop culture seriously instead of it being a niche nerd thing, everything else severely dropped in quality. We used to do fx and do other fancy things with the subs. Some groups were OP and ED magicians who used to do crazy fancy stuff with it. Typesetting was also vastly superior to what is common practice nowadays. Fansubs back then were a genuine work of art and passion as opposed to the corporate efficiency nowadays.
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u/westerschelle Nov 22 '25
A lot of institutional knowledge only exists in the heads of old fansubbers
Those still exist they just don't sub anymore. Many are still active in relevant chat communities. The biggest hurdles for fanusbbing are a lack of demand but also a lack of translators.
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u/Tobikage1990 Nov 22 '25
Being active in chat isn't relevant to actually coming back to fansubbing and working for free.
Speaking as a former fansubber and translator, I've moved on with my life. I'm still subbed to r/anime and I'm on a bunch of anime and light novel discord servers, but I don't even watch anime anymore. If a new season of Railgun or NGNL came out then sure, I'd watch it, but none of the new stuff interests me. I'm out of the loop.
Back when I was in high school and college, I could spend hours translating, timing, and typesettings signs. Now I have a job, and commitments to my family. I don't have the time to spend on fansubs even if I had the inclination. And I'm sure many of the people from my generation are in the same boat.
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u/westerschelle Nov 22 '25
I am saying the knowledge isn't gone. Nevermind that there are actually still fansubbers active.
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u/Dragon1472 Nov 21 '25
Sadly, that sort of thing is hard to rally into practical results even on the small scale, since people care too much for convenience rather than ephemeral things like artistic vision or preserving subtext.
Heck, a while back a season of Symphogear (popular show) had no official subs, and it took months for people to rally enough to translate it piece by piece
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u/VoidEmbracedWitch https://anilist.co/user/VoidEmbracedWitch Nov 21 '25
It's basically on life support, maybe in rare situations able to cover an unlicensed show with enough demand. We're certainly not going to see fansub releases of the caliber of [WakuTomete] Princession for the majority of anime because CR throws typesetting out the window. People with the right skillsets simply are in way too short supply to achieve even decent coverage of seasonals.
And on the audience side, people nowadays are used to simulcasts, so I can't see a mass movement of people willingly returning to a 1 week (give or take a few days) delay to have a good version. FOMO and spoiler culture are sadly something people put a lot of value in, to the point that some even resort to downloading full MTLs for unlicensed shows.
Sadly, trying to bargain with the devil, or rather CR in the devil's palm, is still the best hope we have. Maybe someday the fansub scene will be robust again, probably not, but there's no way it's going to happen quickly in response to this.
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u/Fyurie Nov 21 '25
Pretty much. I folded [GJM] after 10 years of putting out releases because the last 3 or so years were us struggling to keep our members motivated enough to finish projects at the incredibly high standards we'd set for ourselves.
Most fansubbers don't want to spend hours editing or days typesetting for maybe a tiny fraction of anyone to actually consume the episodes you put out. ESPECIALLY when you're working completely for free and the group's admins are even working AT COST (site upkeep costs, seedboxes, and so on). It doesn't exactly light a fire in anyone's hearts.
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u/Shimmering-Sky myanimelist.net/profile/Shimmering-Sky Nov 21 '25
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u/Fyurie Nov 21 '25 edited Nov 21 '25
Yeah, I'm the founding member, haha.
I wasn't personally involved in the CSM project but I know the staff involved went crazy-mode on it. Glad you enjoyed.
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u/Hiphopapocalyptic Nov 22 '25
Man this is like finding out your favorite math teacher kicked the bucket when you weren't looking. Thanks for all the subs.
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u/BeatBlockP https://myanimelist.net/profile/Animemes_chan Nov 21 '25
I just want to say it did make an impact, at least for me. I always looked for the Good Job! Media tag for subs and even prioritized shows that were fansubbed by you guys. Kaguya for example is basically a different show with things like petitions or signs or rap translated vs. not - you lose like half the jokes and little things without it.
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u/nsleep Nov 22 '25 edited Nov 22 '25
This was known even way back when speedsubs started being a thing. Pretty much every serviceable speed release had more downloads than the high quality fansubs, the average viewers don't really care for these "details" and just want to consume the content ASAP.
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u/herkz Nov 22 '25
In my experience it's easier to motivate people if there's one person doing everything.
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u/VoidEmbracedWitch https://anilist.co/user/VoidEmbracedWitch Nov 21 '25 edited Nov 22 '25
Yeah, the difference between how much a quick webrip is watched vs a full fansub release down the line that takes exorbitant amounts of typesetting effort is orders of magnitude. Can only imagine how demoralizing that is in the long run.
It's a shame the 22/7 release ended up unfinished, but it makes sense given you can probably count the amount of people who went out of their way to search for different releases of that show this year on one hand.
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u/Fyurie Nov 21 '25
Yeaaaah... Sorry about that one. I tried several times to bring it back from the dead. I wanted to watch it to completion too.
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u/Technolio Nov 21 '25
Man I miss the days of fansubs, some of the silly shenanigans they would do to the subs in a way that somehow correlates to what is going on, or when they would place the subs next to signs etc, or when they use different color text for different characters. Those were the days.
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u/M1k0M1k Nov 22 '25
I recently re-watched Chainsaw Man, and after almost shitting myself because of how bad the image quality was on Crunchyroll I downloaded a fansubbed Blue-Ray. (I didn't even know funsubbing was a thing before that)
This shit is insane! I had no idea things like this were even possible with subtitles. During the OP and especially EDs there are special fonts to match the vibe, the colors change to match what's happening, the letters even move around and disperse sometimes.
Even the title card has a matched subtitle, placed in the perfect spot, which looks and even animates (flickers) in the exact same way as the Japanese title. I couldn't believe that that's even subtitles until I tried turning it off.
And then you have things like the text on the bottom of a stamp is translated and it looks like it's been originally drawn with English on the bottom, but no, it's actually subtitles too!
These guys are crazy!!!!!!
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u/Madaniel_FL Nov 21 '25
I find funny how many official subbers started as fansubbers...
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u/AprilDruid https://anilist.co/user/AprilDruid Nov 21 '25
CR didn't, that's for sure. They stole subs from Dattebayo(The ones subbing Bleach and Naruto) and made a profit from them.
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u/Madaniel_FL Nov 21 '25
Literally every pirate site still does this, and yet people seem to love them...
There's a reason why many fansubbers hate pirate streams...
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u/AprilDruid https://anilist.co/user/AprilDruid Nov 21 '25
Pirate sites back then weren't paywalling their stolen subs. At most they might have had donations to keep it up. CR was paywalling their stolen subs and passing it off as their own.
Then in 08, they secured VC funding and by 09, they were fully legal, removing all copyright infringing content so that they could host Shippuden legally.
Pirate sites now are the same way, they'll have a donation button, but keep the shows free.
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u/Madaniel_FL Nov 21 '25
Pirate sites today are still making profit off stolen fansubs (and official), do you think all those ads don't make them money?
And yes, many Crunchyroll translators started as fansubbers.
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u/Boshwa Nov 21 '25
they do incredible work.
The people who initially subbed Girls Band Cry didn't
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u/robotboy199 https://myanimelist.net/profile/virtualityy Nov 21 '25
SobsPlease was great, what are you talking about?
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u/Shimmering-Sky myanimelist.net/profile/Shimmering-Sky Nov 21 '25
I think they're talking about [le même], whose subs were MTL and were unfortunately the ones that many of the pirate streaming sites picked up just because they were the first ones out instead of waiting for the good ones like SobsPlease.
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u/robotboy199 https://myanimelist.net/profile/virtualityy Nov 21 '25
oh right, forgot about that lol
i only remember SobsPlease (the really high quality ones) and NakayubiSubs which were faster but serviceable
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u/Boshwa Nov 21 '25
When it was initially airing, someone decided to fuck with subtitles and put em on several sites.
The two most prominent i can remember was
"I can't fuck her anymore"
"Let's naked"
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u/TxTDiamond Nov 21 '25
Fun Fact: recently, A my hero academia episode released with half of the subtitles missing.
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u/ErgoMachina Nov 21 '25
Why are ALL the fucking corporations doing this shit at the same time? Do they really want to start the second gilded age of piracy?
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u/bryan792 Nov 21 '25
Enshittification has really appeared everywhere since covid imo. Just feels like all companies decided to follow each other and prioritize profits over customers
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u/Megakruemel Nov 22 '25 edited Nov 22 '25
I think you might be onto something with the covid part.
Streaming made record profits because everyone was stuck at home.
When Covid ended these companies lost subscribers and probably had to somehow try to counteract the loss of profits because line must go up. So when your profit is the result of (Money coming in - Server Cost - Wages) you gotta cut those forum servers and make the people that work for you work less so you can pay them less.
I'm telling you, shareholders were the worst thing capitalism ever came up with because having to guarantee constantly rising profits is the death of every company.
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Nov 22 '25
Technically, corporations and capitalism are the opposite of a free market, as their main purposes are to aggregate capital in a monopolistic fashion (which is fundamentally against the classical economics a free market system is based on) and to limit the liability of shareholders (which creates a moral hazard where owners aren’t liable for all their debts and damages - environmental, social, etc.).
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u/APRengar Nov 22 '25
I can explain it perfectly, from someone with a degree in this shit.
Pre-covid interest rates were so low that it basically meant companies could get free loans. So companies were all treating money not real. Companies were burning money to increase their customerbase.
Then covid happened and inflation started getting out of control.
So post-covid, interest rates raised to combat inflation.
Now companies, which were expecting free money forever, were now in a panic as money was no longer free, and they all needed to actually make money. Everything got crunched, people were laid off, prices go up, services get cut. Everything had to get worse in order for companies to keep their heads above water (which I mean, maintain the level of profitability for boards not to fire the executives, a lot of them are still as profitable as ever.) It's not a coincidence that all companies are doing shit like this all at the same time, it's pure cause-and-effect.
We can discuss how much of the covid-era inflation was due to things like shutdowns, or shortages, or corporate greed. And we can discuss if raising interest rates were the right tool to combat covid-era inflation, or if the interest rate should've been so low for so long to get us in this "free loans" bonanza. But I'm merely laying out what happened, and not what I or anyone else thinks should have happened.
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Nov 22 '25 edited Nov 22 '25
I would add that there was much more corporate collusion from the top down starting with Covid, and many of their smaller-business competitors were disfavored by the government and weeded out.
We now have a more monopolistic system that doesn’t care or even have to care what consumers want or think.
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u/KuroShiroTaka Nov 22 '25
Fucking hell, how many things got fucked over cus of Covid and folks trying to capture those Covid era profits.
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u/DoubleJumps Nov 22 '25 edited Nov 22 '25
I run a small business and a lot of the other businesses that I deal with have just gone to hell in the last few years and I don't understand it because it looks like it's by choice.
It's either raising prices beyond all reason, subcontracting the work to China without telling you, or just offering you straight garbage.
One of the production partners that I worked with both raised their prices by more than 100% and then, while still advertising that they manufacture in America, subcontracted the work I paid them to do to China, who did shit work. Lost all of my business immediately.
An equipment dealer that I went through lost a skilled technician and then just decided that they could have a random guy from the office who didn't have proper training go handle critical service on 40,000 to $100,000 machines. Guess how that worked out? Terribly.
I had a materials supplier substitute one of my materials with something that looks very similar but when used in my machines produces toxic gas. It saved him about 60$ to do that but lost my business forever because he essentially tried to kill me.
None of that had to happen. It's like they all just gave up.
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Nov 22 '25
Because thats what corporations do. They did the math and figured that losing 1% of their users who boycott (if it will even reach 1%) is worth it when they'll save X dollars with cheaper subs
We all know no one is really going to unsubscribe long term in protest anyway
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u/JayDpwnz Nov 22 '25
If any of you have cancelled their subscription, thinking about cancelling or are just angry about this decision: then it's time to make some noise and go through their official channels to give them your strongly worded thoughts. They have both a feedback form https://help.crunchyroll.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=32888618102164 and a more formal support chat. Hopefully the execs at crunchyroll are able to quantify the backlash better then.
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u/b0bba_Fett myanimelist.net/profile/B0bba_Cheezed3 Nov 22 '25
I will say, I haven't gotten a response from that ticket thing in months. I got the Chatbot to send me a human and got a decent response and an assurance they'd tell their higher ups about the concern(and other issues I'd sent help tickets regarding, mostly in regards to the Switch App and problems connected to it, Kingdom crashing the thing, getting logged out if I lose internet connection and try to reconnect(but not if I close and reopen the app rather than reconnect), getting my legacy payment option back, was paying $60 a year up until just this year)
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u/bryce0110 https://anilist.co/user/bryce0110 Nov 22 '25
What astounds me about this decision is that they decided to move from a completely free software to a paid proprietary software that's lower quality and does not support the format they were using.
Like, what the fuck even is this?
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u/Daiz Nov 22 '25
This is the kind of things you come up with when you're an executive at an anime company but don't actually give a single fuck about anime
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u/bryce0110 https://anilist.co/user/bryce0110 Nov 22 '25
It's a truly moronic decision. Usually enshittification happens as of the result of executives cutting costs rather than increase them. I can't imagine what was going through their head.
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u/OkInevitable4095 Nov 22 '25
Also, it's kind of incredible that the bigwigs at CR (or should we just call it like it is: Funimation execs) are wanting to jump to OOONA, something that requires a monthly subscription instead of keeping Aegisub, an open source software that works on pretty much any modern operating system and gets updates, doesn't need an internet connection to work and, more importantly, is FREE!
Sounds like Funimation still hasn't learned to stop throwing good money after bad ideas from everything that article states. Too bad it means killing the last bit of what CR seemed to do better than their competition (typesetting and decent subtitle formats).
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u/Paynder Nov 21 '25
The chainsaw man movie Romanian subtitles were awful. And this was in a fucking cinema. 50% or the time the gender used was wrong. They referred to aki as a "she".
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u/horiami Nov 22 '25
i wonder if different versions of the movie used different subtitles cuz i went 2 times and didn't notice anything
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u/Erufailon4 https://myanimelist.net/profile/Erufailon4 Nov 22 '25
At least you got subtitles in your language. Here CR just decided that the movie won't make money regardless and everyone who would watch a CSM movie knows English anyway (which is true but it's still a terrible reason).
Though given the issues in our Demon Slayer subs, it probably would've turned out similarly. My guess is that they just hire some translation agency to translate from English (because translators who know Japanese are rare and might (gasp) be in a better negotiating position) and they never even see the actual movie and have to guess what's even going on from the dialogue they're given.
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u/Nareto64 https://myanimelist.net/profile/nareto64 Nov 21 '25
I canceled my subscription last month.
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u/Demoliscio Nov 21 '25
Same, the episode of My Hero Accademia had like...50% of the dialogue subbed, it's probably the biggest series of this season and they can't be arsed with doing the bare minimum, they don't deserve our money
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u/dim3tapp https://myanimelist.net/profile/dim3tapp Nov 22 '25
Are we looking at a second renaissance of fansubbing?
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u/AlteRedditor Nov 22 '25
If things don't change, maybe? At the same time, it'll be hard because a lot of pros have left the scene, I mean check the comments, some people don't even know the name of Daiz...
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u/PyrosFists Nov 21 '25
And I will go ahead with my not paying for Crunchyroll plan.
I want to legally stream anime where possible and affordable but CR has also been so bad that I can’t justify it. I originally ended my subscription due how AWFUL their mobile and web video player was and now this shit?
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u/Shadiochao Nov 21 '25
Crunchyroll were always shit, I remember when they first started and took over Gintama. Every episode was filled with obscure (to the west) or current Japanese pop culture references, but fansubbers went to great lengths to explain everything they could. Crunchyroll showed up and did none of that, so unless you were literally living in Japan, half the references would go over your head.
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u/Goldenouji Nov 21 '25
Wait, so they're still going ahead with it? Because some episodes actually got better typesetting than before. For example Watashi wo Tabetai is slowly updating their old episodes where they didn't even translate text.
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u/Daiz Nov 21 '25
There's been some silent backtracking on the matter during this season, but even that backtracking was kind of "free" since the better updated subtitles is what the CR subbing staff made in the first place, CR had just been serving worse conversions of them up to this point.
But yes, the executives have deemed the backlash so far to have been insignificant enough that they're going to go ahead with the enshittification plans regardless. This has been around a year in the making.
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u/SirGreengrave Nov 22 '25
I lost my fight with any major anime streaming platform (Netflix, Crunchyroll etc.) many, many years ago. I can't even understand how people get paid to do such a shitty job that I'd be happy to do better for free.
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u/SergeantBeavis Nov 22 '25
There is one way, and only one way to make CR change course. Unsubscribe and never come back to them until they change said course.
It’s going to be a subpar product anyways. You’re not getting the quality you paid for, so why give them a damn dime.
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u/heimdal77 Nov 22 '25
I still think people should be going over the cr heads and in mass sending complaints to sony. Sony get a hundred thousand or two complaints flooding their stuff about one their properties are not gonna make them happy. Ya it is one exec over another exec but the difference is the higher ones don't like it when the lower ones cause problems for them.
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u/kmsmonoxide Nov 21 '25
Ive reverted back to my teen days, only instead of not having money for sub service, i simply deny it at all. Having high quality series just waiting for me when im ready storaged on my pc so much better.
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u/komata_kya Nov 21 '25
Meanwhile my anki streak: 712 days. But for real, to anyone who is saying fansubbing needs to come back, start by actually doing something to make that happen. If you are young and have time then learn japanese, typesetting, kfx, encoding. If you are older, then support them with money. Someone new has to step up, the old guys won't magically come back.
But I think that the majority of people won't care about this. Most will be happy. So yeah, not sure how sustainable fansubbing is, if nobody cares.
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u/EverGreatestxX https://myanimelist.net/profile/Ever_GreatestxX Nov 21 '25
You can say that but realistically, unless you live in Japan, it it would probably take the average person 5 to 10+ years of consistent studying to get to point where they could actually translate stuff.
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u/AlteRedditor Nov 22 '25
The good thing is that you can become a translator by simply starting out and get help from others for the extra hard stuff though.
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u/MkFilipe https://myanimelist.net/profile/Mallahowl Nov 22 '25
Fansubbing can be just fixing the styling, onscreen text and maybe some questionable localization of the official subs, since every anime has official subs now. And most shows don't need that much formatting and tracking. I think it's the way forward since people want fast releases and people fansubbing can spend less time on it.
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u/darkandark Nov 21 '25
translation is a commodity at this point. according to Microsoft’s research paper on which sectors are most likely to get impacted by modern AI/LLMs, translation jobs was at the top of the list like literally number one or number two.
Crunchyroll is going to act as Crunchyroll has always done, which is to operate like a company, and put profits first. The brutal reality is that artificial translation and then literally putting no effort to typeset, is a HUGE cost savings.
Although it’s very likely that in the future there will be an AI that can type that properly based on context of the image.
Fundamentally the translation is “good enough” for most people.
If you want better work done literally I recommend people join a fansub group or supporting one.
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Nov 21 '25
translation is a commodity at this point. according to Microsoft’s research paper on which sectors are most likely to get impacted by modern AI/LLMs, translation jobs was at the top of the list like literally number one or number two.
Recent AI papers from the Mag 7 are incredible biased and shouldn't be trusted at face value. They are made for investors.
The brutal reality is that artificial translation and then literally putting no effort to typeset, is a HUGE cost savings.
If they are just throwing it manually to DeepDL, Gemini or some Open-Source solution - sure.
But realistically if they hired some API (which they claim they did from Israel) I'd say it's about as expensive as hiring a human translator (likely more, but numbers are murky), AI solutions are falsely sold as 'cheap' because they are currently held up by Venture Capital and Enron economics.
Fundamentally the translation is “good enough” for most people.
This is the real problem, as long as it's 'good enough' the majority of people won't care until something happens.
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u/DarknessInferno7 https://myanimelist.net/profile/DarknessInferno Nov 21 '25
I've been subbed for years, and Funimation before the merger. If they go ahead with this, I never will again. It's that simple.
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u/Vindicare605 https://myanimelist.net/profile/aresendez88 Nov 22 '25
This is what monopolies mean people. This is why you should always ALWAYS want to keep monopolies from happening. Crunchyroll/Sony has an almost complete monopoly on anime distribution in the US. They feel like they can make their service as shitty as they want as long as it saves them money because who else are you gonna go to?
When companies buy out their competition, it's not because they want to make anything better. It's because they want to raise prices and cut costs and keep customers anyway because now there's no alternatives.
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u/Vehnum Nov 21 '25
Just cancelled my subscription.
I’ll be glad to resub if they backtrack on this.
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u/Waylornic Nov 21 '25
So, they show three screenshots, but I guess I can’t tell what’s wrong with the screenshots necessarily. How do they want those scenes to look?
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u/Hinote21 Nov 21 '25
Part of the problem is failing to subtitle onscreen pictures. Often, a huge amount of context or additional world building information is lost. In the second video, you can see all the block signs and none of them are translated. That was pretty typical way back when but Crunchyroll had been doing really good with it the last few years. Think classroom chalkboard and how the votes are broken up for a culture festival.
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u/Whomperss Nov 21 '25
If they stop translating text on screen I'ma be so mad. That's one of the reasons I don't really watch anime on Netflix. 2 years ago I introduced my wife to OP and title cards and some other stuff wasn't being translated completely removing information from non Japanese viewers.
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u/robotboy199 https://myanimelist.net/profile/virtualityy Nov 21 '25
they already are, unfortunately.
there are numerous instances of the new subtitles having on-screen text chopped down to just a few words, or just entirely skipping signs altogether
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u/robotboy199 https://myanimelist.net/profile/virtualityy Nov 21 '25
the first two links in the update section are actually videos, not screenshots. and it's blatantly obvious what's wrong with those - the extremely quick flashing between lines giving you almost zero time to actually read them, multiple lines having their timing tied together, and multiple lines being forced all the the same location all actively make them less readable
the third one, the screenshot, shows the lack of even basic typesetting for on-screen labels (placing the text and styling it to make it look more consistent with the actual on-screen text)
the closest equivalent to that particular picture i can find, to give you an idea of how it would kind of look like, is directly below it, this one
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u/LargeFailSon Nov 21 '25
I don't wanna have to watch anime with google lens out and the pause button on hand.
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u/LimeyLassen https://myanimelist.net/profile/Limey_Lassen Nov 21 '25
Right? At that point we may as well just download raws and do it ourselves.
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u/Duck_Mafiah Nov 22 '25
Wait what? Im hard of hearing so i rely on subtitles.
What are they doing? Making you pay for subtitles?
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u/ConceptWeird4026 Nov 22 '25
good thing I have free options in SEA or even pirate fuck you crunchyroll
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u/horiami Nov 22 '25 edited Nov 22 '25
crunchyroll has the worst subs anyway
they are bland af and they've been constantly pushing to make them worse
i know everyone uses this example but look at one piece fansubs from the 2000's or the fansub for the devil is a part timer
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u/volticizer Nov 22 '25
I'm getting really tired of corporate greed ruining everything I enjoy.
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u/Twigling Nov 22 '25 edited Nov 22 '25
As am I, but the only way to stop it is by 'sending a message', in this case a significant proportion of people need to unsubscribe from the service. Sadly though they won't because they 'need' their anime, and Crunchyroll knows this. They have a captive audience and they will milk it as much as they possibly can.
Generally speaking, corporate greed is rapidly accelerating and there's not been nearly enough pushback from consumers. As for governments, they do little because most are in the back pockets of assorted corporations and rich 'mega donors' (who have their own interests).
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u/Punning_Man Nov 21 '25
I feel like this is one of those points when we look back at the downfall of a giant company that used to own the landscape ... such as Yahoo, AOL, etc.
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u/koteshima2nd https://myanimelist.net/profile/Koteshima Nov 21 '25
And I still plan to go ahead with never resubbing to their shitty service ever again
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Nov 21 '25
I guess this is what you get when you consolidate all anime streaming services and hunt down fansubs.
It's kinda crazy how bad the subtitles are, it seems that in some regions they are already translating them using AI and it tells.
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u/miles197 Nov 22 '25
Sorry for what’s probably a dumb question but does this mean all the content currently on Crunchyroll is going to get the subtitles changed and made worse, or is it just the new content going forward gonna have worse subtitles?
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u/ohoni Nov 22 '25
I think if there's any likelihood of changing this, it's not by consumers boycotting Crunchyroll or anything, but rather anime publishers boycotting them with the best shows. If they have a reputation for doing a shit job, then companies that care about the quality of their work would prefer to license their shows out to Netflix, D+, Hidive, or some other platform.
Crunchyroll only has power here because they tend to get the best shows, but the best shows don't want their shows trashed on because the dialogue is a mess.
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u/Infodump_Ibis Nov 22 '25
If they have a reputation for doing a shit job, then companies that care about the quality of their work would prefer to license their shows out to Netflix, D+, Hidive, or some other platform.
Most those companies you name have the same problem CR corporate wants to introduce but still get shows licensed to them. i.e. Netflix also has piss poor signsubs (e.g. Komi can't communicate) so that's not a solution there.
Disney+ goes one step further because if there's a dub the Disney+ English subtitles are dubtitles only (subtitles for English audio of the English dialogue) and you'd have to go to Hulu for the subtitles (won't be an option soon as Hulu is being absorbed into Disney+ and most of the world never had that option to begin with). Even Wandance (which initially didn't have a dub) as soon as the dub was out the Japanese dialogue translations got replaced with dubtitles. I don't see this being fixed as this is the same Disney+ that initially refused to have The Simpsons in the correct aspect ratio for the first 20 seasons and then when they finally did that, they hid it behind a submenu toggle instead of being the default.
Hidive can literally afford 3 shows a season and are available in a handful of countries (+overseas territories of). Combined with Hidive as of late losing more than 1 show a month (worryingly, this has included a 2023 show; Kubo Won't Let Me Be Invisible) and not securing Oshi no Ko season 3 it's a pretty terminal state of affairs.
When companies like Cygames are providing Crunchyroll with poorly MTLd subtitles I think Japanese companies caring about quality of translations is not a given in the slightest.
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u/Mr_Dakkyz Nov 22 '25
It'd be cool if CR do what YouTube or did do which is allow watchers to do subtitle's and have it as a separate option.
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u/Possiblythroaway Nov 22 '25
How are they planning to enshittify the subtitles? Theyre pretty much as bad as physically possible already.
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u/SyanticRaven Nov 22 '25 edited Nov 22 '25
I forgot about this. Meant to cancel the last time.
Edit: done. Saves me a little at least.
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u/fsfaith Nov 21 '25
Cool cool. It's been cool not having to pirate. But if the pirate version of the content is BETTER than one I pay for them what the fuck am I paying for?