missingno

I’m just saying that the original is always better than dub.

To say that as if it’s universal is exactly what I’m trying to say is wrong. Especially if your justification is “it’s not 1:1 so it’s bad” - SungWon Cho, who IMO is one of the most talented English VAs out there, has a response to that that’s way better than I can ever put it.

In 2002 when Naruto first aired? Yeah, a lot of dubs were pretty bad back then, they cut a lot of corners and didn’t always hire the best talent. But today, voice acting is taken so much more seriously now, and there is a lot of equally fantastic talent in the west. Hell, there are some shows I’ve watched just because a VA I like is in them.

I feel like this kind of elitism towards dubs comes from people who grew up in that era when dubs sucked, but haven’t noticed that times have changed since then.

I’ve seen this in licensed titles too. Bocchi the Rock had several pages of notes at the end of each volume explaining references that went way over my head.

In the English-speaking world, we use the term ‘anime’ to specifically refer to animation made in Japan. Other countries do make animation, we just don’t call it ‘anime’ unless it comes from Japan.

But in Japan, ‘anime’ simply means animation. I remember seeing a video where someone interviewed random people on the street in Tokyo asking what’s their favorite anime. The most popular answer was Frozen.