Subs vs Dubs (breaking new ground in blogging!)

I'll get straight to the first point: Fuck you dubfans.

Little backstory; I started writing this a month or so ago with the opinion that "hey, you like what you like.. it's not my place to tell someone how to watch something" and I was going to do a piece looking at the pros and cons of both.

But the more I thought about it, the more this whole dub-community started looking bizarre to me, and I realized that people who are pro-dubs are either 1) Blind, 2) Lazy, 3) Morons, or 4) Young Kids (which is pretty much an "all of the above" answer).

Because if you told me that you prefer to listen to the dubbed version of Seven Samurai, Oldboy, Amelie, or whatever other myriad of foreign films out there I would slap you with my bitch-tits and assume you an uncultured knob-head.

Sure, Magikano may not exactly be Kurosawa, but that's no reason to not take anime as a legitimate medium of expression.

The second, and more important point
Anime is about two things: GAR and Moe/TEH CUTE.

Forget story, mecha, cheap gags, angst, and all that jazz, because those two key factors above are really the lynchpin of anime as we know it. Even if a show doesn't revolve about them, the elements will be strongly present.

And there's your problem. Western voice actresses do not sound TEH CUTE. There may be a couple, but I've certainly never run across them (and yes, I actually do a dub check on all of the DVDs I buy).

GAR is something us Westerners can do a little better, however there's still an unfortunate tendancy for VAs to just put on a strained Eastwood-meets-Ash-from-Pokemon voice and assume they sound awesomely hard. There's also an obviously clear lack of badassed exoticness that occurs with the replacement of the Japanese VA.

Would you think Hilary Haag voicing Pan's Labyrinth is "awesome"?

So in closing, championing a dubtrack isn't as clear cut as a matter of audible preference. It's basically saying "fuck you" to what the majority of series are trying to convey. That's kind of a dick move.

There's something seriously wrong with the notion of "fans" getting excited over the prospect of a dub announcement to their treasured series.

Extremely wrong.

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