Harsh Truths People Can't Accept - English Dub Aren't Cringe becau...

My biggest problem with dubs comes from poor localization ruining scripts even to this day. Not too surprised because a lot of western companies parade politics to boost esg score. It is still well known in the gaming sphere like atrocious localizations from DQ11 to FE Engage. Many translators are very open about changing works to their fancy.

You're trying to tell me that Japanese people don't speak like anime characters?

@Phosphophyllita Most of them don't.

You're trying to tell me that Japanese people don't speak like anime characters?

Sure. But I don't speak Japanese. Most anime-watchers don't. And I like the mostly-unintelligible noise that Japanese VAs make.

I do speak English, and I have preconceptions and tastes about how an English line should sound. It's not surprising that English speakers have such visceral reaction to English anime acting.

I know you're talking about the people arguing that all English dubs "are bad," but personally I'm going to stay far away from them and nothing will make me enjoy what I don't enjoy.

I have never judged dub watchers personally and I think it speaks to a serious lack of maturity and lack of tolerance for different opinions if you care that much about what other people do.

I can completely understand wanting to watch things in your own language or at least a language you can understand. It can also help a lot of people to be able to focus on the visuals better.

I also have a friend who's dyslexic and has ADD and watching dubs helped her to keep up with what we watched together as well.
For example Saiki K has very fast paced humor and we watched that dubbed which helped her quite a bit.
We did end up watching season 2 onward subbed anyway because they stopped making any dubbed versions so she did have a little more trouble keeping up at times, but we both still found the show so funny that we finished it together.

I also agree that dubs have gotten a lot better over the years and they generally try to keep a pretty similar "vibe" to the original VAs from what I've seen.

That being said, I typically do watch sub when watching series on my own since 1. I like how Japanese sounds, 2. it's the creators' original vision for the characters and 3. I'm a pretty quick reader and it doesn't bother me to read subs. (Plus some more niche anime don't have dubs anyway or they can take a moment to come out.)

@Sasori56483 it must be a lie, right? They do speak like anime characters, right? Please, don't shatter my fantasies

I actually have the opposite view. Japanese dubs aren’t cringe, and neither are English dubs. The voice actors are just doing their job by acting their characters, and they generally do a good job. It’s called voice acting for a reason, after all. The characters might not sound like real people, but they sound exactly how you’d expect the characters to sound like. When a dub is bad, it’s usually because of the decision from upper management, and not the fault of the VAs themselves.

I think english dubs are gross no matter how well paid the people are or what their fanboys say. I would still think they're gross even if I never watched the old shitdubs. It's odd that you think you can tell everyone what their impression of dubs is about. You're not a mind reader and most western anime fans alive today probably haven't watched any dub older than the late 2000s anyway.

@Phosphophyllita I know you're joking, but people do genuinely seem to think otherwise.

That said, I recently moved into the city and I do hear a disgusting number of girls talking "like anime girls" to get guys' attention.

For the second time, you're not a mind reader son. And by the way I'm not impressed with your bilingualism. I don't even think japanese sounds cool.

Believe it or not but I have legitimate aesthetic reasons for preferring the original spoken language in foreign media. I'm not the only one, too. I also know anime speech isn't how those people sound IRL, everyone knows that. That's not a secret only expatriot weebs in japan get to know about. Claiming that's the reason why all the plebs back home prefer japanese to english dubs just shows how out of touch you've become over there. Maybe it's time to move back to the real world.



Does it? I don't see that in the substance of any discussions I read about dubs being gross. Maybe this whole origin theory is just your individual opinion.

@LifelineByNature Name one Japanese person who is not an anime character. I dare you

@XMGA030 What's your aesthetic reason for having an audio preference? I'm curious now.

I never said I could read minds. Nor did I say it's "because they sound different to real people" either. I may not be a mind reader, but at least I *am* a reader.

Do I really need to explain this? If you don't already understand the concept of preferring things in their authentic form then it's forever beyond you. There's nothing I can say.

Is that supposed to be logical? I have better things to do than explain elementary concepts to you. I wish you luck in overcoming your learning disability.

Super Bold to claim I know english!!

Bruh, if that would be true, most of the video games original English voice acting would be also unbearably cringe, but for some reason they are not, so I highly doubt that me not being fluent in Japanese is the reason why original Japanese dubs appear superior.
Why is it that almost every English anime dub is horrendous, but almost every English video game dub is phenomenal?
I still stand by my previous assessment. Voice actors who voice anime almost exclusively tend to be entitled narcissists and sociopaths and it baffles me that people still try to argue otherwise after recent SAG-AFTRA drama, Vic Mignogna scandal or absolute vile comments from that Subaru VA about decent political assassination (for which he still wasn't even reprimanded, let alone fired, btw). Meanwhile the biggest scandal in Japanese VA industry was Aya Hirano having consensual sexyal relationship with her bandmates, efuch still ruined her career.
When you are a narcissist, you become entitled to praise and as such you don't hone your craft and that's the result why English anime dubs are bad. They sound bad, because they are allowed to sound bad. And what makes this all worse is that people who actually consume English dubs praise them for this shit.

It's easy to tell if this is personally true for you or not based on if you think some Japanese voice acting is bad as well. If you've ever criticized a Japanese voice performance, then that isn't the issue. Which I would guess is the case for around 99.99% of sub watchers.

One thing I will chime in to say is that I don't really "buy" the argument - and never have (even though it's a claim trotted out very frequently) that when assessing general quality, only older, 90s and earlier pre-2000s dubs were bad compared to the much newer produced and released ones made today or in recent years. Frankly, I consider that attempt to dispel a supposed myth instead itself in fact the myth.

Because I watch everything with the original Japanese audio and English subtitled the same as I watch all other foreign media in its original native language, but due to curiosity of wanting to check out a few seconds or a minute of the dub or occasionally accidentally clicking or downloading the wrong file or having the wrong audio track set within the video player software or any number of eventualities, there have been many occasions when I've heard much more recent dubs all the way up through and including ones from the current year. And they sucked every bit as much.

I believe that if one fundamentally dislikes English dubbing (or insert whatever your native language is in lieu of English) over foreign language works, then that will carry through across the eras. I have never listened to an English dub from, say, 2019 or 2022 and thought and felt "Wow, so much better than those antiquated hackjob ones from 1995." It still sounds intolerably off and ugly to me.

Now, my disliking it doesn't make it objectively "bad" in the way that my dislike of vegetable juice or pig intestine hotpot doesn't make those things inherently objectively bad. But people baselessly universalizing their own subjective views and tastes is more of a global-humanity-throughout-the-entirety-of-recorded-history-on-every-issue-conceivable problem. Not a specific anime audio problem.

@Piromysl It's the format of anime that makes it cringe, though. And even then, some games VA is pretty cringe, which I'll get into in a sec.

But anime *is* pretty cringy. Whether it's shounen or shoujo or slice of life - it's overacted and often has child protagonists. How many of those video games that you think have good voice acting have these same factors in play?

MGS isn't cringe because the protagonist is a middle aged secret agent - but can you really say Persona's voice acting isn't cringe? In both English and Japanese.

Japanese seiyuu perform notably better vocally, compared to the lower class VAs that are usually hired for the English anime versions.

If more English versions had top class VAs like Samuel L. Jackson in Afro Samurai, I would sometimes watch in English.

@LifelineByNature The video games that share the same problem happen to be mostly anime themed video games like Genshin for example. And for the same reason I pointed out. Most of the VAs who voice almost exclusively anime also voice anime themed video games like Wuwa and Genshin.
There are even exceptions that prove the rule. Laura Post, who voices Yelan in Genshin also frequently voices video games (most notably Ahri in League of Legends) yet her performance as Yelan stands above the rest as actually very good, compared to the rest which are garbage. She is a literal cherry on top of a pile of shit.
And yes, I said "most" not all. There are some cases where even original English voice acting is bad like Megan Fox in Mortal Kombat.

I think it's just always going to be a purist sort of thing. People are going to like dubs because they just don't like English dubs no matter how good or bad they are.

Then why isn't it cringe in case of Eng show? Arcane, Blue Eye Samurai or even Kpop Demon Hunters weren't "cringe"***. They had excellent VA'ing.

The scenes in the show were directed to match the delivery of how they speak their native language (most basic example: word order). To translate that you would need an insanely good dub director and voice actors. And generally speaking, those are missing, while JP voice actors are really good and spend a lot of time and money to become better. They are going to vocal coaches - in many cases - weekly, while that's not the case with EN voice actors.

***I wouldn't use the word "cringe". In many cases that describes the general vibe, but I would stay with the word "bad".


Then why does Kpop Demon Hunters work? It was pretty much an Americanized anime. Or ATLA?
There are numerous cases when this "cringe" - this is why I don't like this word - delivery worked, but somehow they didn't manage it with anime? Then something is bad around the people who try to dub the anime.

@ktg Because the format of what makes anime "anime" is cringe. Well, most of the anime that people consider to have cringy dubs, that is. Popular shows, shounen shows, etc. People don't tend to consider the GITS dub to be cringe, but that's because it doesn't follow what's true of typical anime that people *do* consider cringe.

English VA's also do coaching and training constantly for their work. In fact, more-so than most Japanese VAs. You only really see people report (and sometimes, overexaggerate) what certain seiyuu are doing, but people try to apply that as a general norm in the industry when it simply isn't the case.

"Why is ATLA good?"
Because it isn't anime - and thus doesn't fall into the thematic issues that anime does.

As I said above - it isn't all anime that gets critiques, even in English. People say "english dub bad", but the examples they give are always very specific and very similar. There's a reason for that. It's because it isn't the dub that's bad - it's the anime itself.

@LifelineByNature But ATLA and Kpop Demon Hunters follow the format of an anime. That was the point of those projects. They wanted to tell their story in an anime format.


Firstly, that's not the case. It's actually pretty rare.
Secondly, in western countries it's even a popular concept that many people pushes how you shouldn't go to coaches. CDawgVA made a video about how you shouldn't go to coaches because they don't help you. That's where we are.
While JP voice actors even starved to pay for coaches.

So no, the anime has no issue. The EN dub is bad. You also generalized, but it's worth mentioning that in reality there's a huge difference between EN VAs who work on anime and EN VAs who doesn't. There are - in most cases - in a completely different group and have completely different skillset.

Firstly, the original Japanese voice track is not a "dub".

I'm just back from Japan and while it's true that Japanese people - particularly women - don't speak like anime characters most of the time, they do sometimes, but not seriously or often. But an excited Japanese person can sound surprisingly like what we hear in anime. Bizarrely, I got a round of applause and shouts of delight just for asking a girl in a lift to press the button for the 3rd floor in Japanese. Her and her friends' excited chatter about encountering a tourist who was trying to speak the language did sound like a scene from some SoL anime.

But there are bigger problems with English dubs. One is that they are actually American dubs and so we end up watching things set in Tokyo or space or whatever but everyone sounds like they're in LA. The voice acting in the Cowboy Bebop dub is some of the worst for this but of course the dub was aimed at Americans and they love it while to me it's unbearable cringe. On top of that are some localisation attempts which target what the producers think is current American pop culture and values or - even worse - want to sanitise the script for "Good Christian Family Viewing™" in the mid-West.

Then there is the difference in speed of the two languages. Japanese can be very compact but also surprisingly long-winded compared to English; it can also be quite repetitive with stock-phrases. Plus there's the natural difference in what concepts are expressed between any two languages. That makes it very hard to write natural-sounding English which fits into the pace of the animation during conversations.

So, yeah, English dubs ARE bad. They could be better but there's only so much you can hope for given the constraints and economics.