Crunchyroll Accused of Making their Subtitles Worse?

One of the biggest challenges when watching anime outside of Japan is that most people outside of Japan do not speak Japanese, and thus rely on subtitles, dubs, and typesetting to help them understand the piece of media they’re watching. As we saw above, if you do not speak Japanese, you’re unlikely to comprehend the joke in Komi Can’t Communicate. However, in Crunchyroll’s release of My Dress-Up Darling shown above, you can both follow the character’s narration, as well as follow what’s being written on the chalkboard.

Since its inception, Crunchyroll’s localization team has used a free program called Aegisub to create subtitles and on-screen text translations. The tool is incredibly flexible, allowing for a greater variety of fonts, unicode characters, and simultaneous elements that can move independently. You can use multiple fonts, colors, and effects active at the same time to provide greater clarity to the viewer.

This is all impossible for Netflix, Disney, and the like. But as of now, it seems like it may be the case for Crunchyroll, too. As of today, we’ve seen rumors that Crunchyroll has forced its team off of Aegisub.

While this rumor has not been substantiated by an independent third party as of writing, it makes sense with what we’re seeing in new season releases, and with other recent news. Crunchyroll’s major layoff just two months ago, during which most of their operations team was unceremoniously let go, included some of the longest-serving Crunchyrollers, adding up to a combined total of around 100 years of service to the company by my calculations. Is a new subcontractor and/or service the replacement? It seems that way to me.
So what?

If this is indeed the case, let’s try to see why Crunchyroll would do this. Here are a few possible explanations:

1) Crunchyroll sub-licenses a lot of content. If you look at Netflix’s most-watched anime of the year so far, a lot of it comes from Crunchyroll, like Solo Leveling and Mashle: Magic and Muscles. If you’re Crunchyroll, it’s easier to make just one version of the subtitles, than to have a Crunchyroll-specific one and another that you send out for ingestion for “Crunchyroll on Prime Video” and “Crunchyroll on YouTube.”

2) It’s a lot of work. Every member of the Crunchyroll localization team I’ve ever talked to or worked with is obsessive about anime and anime culture, and wants to make the anime watching experience the best it could be, no matter what. But hey, if you’re Crunchyroll and you’re trying to offload localization work to less specialized contractors who are typically not trained to use Aegisub or engage in moderate typesetting, you might see it as a cost-cutting measure to stop doing it. (The jury is still out if it actually would do that, though.)

3) From a product development standpoint, it’s easier to use industry standards for this sort of thing. It’s rough to be the only major streaming service to care about typesetting. And extremely expensive to re-encode each language’s video files!

But here’s the thing: if Crunchyroll has indeed changed its standards, there’s now zero major streaming services that care about typesetting. Crunchyroll is supposed to be the “fan-first” service, something their leadership likes to highlight wherever possible. But between this and last year’s removal of comments (including excising years of previous comments), their product road map suggests they are anything but fan-focused.

I don’t believe this is going to lead to a noticeable rise in piracy or anything, to be clear. And even then, it would not be much of a statement. The supermajority of people who pirate anime watch on bootleg streaming sites, which use rips of official releases from places like Crunchyroll at a rate of over 95%. The most popular “fansub” group in 2025 by every available metric is “SubsPlease”, which, again, is just Crunchyroll rips. Outside of a few notable exceptions, our research does not see pirate behavior actually behave as if it’s in response to a service problem. This is all to say: if Crunchyroll stops doing typesetting work, for most anime, it will simply cease to exist. The viewing experience for the typical anime fan will go down.

But when anime piracy makes up “nearly 28% of TV piracy,” according to research by Muso, it’s a much more normal behavior, and makes bootleg streaming sites seem a more viable replacement good. This kind of anti-customer behavior will be seen as validation by the pro-piracy crowd. Anime is disproportionately pirated to a large degree primarily because of ease and inertia, but anything that justifies the behavior is celebrated and repeated ad-nauseum. And I don’t really understand why Crunchyroll seems so eager to give piracy this easy win.

If Crunchyroll suddenly reverts to their previous subtitling practices, most of this article can be disregarded. But if not, we lose something small but important to anime as a medium in exchange for a marginal benefit to Crunchyroll’s coffers.