this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
234 points (96.4% liked)
196
6153 readers
1301 users here now
Community Rules
You must post before you leave
Be nice. Assume others have good intent (within reason).
Block or ignore posts, comments, and users that irritate you in some way rather than engaging. Report if they are actually breaking community rules.
Use content warnings and/or mark as NSFW when appropriate. Most posts with content warnings likely need to be marked NSFW.
Most 196 posts are memes, shitposts, cute images, or even just recent things that happened, etc. There is no real theme, but try to avoid posts that are very inflammatory, offensive, very low quality, or very "off topic".
Bigotry is not allowed, this includes (but is not limited to): Homophobia, Transphobia, Racism, Sexism, Abelism, Classism, or discrimination based on things like Ethnicity, Nationality, Language, or Religion.
Avoid shilling for corporations, posting advertisements, or promoting exploitation of workers.
Proselytization, support, or defense of authoritarianism is not welcome. This includes but is not limited to: imperialism, nationalism, genocide denial, ethnic or racial supremacy, fascism, Nazism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc.
Avoid AI generated content.
Avoid misinformation.
Avoid incomprehensible posts.
No threats or personal attacks.
No spam.
Moderator Guidelines
Moderator Guidelines
- Don’t be mean to users. Be gentle or neutral.
- Most moderator actions which have a modlog message should include your username.
- When in doubt about whether or not a user is problematic, send them a DM.
- Don’t waste time debating/arguing with problematic users.
- Assume the best, but don’t tolerate sealioning/just asking questions/concern trolling.
- Ask another mod to take over cases you struggle with, if you get tired, or when things get personal.
- Ask the other mods for advice when things get complicated.
- Share everything you do in the mod matrix, both so several mods aren't unknowingly handling the same issues, but also so you can receive feedback on what you intend to do.
- Don't rush mod actions. If a case doesn't need to be handled right away, consider taking a short break before getting to it. This is to say, cool down and make room for feedback.
- Don’t perform too much moderation in the comments, except if you want a verdict to be public or to ask people to dial a convo down/stop. Single comment warnings are okay.
- Send users concise DMs about verdicts about them, such as bans etc, except in cases where it is clear we don’t want them at all, such as obvious transphobes. No need to notify someone they haven’t been banned of course.
- Explain to a user why their behavior is problematic and how it is distressing others rather than engage with whatever they are saying. Ask them to avoid this in the future and send them packing if they do not comply.
- First warn users, then temp ban them, then finally perma ban them when they break the rules or act inappropriately. Skip steps if necessary.
- Use neutral statements like “this statement can be considered transphobic” rather than “you are being transphobic”.
- No large decisions or actions without community input (polls or meta posts f.ex.).
- Large internal decisions (such as ousting a mod) might require a vote, needing more than 50% of the votes to pass. Also consider asking the community for feedback.
- Remember you are a voluntary moderator. You don’t get paid. Take a break when you need one. Perhaps ask another moderator to step in if necessary.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Excuse me, but I’d like to ask: Why do English speakers hate their voice actors so much? Are they really that bad?
Here in Latin America, we LOVE ours.
There was also online piracy, which included the occasional fan dub. Which like... The passion of fans can be great for some things, but most anime fans lacked the skills fkd professional quality audio production.
And so for a loooong time English dubs got the reputation for being garbage. That changed a while ago, but some people just have a hard time adjusting their expectations.
In the pirate scene you also have fan subs, which is something that is much more accessible to anime fans than audio production. You need a lot of equipment and talent and expertise in different areas to create a dub. You just needed a computer and the ability to translate to make a sub. I don't mean to diminish the effort and skill it takes to translate, but dubbing requires all of those same skills PLUS a whole lot more, so it is harder.
This is not unique to anime. People in the US who watch foreign films in different languages have a similar subculture.
Personally, I like to get high and watch anime, but I find it's harder to read when I'm high. I don't mind watching sub's stuff occasionally, but I prefer dubs.
Edit: and here they all come to prove my point. A bunch of elitist gatekeepers telling me I'm wrong for enjoying media the way I want to enjoy it.
For me that's a plus. I can listen to Matt Mercer's duldct tones all day.
I look up my favorite voice actors and see what else they have been in to decide what to watch next. I think a LOT of people do this, with live action actors moreso.
I'll have to respectfully disagree on this. More power to Matt and his prolific career, but man, can we please have some other voices.
Edit: My goal is to be immersed in the story, and having a small group of VAs work on everything becomes distracting, in my experience.
I used to think this until I watched one of those "[sentence] in 50 languages" videos, and then, surprised by what I heard, I listened to longer things dubbed in languages other than English. It turns out not being able to understand the language doesn't brainwash you into thinking the performance is compelling.
And, TBH, I've come to consider this attitude, that voice actors can just be swapped out like mechanical components, to be disrespectful to them and the art of voice acting. What we have with American dubs is like taking Star Wars and swapping out James Earl Jones for Dwayne Johnson doing the same voice he does in Moana, with zero direction from any of the creatives that originally made the Darth Vader character. Note that I chose Star Wars as an example and not something like Citizen Kane or Schindler's List. I'm not trying to argue that all Japanese media is some kind of high art that can never be equaled. But something doesn't need to be high art to be butchered.
I formed that opinion based onnfeedbacj I received from native Japanese speakers. And it makes a lot of sense. I've also watched compilations just admiring bad voice acting in muktiple languages- sometimes there aren't even words, just noises and exclamations and sounds that are terrible. Sometimes its easy to tell a flat delivery even if you don't speak the language.
And I LIKE bad voice acting sometimes. Depending on the situation it can be more entertaining than good acting.
There is good and bad voice acting in animation written for English-speaking people. Further beyond just the acting itself, there is the writing and and direction and editing and mixing to consider. I've seen stuff with voice actors that I know are good that sounds terrible because of these other factors.
And yes, the acting will change depending on the individual performance, but I don't think that just because someone was the first to do it means they will be the best. For most of human history, plays were performed by hundreds, maybe thousands of different actors across centuries. How many different men have played Romeo or Hamlet? Even with bad actors, you can still usually appreciate the stories.
I would have absolutely no problem with replacing James Earl Jones with another actor in a remake. Heck, there are probably a lot of actors in their prime in Hollywood right now that have spent most of their lives working on their Darth Vader. I don't think that's disrespectful at all. Characters get re-cast quite often as their actors age out or die or jisy have scheduling conflicts. And you see this in anime too: sometimes the Japanese voice actor changes over time, sometimes the English ones do, its not really a big deal.
True, but not what the conversation was about.
All three of these situations are different than dubs. In the first two cases you have people using an existing work to realize a unique artistic vision, combining what was already there with their own perspective and self expression. A remake (and another instance of a play performance) doesn't replace the original, as its an entirely separate work. In the last case you have the original creators of something working around a fact of life, and still doing their best to realize their own vision.
In the case of a dub you have a localization company contracted by a publishing company to produce a product. Their objective isn't to create a new work of art, which is why its very rare for someone to say "you should watch the original first then the dub for the best experience", like they do for, say, Suspiria (1977) and Suspiria (2018).
The desired outcome of a dub is to provide as close to the same experience as possible to the original, but in a different language. So essentially the producers of the dub are trying to do the same job as the original director. The thing is that almost everything about the quality of a movie performance is attributed to the dynamic between director and actor. People literary write books about how a specific performance came about, specific things that a director said to an actor, specific events that happened to take place on set. If I said "give me access to the same actors and cameras and hand me a script and I could do as good of a job as Steven Spielberg" people would think I was insane.
So why is it SUCH a controversial statement to say that maybe Bobson Dugnut at a random localization company may have done a worse job than someone like Yoko Taro or Hayao Miyazaki?
And favouring walking and riding a bicycle over driving a car is gatekeeping of transport because it keeps out the disabled. What a bizarre argument/accusation.
It doesn't, as long as your reading skills are above that of a 12-year-old.
Bruh, what? Non-English films aren't dubbed enough in the first place for this to be a metric for a "subculture".
Car-centric infrastructure is far more detrimental to people with mobility impairments than any other mode of transportation. I would recommend you research what gold urbanism is if you're saying stuff like this.
Reading literally engages different parts of your brain that are otherwise dormant. And as I mentioned, sometimes I want to watch stuff while high. Sometimes I want to give my eyes a break from using my glasses or reading things in fine detail.
I didn't mention this before, but it is also very common for myself and a lot of other people to be doing other things and having TV on in the background. While i'm working or cooking or doing dishes or engaging in hobbies like soldering or woodworking. Especially with incredibly long anime like One Piece... That is a whole lot of hours to dedicate to doing absolutely nothing else. Netflix has talked about how they make "second screen" content now. Personally I find the idea of scrolling some social media in your phone while watching something to be a terrible idea, but its also often enjoyable to just listen to an anime.
Sure.
I'm not. My statement was (quite obviously, I think) an illustration of the bizarre logic of interpreting "A is better than B" as "people who have difficulties with A should be gatekept from the subject altogether and not use B either".
That's still not "a lot more cognitive effort" that you claimed, though, and also not proof that it reduces your appreciation of the animation.
Who cares? That's such a specific use case, nobody is arguing for or against dubbing with regards to how much you can follow it while high.
Writing this after previously arguing dubbing is better because it allows you to follow the animation more attentively is just ridiculous.
This whole discussion is ridiculous, in fact.
they don't talk like how real people talk. according to a semi local voice actor, japanese studios want that weird acting for some reason but a lot of voice actors hate doing it and that's why theres like 3 men and 5 women that do almost all of the english dubs
But many voice actors from other languages don’t speak like “normal people, not even Japanese seiyuu.
Going back to the example of Latin American dubbing, 90% of the time they speak in unnatural Spanish with a neutral accent that doesn’t match any of the Spanish-speaking regions, but it works within the CONTEXT of the scene. The remaining 10% is when they do speak according to a region (mostly Mexico cuz is the one with most prolific dubbing industry), and this is split between when it works and when it’s annoying af.
I think that rather than feeling natural for the “real world,” it should feel natural within the world of the work.
The issue is more that English dub voice actors tend to be .... not as good, and wind up sounding stilted. Watch the dubbed version of Princess Mononoke, and compare it to ... uh...
You know, it's been so long since I watched any English dubs that I've plum forgotten what some of the worst offenders are.
Princess Mononoke with the Billy Bob Thornton casting. Awful.
That was actually partly what I was thinking of. Whether you liked the voice is up to preference, but you'd have a hard time arguing that the performance was worse than typical dubs from the era.
I don't have a working knowledge of many languages commonly dubbed in but even when the original japanese goes past a certain threshold I can't stand it. I understand enough japanese to follow along with anime that isn't too complicated and recognize that it tends to be different from real conversation to varying degrees. Some games and anime I've gone to an audio track of a language way beyond my comprehension just to feel less uncomfortable.
Regional accents or dialects gross me out in dubs though. I die inside every time kansai ben or something gets replaced with a very fake us 'murican rednecky bit. I could probably tolerate it if it was using or based on english from outside of the states but most of the time they end up turning it into a trailer trash vibe for a character that is very much not that.
I can kinda get behind the feeling correct for the setting but usually its just too jarring and I can't picture a world where anyone would speak like english dub anime girl outside of gooner streaming or something. As a different example I didn't mind the voice acting mod of the outer wilds game. Much of the audio felt off to my ears that have been listening to mostly english all my life but the characters are all aliens (to us) and the ones that feel most off are of a different species to the player character and the audio would presumably come from the translator device. It also was nowhere near as jarring as the typical budget anime dub.
One thing that hadn't been mentioned yet in this thread is that when voice acting is sub-par, it's not as noticeable when it's not in my native language. That's my own experience anyway.
I personally struggle with English VAs often when they seem to ham it up more than seems appropriate, or don't seem to take things as seriously as the scene's tone.
Most of them aren't too bad. It's just that a lot of the anime dub voice actors do the same kinds of voices over and over again, and it gets a bit repetitive. Outside of dubs, there's grown women voicing kids, which can be a little strange, but still better than getting kids to do it. The ones voicing originally English speaking characters don't get as much respect or attention as live action actors like Tom Holland or Keanu Reeves, but the more well established ones do get a bit of both. https://youtu.be/DzjiBJ7AetE This is what anime dubs sound like to a lot of us.
I love figuring out what One Piece character any given voice actor played. There were so many it's like the Kevin Bacon of animes. It's usually Zoro.
Though that's normal for Japanese voice acting, too. Many male characters end up with a female voice actor this way.
Though that's normal for Japanese voice acting, too. Many male characters end up with a female voice actor this way.
English voice acting tends to change the tone way too much
I could guess. Most English actors are not used to doing dubs. Lots are just giving it a go when they want to be a screen actor.
There's a far more reliable pool of work for dubbing TV and film to languages other than English and therefore a greater pool of professionals to pick from. Leading to higher standards.
On top of that there's an anachronism of American actors accents in older stories set in the past that don't fit, or trying other English accents they've never been exposed to fit in.
Good English speaking actors and voice actors are in really high demand outside of the gaming industry too. There are a huge number of bad or inexperienced actors trying to get a career going.
The quality of actor for dubbing a game you can get for a budget is probably lower or at least much less consistent.
When we love an actor they get star billing and the cost to hire them rockets. They then move towards film and TV.
We love our good actors but that means they're too expensive.
Eh. There's tons of dubbing in my language, but I'd say that English voice actors for games are better on average. Except when the original voice acting is in a very specific style, like whatever Japanese voice actors are doing, or games very obviously set in a non-English region (e.g. all the shooters set in eastern europe), or the non-English voice actors just ending up better than usual.
Japanese and English have a very different cadence. Also, in Japan, anime voice actors are a big deal and take it very seriously, whereas in the English speaking world these jobs historically attract a different level of talent.
Any fiction which is written, performed and edited in a given language is just going to be better in that language 90% of the time. Its the more complete artistic vision.
Of course, if you don't care that much about the artistic vision, and you are just putting on something in the background while you browse your phone, that's an entirely different issue.
It's a hold over I think. From back in the day when dubs were entirely fan made so the quality of actor was just "whoever wanted to do it for free". It could also be 4kids hangover from watching these terrible dubs of one piece or pokemon from back in the day.
Not even remotely just fan dubs. ADV was often, but not always quite bad. Funimation can be very hit and miss. I don't know how familiar people are with Rikudo Koshi and Excel Saga these days. The English dub was a crime. It's an absurdist series by nature. The absurdity bolstered by the serious delivery in insane situations. The English dub lost most of the serious tone. With a lot more goofy, ahyuk ahyuk delivery. It was baaaaaaaaaaaad.
But as someone who's been a fan and watched anime for over 35 years. It's gotten worlds better. And not even all the stuff back then was that bad. The dub of space adventure cobra still holds up well for me. Not perfect. But very serviceable.
It really depends. Just an example, Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill had mostly fine dubs, but I absolutely hated the English Sui voice acting. It just didn’t fit right, and one individual even told me that was the reason she refused to watch the anime (she prefers dubs.)
I’ve experienced similar with other anime, so I just err on the side of subs these days.
English dubs on Kaguya-sama: Love Is War are fantastic, btw...
But I've seen comparisons where dubs completely change the meaning of what they're saying.
Maybe it's just because I don't watch enough anime, but while I've definitely recognized voice actors in different shows, I don't personally find it any more annoying than seeing an actor play another character in another IP.
Idk his name but one guy is in a ton of stuff including games, but I love when I recognize it.
I actually love it. When I find a voice actor I like, I look up their filmography to find new shows to watch.
English dubs for media where English was not the main market are usually terrible (yes it's mostly about anime as far as I know)
For me, the English dubs are always missing something. Kind of reminds me of watching a play put on by a highschool drama club vs. something that's been on broadway.
I guess it just sounds unprofessional to me when comparing to the Japanese acting.