The big news in weebdom is the complete shutdown of KissAnime and KissManga, two hugely popular pirate sites that fans of manga and anime have relied on to get content for free. This follows on the heels of Japan tightening its copyright laws.
Given the enormous popularity of these sites, this will have repercussions that remain to be seen.
American voice actors have been doing a lot to make themselves obnoxious lately, so they took this as another chance to show their lack of basic P.R. skills: Several took to Twitter (the internet’s home of celebrities behaving moronically) to rub salt in the wound and gloat over the fans who could no longer get their content from these sites. Of those I’ve seen, the most notable of these gloats is this one:
If your pirating anime, please stop. Your excuses are invalid. Please learn the concept of “then you don’t get to have it.” You are not entitled to consume it merely because it exists and is out of your reach. That’s some colonizer bullshit. pic.twitter.com/AOqoHeBRBO
— Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Alex Moore (@AlexMooreActor) August 16, 2020
That’s from Alex Moore, who has done English dubs for Fire Force and Fairy Tail. To her credit, she later apologized for some of her language. Still, I think her comment is worth noting because she brings up one of the most compelling reasons to turn away from official translations and toward pirate sites and fansubs. I’ll quote it in case the tweet goes away and the image accompanying it disappears:
“But [PC culture/feminism/politics] of dubs ruins the show!”
No it doesn’t, you’re just an asshole. How many times have you heard someone yell “YOLO!” or “YEET!” Or mention a meme in a localization? It’s done to make it accessible and relevant, not be transliteral. (BTW, next liberal feminist Witch coven meeting is at BN’s.)
Notice what she’s doing here: People complain about messages that are not in the original material being wedged into that material, and her response is, first, that you’re an asshole, apparently because you disagree with her ideologically. This is a standard tactic of the Woke cult—either acquiesce to them on every last little jot and tittle or you lose your humanity card.
Second, she argues that trendy words should be wedged ham-fistedly into translations to be “relevant” and then, laughably, gives outdated examples: No one says “YOLO” anymore (thank goodness), and “yeet” is on its way out. Memes, generally, go stale within a few weeks after they appear. That’s why you shouldn’t screw around with translations this way: Because you’re dating your material, and chances are, you don’t know what the kids think is hep and happening anyway, even if you think you do.
Since she likes internet lingo so much, I’ll sum it up this way: What she writes here is Boomer-tier cringe.
She inadvertently makes the best case for piracy I’ve ever seen: “Yes, we are going to be unfaithful in our translations, and you’re going to like it, you asshole!”
To give an idea, of what she thinks is making a show “accessible” and “relevant,” this is the most infamous of altered translations, from a show called Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid:
You can see that the dub has nothing to recommend it over the sub; it is not more comprehensible, not more “relevant” in its lingo. It is merely an example of someone thrusting a political agenda into a show that has nothing to do with it, simply because she can.
I’ve previously encountered this before: I have a review expressing my suspicions that VIZ inserted identity politics into Sailor Moon R: The Movie. I have since had confirmed that my suspicions were correct—but of course I knew I was correct to begin with because, unlike VIZ (and most of Sailor Moon’s Western feminist fanbase), I can grasp the worldview in which Sailor Moon was written and recognize lines that don’t belong to it. Those lines don’t make the show more “relevant” as Miss Moore asserts; they stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.
I can’t in good conscience approve of piracy: There’s a lot of anime I want but don’t have because I can’t get it legally. Despite this being a site about magical girls, you’ll notice I don’t talk about the latest Pretty Cure series; that’s because I can’t get them. I’d love to watch Sugar Sugar Rune or the Studio Pierrot shows from the 1980s, but I can’t acquire them legally, so I go without. Asking that people purchase things legally rather than steal, and go without if they cannot purchase legally, is not normally unreasonable, especially when those things are mere entertainments—normally.
I’m not actually prepared to approve piracy. But smug voice actresses make it tempting.
