The Great Anime Debate: Dub or Sub?
Every now and again in my beloved Blerd anime corner of Twitter, I’ll see the discourse begin to rage on about subs watchers vs dub watchers of anime. Most of it being that sub watchers can be kind of elitist against dub watchers and it is annoying. Well, as an annoying sub watcher, I’d like to plead my case!
For those outside of the anime community, dub and sub, despite sounding like BDSM terms, refer to watching anime (or at this point, any media that is not spoken in your native tongue) with subtitles in English versus watching it dubbed over with English voice actors.
Like many anime fans who grew up in the 90s, I got into anime by watching dubbed anime on television: Dragon Ball Z, YuYu Hakusho, Sailor Moon, Inuyasha, Full Metal Alchemist, Yu-Gi-Oh!, etc. A lot of my animes, even if I have watched them subbed since, I hear them in the voices of their English dub actors.
There are a lot of talented voice actors in the industry who have worked to bring character to life, so I want to make it clear that my preference for sub has nothing to do with a lack of quality on that end. My issue with dubs is that historically and presently to a degree, they have erased queer aspects from certain animes and will either Americanize whole parts of the show or change core messages for the sake of more Western-leaning ideas.
I remember when I started getting the internet for the first time and got access to fansites, and that’s how I found out about all the queer content that had been taken out of Sailor Moon and Card Captor Sakura. Even before I realized I was gay, I simply found it annoying and frustrating, like reading an abridged version of a book by accident. It is felt as if I wasn’t getting the story fully right, that I wasn’t being allowed to make own opinion.
When it comes to cultural erasure, I remember back in Pokémon days when the dub would call rice balls jelly-filled donuts … as if a rice ball was some strange food no one would have ever seen. Or in Yu-Gi-Oh! where they made it seem like the characters were in the US, but then had to take an overnight flight to go to Califonia. Little things that at the time seemed strange but didn’t take away from the story.
Thankfully, now there is much less pretending that rice balls are “donuts” and infusing of random New York/Jersey accents to make the characters sound more American, but sadly it does still happen.
My goddaughter made me watch Glitter Force with her on Netflix. Glitter Force is the Saban dub adaptation of Smile PreCure! a super popular magical girl anime series in Japan. As my goddaughter watched Glitter Force I was taken back to my own childhood. All of the characters have been given names like Emily, Kelsey, Lily, and April and the characters are now all implied to be from the States.
This bugs me.
It bugs me because there is already so much very weird discourse about “race” when it comes to anime characters that is honestly so exhausting already, but when dubs decide to make anime less Japanese in makes me uncomfortable. I understand tweaking things like jokes every once in a while, but, feel that if we love this medium and the stories being created, then we should honor the cultural nuances and tone.
Last year when I spoke with some of the dub cast of Dragon Ball Super, Sean Schemmel (Goku) brought up how he still has to fight for Goku to be written as he was by Akira Toriyama and not in a more idealized, heroic, Americanized way and part of why he loves Kai is that they were able to keep it closer to the original material.
Again, there is nothing wrong with dubs, but because of all of these things, I often find myself wondering if I’m going to get the full story if I watch one? I don’t begrudge people who want to watch anime and do other things, or just honestly prefer the English adaptation, there are super-talented people on these shows and I still watch the original DIC dub on my Sailor Moon VHS (yes, I still happen to own one of those). I just have a lot of trust issues.
Which do you prefer? What are some of the series you prefer as a dub versus a sub? For me: Saiyuki.
(image: J.C.Staff)
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