Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Angry rant: Stupid pompus n00bs.
I can't hold this in any more. If I hear one more complaint about the Naruto dub, I'm going to bust. Yes, I know the voices aren't perfect. Yes, there is occasional mispronunciation. Yes, I know, I know, it's not perfect. But, it's a hell of a lot better than the dubs I started out with.

I am so sick and tired of these pompus-ass n00bs that probably came on board with the upswing in anime popularity. They find anime, find that they can get it for free, and automatically think that the original Japanese with fansubs is the best thing evar. It, of course, never occurs to them that fansubbers are human and often in a rush, so that there is mistranslation. They also wouldn't know bad Japanese voice acting if it jumped in front of them and beat them senseless with a hallibut. Add to that their blatant ignorance of language (Japanese and English are extremely different in grammar and speech!), and you have yourself a pompus-ass n00b that irritates the hell out of people like me.

Don't get me wrong, it's not all n00bs. There are seasoned otaku that are equally snobbish and possibly more irritating because they should know better. It's especially worse because the seasoned otaku are giving the n00bs a creditable base from which to complain. "I think the Naruto dub sucks, but so does my friend and he's been an otaku for seven years!"

I'm also tired of this "OMG-the-production-companies-are-greedy!" argument. Go out and compare Funimation or ADV or whatever to a company that could truly be put under greedy. You'll find that they make substatially less money, from what I can tell. Here is a report on the earnings for Navarre (which is Funimation's mother company. Bear in mind that the data ecompasses all of their properties. Here is Nike's 2006 earnings report. Yes, kids, that's a whole decimal place. Mind you, I randomly chose the comparison company, but you get the picture. There are a lot more profitable (greedy?) companies out there.

Secondly, if not for these production companies, anime may not have taken off in the States at all. It would have, instead, remained underground. If production companies hadn't licensed anime in the first place and even dared to put it on TV, we wouldn't have nearly as many otaku and the industry would have failed right then and there. You complain about a $30 Naruto DVD? What about a $50 import with no English subtitles. That's an alternative. Sure, I guess there might be fansubs, but recalling that there aren't nearly so many otaku, would the fansubbers even bother? Their whole point is to spread the love of anime, but if there isn't a large audience, they might not waste their time or energy.

Yes, I know they're companies and that they're out for profit. But, you must remember that production companies were started by fans, directly or indirectly. They listen to fans much better than companies whose base is the general public.

So, pompus n00bs and elitst jerks, maybe do some reasearch before throwing stones, eh?

Of course, this doesn't apply to any of you. My argument is kind of wasted, huh? I'm not claiming to be against fansubs or anything, I'm claiming to be against pompus jerks. I think that's a sentiment we all can get behind. ^_^

-MC