In today’s post, I would like to address my thoughts on fansubs. Glorified by some, vilified by others. However, I think a lot of people on both sides often get so caught up in their beliefs that they forget (or ignore) the big picture.

.ANN commonly likes to vilify the fansubbing community. They proclaim that fansubs are hurting the R1 anime industry. After the “bubble” burst in late ‘04/early ‘05, mainly due to ADV saturating the market with too many B and C titles at one time, fansubs became the scapegoat.

It’s no wonder that some people have a bad impression of fansubs. With groups that continue to fansub series that are licensed, it seems that both fansubers and anti-fansubers tend to forget why fansubing came into existence, and why it continues to exist.

Fans created fansubs so they could raise awareness of the hobby. In our current situation, instead of using fansubs to spread awareness of the medium in general, we spread awareness of individual series. Still, no matter what reason they were meant for, their ultimate usage depends on the person who downloads it.

Anti-fansubers tend to overestimate how fansubs affect the market. Bleach and Naruto used to have 15,000-20,000+ people downloading it per episode before it was licensed. Yet look at the ratings both shows get on CN. Look at how good the DVD’s are selling. I’m not trying to say that fansubs helped these shows. No, far from that. I’m pointing out the fact that fansubs had no negative impact on the success of these shows. Likewise, let’s say ADV licenses some B-grade bishojo/harem series. The show flops. Guess what, it’s not that fansubs killed your market for the title. It’s the fact that it probably is a mediocre show, and people weren’t interested in it when they saw it on TV, watched a preview disk, or rented it. All three of these options generate money, either in the form of ad revenue, copies of an magazine that held the disk, or whatever they get from a rental place like Blockbuster or Netflix. However, they don’t equal out to disk sales.

To illustrate my point, let’s use the recent Kujibiki Unbalance television series. It wasn’t an interesting show, and they moneyed around with the charming character designs that the series had during Genshiken. The first episode was fansubed, and no more after that. Now if the show were to be licensed, and flop, the blame would be laid upon “illegal” fansubs. As stated earlier, some of the anime companies fail to realize that they have also provided free or relatively cheap means of watching the show to consumers before they dole out $20-30 dollars for something they might hate. On the other hand, some fansubers are only interested in free entertainment. They complain about minuscule problems with R1 DVD’s. The fact is though, that they are making excuses so they can justify not paying for the material they enjoyed. They don’t care if the R1 market ceased to exist. Those are the people who have given honest fansubers a bad reputation.