I’m not telling.
For starters I’m going to point out a few things for anyone who may wind up here and think, whoa holy crap that’s amusing…. or dood I liked that review! First of all if I review any anime, it’ll be from a point of view reflecting only the sub titled version. As a rule I don’t watch dubs because I have a dislike for North America’s anime industry about as deep as… something really deep; Mariana’s Trench perhaps. This stems mostly from the typically below mediocre voice talent they like to hire as well as editing shows to change the target audience, or just needlessly editing a show to remove things they think I shouldn’t see because a few soccer moms have sent them nasty letters… not that I have anything against soccer moms. I will sometimes though mention what I thought of the dub. THis in no way implies I watched the whole thing in english. This just means I switched over to it once or twiceto see how bad it really was. I will never ever bash something I’ve never tried. I’m so tempted to put something like dattebayo or it’s more annoying alternative “BELIEVE IT!” here but I’ve grown to dislike that show, mostly for annyoing fans whom I like to refer to as Narutards… not that all fans of the show qualify for that. About the only way to qualify is to call it the BEST ANIME EVAR!!!!!11111onenineelevtyone when it’s the only show you’ve ever seen. I have legitimate beefs with it as well but I’ll save that for another post.
And when I say otakuism, or even refer to myself as an otaku I want to make one thing clear. I don’t mean it like the people who like to call themselves experts after having seen all the english episodes of Inuyasha and Dragonball Z. I mean the actual definition. (link leads to a wikipedia article on Otakuism.) Now, after having skimmed through that article you should have a basic idea of what I mean. So yes, I have next to zero social skills unless safely hidden behind the glow of a computer monitor. I am working my way towards slightly overweight, I am unemployed (currently anyway). And yes, I do spend ninety percent of my time either on the internet talking about anime or watching it. That is if I’m not playing video games (Recently I’ve been playing PatchCon) or reading comic books. (I read actual books more often actually) I have a stockpile of pictures on my computer of anime characters that’s several gigabytes in size. (The one on my other computer is bigger.) Yes my personal hygiene uh… patterns are somewhat … questionable… (speaking of which I was going to shower a few hours ago…) So you can count on one thing, I know what I’m talking about. Well that and like I said I don’t knock things I haven’t tried. If I thought a show was so boring I stopped watching it I forced myself past at least episode 3; a rule an online acquaintance of mine got me started on.
If you’re one of those folk who’s never seen anything but dubbed anime relax, nothing wrong with that at all. Even I was there once upon a time, but yes, you are missing out on a lot of good stuff. Mostly the only reason for that is because the North American anime industry (and the rest of them for that matter) assume it won’t have much of a fanbase, and that’s how they decide what gets brought over, by how much money it’s going to make them. The best I can offer as an example is the Azumanga Daioh “incident”. It wasn’t much of an incident but it’s when a few companies realized that we fans know what we want. (They figured the fan base would be nil and then the show was fansubbed and became absurdly popular. But this was also in the same time frame as flipping manga to read like an ‘american’ book.) but other gems such as Air have been totally lost to people who don’t watch subtitled stuff, which sucks because Air is awesome. I think 800 odd words is more than enough don’t you?
