Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
EDIT: Link was taken down thanks to someone in the comments here’s the archive for the page https://web.archive.org/web/20251004184506/https://fandomwire.com/crunchyroll-faces-cancelation-why-anime-fans-are-choosing-piracy-after-latest-update/
https://bsky.app/profile/lamhfada.bsky.social/post/3m2c3udxnjc2u
When property is valued over people, piracy is protest. Pirating undermines a system that guards profit while neglecting humanity. Every download is a refusal to accept laws that protect wealth over well-being.
And the Spotify ceo just stepped down so he could focus on weapons systems for Israel. The people running all of our media services are Nazis.
Fascism is the natural end stage of capitalism. Plenty of businesses that have no core connection and competency with the military are embedding themselves into the military. For now, most of the US top brass loathe the Trump administration, but eventually they will be replaced by loyalists. We might get a real life Enclave if something isn’t done to rid the fascists.
Ahh good ol’ Aegisub. I have great memories of subtitling anime in my late teens before I got a girlfriend and the fansub scene died when Crunchyroll took over.
I was also one of the people helping test Aegisub on Linux (2009-ish), I wasn’t a programmer at the time but I remember a dude called ‘verm’ in the IRC channel who did a bunch of work to make Aegisub stable on Linux. He taught me the difference between little endian and big endian, I guess he was bored that day
Enshittification, everyone. It comes to everything.
Animelab died for this
The problem here is that all these major anime providers are owned by Sony, so you’re kinda fucked if you want to boycott them.
Did you read the article - or even the title? This story is about people turning to piracy, not turning to another official source.
You’re not fucked if you have The Pirate Bay. :-)
Have you been living under a rock?
I live under a rock apparently!
Anime’s on tpb now? Fuck me i just use #transformers
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Lol. Crunchy roll was always crap. Watching anime in the raw is torture.
As far as I know we don’t even have fansubs anymore, any group nowadays is just a rip of whatever streaming has the anime, current anime if it’s not picked up by any streaming will get no subs, the streaming giants were successful and embracing it and enshitifying.
Some groups are still alive:
And there goes the last streaming service I still paid to access. It was convenient exactly because of the subtitles…
Everything now must flow through my -arr stack.
The zionism thing was the icing on the shit cake. Fuck that genocidal ethnostate, and fuck all genocide enablers.
I cannot seem to find any verification that any of this is happening. An OPs link is dead.
Found this. Apparently they took the post down but here is the archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20251004184506/https://fandomwire.com/crunchyroll-faces-cancelation-why-anime-fans-are-choosing-piracy-after-latest-update/
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I wouldn’t even pirate their content! Let’s just hope enough people leave so they can shut down already!!! :-(
Its not their content (unless they make originals I dont know) they are just distributing Japanese content
I think they’ve funded a couple of series, although not nearly as many as Netflix has.
So we’re banning everything from Israel now?
Yes
That is the purpose of a boycott yes. Here are some other examples
Abolitionist boycotts of Southern goods over slavery - https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/boycott-sugar-slavery-bds/
Boycotts of German goods over Nazi policies- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_anti-Nazi_boycott
Boycotts of South Africa over Apartheid - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Apartheid_Movement
Ongoing boycott of US goods by Canada over a threatening stance taken by US government- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Canadian_boycott_of_the_United_States
I don’t want to support any company that is either directly or indirectly funding genocide and fascism. It’s not complicated.
If you found out that Netflix powered their servers using an orphan grinding machine, would you still subscribe to them?
So you don’t buy anything that comes from USA, Italy, China, Russia…, or that does business with a company based here? That’s pretty much all of them
Given how things have been going, it seems an appropriate course of action.
Yes.
yes
Be serious.
I’m so super mega serious. Seriously. I’ll try it more basic, but deadly serious:
"What going on?
Me not understand.
Why hate thing? Is cause ai, or cause Israeli, both? Something else?
Why do I care who is hitting the keyboard characters to sub a story i already know/love?
AI gets subs wrong, and thinking that doesn’t matter is both ableist and just a terrible lazy product, but that’s not the pressing matter.
It’s Israel. Because giving money to another party is not a value neutral action. Using a site that pays money to Israel—and you either know what that means or are purposefully avoiding the subject—means you are supporting Israel. Your consumption does not occur in a vacuum.
Israel, the country committing a genocide? The country actively and openly exterminating an entire ethnic group? And the product isn’t even good anyway?
Yea, it’s actually so easy to tell them to fuck off. If you can’t figure that out your moral compass is broken and you should send it in for a warantee repair.
I don’t like anime, so this has no bearing on my life. Hot take, I know.
More like useless comment in such a thread.
Why are you commenting on a post you think has nothing to do with you, then?
But let me say this; corporations becoming increasingly emboldened to replace people with AI, disregard accessibility concerns, and make ethically bankrupt purchasing decisions without any consequence is something that perhaps should concern you, regardless of whether the company’s output is of relevance to your interests or not.
Hot take, I know.
Fansubs have always been superior.
I miss them because when something like Seitakoi no Ichizon made reference jokes, instead of localizing they had translator notes at the top explaining the reference and what it was from, I learned so much old japanese otaku culture back then thanks to it.
My daughter got into anime through friends and I got some street creds by talking about how things used to be. Buying laserdiscs in Japan, subbing them and showing them at conventions. I subbed two episodes of some show I don’t remember. Or shipping VHS tapes across continents. My daughter doesn’t care, of course. But her friends were impressed. I fear that that was my last hurrah, though. I got nothing else.
Remembers all the fan sub opening/ending Karaoke so I could actually understand songs too. 🥹
Steins Gate fansubs were amazing.
There are barely any real fansubs left. Most are Crunchyroll, Netflix or Funimation restyled and maybe retimed plus checked if they spent a lot of time on it.
I’m an old pirate who remembers, and the thing, the raw ingredient missing in this scenario?
need
If it didn’t exist, if there was no possible way to get a copy of somesuch Gundam episode whatever in english, some dude somewhere would cross the ends of the earth to get it onto the internet. Piracy is motivated entirely by utility and need, it’s why music piracy atrophied into almost nothing until Soulseek arrived and streaming prices increased. Supply met demand, and it will again for fansubs.
If it’s needed, someone will meet the need. We did it in 1998, we’ll do it next year.
And that’s honestly all that’s needed, the official translations are usually perfectly fine. The elaborate typesetting is what makes the fansubs so good.
Agreed, It very noticeable how bad the subs are. I remember watching an the terminator anime and the subs were atrocious.
https://reddit.com/r/television/comments/1f4cj61/netflixs_wellanimated_terminator_zero_starts/?
I’ve been an anime of crunchy roll with those auto ai subs and the main character is called Kun. Holy shit half the time it’s censoring itself because it’s trying to say something racist, but not always…
That‘s how Crunchyroll itself started out if I remember correctly. Now look at it, completely unrecognizable. It‘s exemplary for how things have been progressing or rather regressing this century so far.
