Global Fandom: Susan Noh (United States)

Anime Fansubbing in the Age of Simulcasting

The widespread exposure of anime in the United States and the global community more broadly has largely been predicated on fansubbing communities which have existed since the 1980s. Fansubbers are industrious fans who translate and distribute international work to their various social and digital networks. Despite this history, fansubbing and peer-to-peer distribution remain deeply ambivalent and polarizing practices, exemplified by the ways in which fans, industry, and practitioners grapple with the motivations and effects of these cultural practices as it relates to questions of access and impact on production industries. While much has already been written about the motivations and practices of fansubbers prior to the rise of streaming services, my research seeks to centralize the impact that the existence of formal distribution portals has had on the English anime fansubbing community, and where different forms of illicit distribution have emerged to challenge the once-dominant presence of anime fansubbing. One such emergent figure, which intersects with the streaming services’ rise to mainstream popularity, is the fan-ripper: individuals who use automated scripts to download content from these formal streaming services to distribute illicitly elsewhere. Whereas previously, the practice of fansubbing had largely been justified as a means for proliferating awareness and access to anime in a media landscape that seemed disinterested and incapable of licensing productions in a timely fashion, that is no longer the case, as simulcasting services like Crunchyroll, HiDive, and Funimation release content often merely an hour after the official broadcasting in Japan. 

            Given the prevalence of fan-ripping and formal anime streaming services in the United States, the number of individuals who are devoted to the practice of fansubbing has declined. Anime fansubbing used to be divided into two distinct groups that were distinguished by their strategy of approaching translation. There were the speed-subbers, who focused on delivering fans rapid-fire subtitles, often at the cost of quality, and then there were the quality-subbers, who would often take their time to ensure accurate subtitles, immersive typesetting and effects, and more. The advent of simulcasting streaming services largely put speed-subbers out of business, as no matter how speedy a fansubbing group may be, it was impossible to compete against streaming services who often receive early access to the work in order to create their own subtitles for coordinated international releases. Beyond the formal streaming portal, it was also difficult for speed-subbers to compete against the growing community of fan-rippers, who would automatically download the content that streaming services provide and distribute them to often-illicit anime providers. It is no surprise then that one of the primary justifications that contemporary fansubbers give for their continued presence in the distribution landscape is that of “quality,” as this discursive thread is a remnant of the quality fansubbing groups that used to exist alongside the speed-subbers. 

            How “quality” is discursively defined within the fansubbing community and their supporters primarily revolve around the editing of the translations, typesetting, and the inclusion of unique textual features that fansub groups incorporate in order to cater specifically to fans’ needs. These definitions of quality exist against the grain of official releases from streaming portals. For example, throughout a series of interviews that I did with active fansubbers, features like karaoke type during the opening/endings of series, immersive typesetting of background signs and text, as well as organic sounding translations that carefully balance accuracy became markers that distinguish the fansub from the official translations. Simultaneously, fansubbers were quick to denounce the quality and perceived weaknesses of official translations, often criticizing exploitative labor practices as one primary reason for the continued mediocrity of official releases. As a few interviewees noted, their fansubbing work would not be complete until official releases can meet their unique standards of quality. To the contemporary fansubber, spending more time working on a translation as a passion project is more amenable than the idea of working for a company that provides paltry pay and demands an unreasonable schedule for getting this labor done. Indeed, several fansubbers were deeply critical of the ways in which they saw corporate entities exploit the professional translator’s fannish passions for anime to encourage them to take lower rates than what may otherwise be considered the norm for translation labor in other fields. While much of the news regarding low pay rates and exploitative labor conditions are not publicized, the whisper networks that connect fansubbers to professional translators continue to allow certain forms of gossip and knowledge to travel. Admittedly, it is difficult to discern the extent of veracity of this news, but its existence nevertheless reveals much about the ideological tensions that exist between official corporate players and those that work within the informal economy. 

This distinction between the unpaid digital laborer feeling empowered through their hobbies and the professional as being exploited, despite being economically compensated and retaining the clout of working on their beloved projects in an official capacity, echoes Tizianna Terranova’s observation of free labor on the Internet as “not necessarily exploited labor” (Terranova 2000, 48). While in the earlier years, the clout that fansubbers would receive from making anime accessible to non-Japanese speakers may have deeply shaped the neoliberal fannish economy, such clout is rarely found today, as the viewers who often engage with fansubs are those who are willing to wait for their release, sometime after the ripped or official version has already been made available. When asked why contemporary fansubbers continue to do this labor in spite of dwindling subcultural capital, my interviewees often repeated that as much as contemporary fansubbers continue to toil in the name of “quality,” what often really motivates them to remain is the friends and forms of community that continue to persist in the face of a changing distribution landscape that may eventually call for their obsolescence. While Matt Hills noted in his work on fansubbers that these groups often acted in highly competitive and individualized manners that reflected the neoliberal market dynamics of cultural production, that no longer seems to be the case within English fansubbing, as individuals often moved and collaborated between groups depending on where they saw a need for their particular skill sets (2016). Where we see the neoliberal branding function of fandom is now largely between fan-ripping groups, due to their rise in visibility in the current media distribution network.  

Despite the multivalent work that the concept of “quality” is doing in both discursively marking the boundaries between fansub and official release, as well as providing justification for the continued necessity for fansubbers, there remain critical points of overlap between these two supposedly rivaling factions. The emerging figure of the fan-ripper is one result of these areas of overlap. While the fan-ripper takes advantage of the simulcasting capacity of the formal service, they continue to compete for space and attention within the digital arenas that once were occupied primarily by fansubbing groups. With faster release schedules, it is often the fan-ripped content that receive the most engagement from viewers with a few exceptions, such as the fansubbing groups that strategically work with content that reside in “Netflix jail,” a term that was coined to describe when content was being broadcast to nations abroad, but purposely stalled for a full “bingeable” season release in one’s own country. While most fansubbers seem apathetic about the presence of rippers within their community, many were quick to denounce that what they did was fundamentally similar to that of the rippers, leveraging labor and dedication to the crafts that come with fansubbing as something that fundamentally separates them from the rippers.

Fansubbers were once the primary means of access to many anime titles; however, with the mainstream success of streaming services, accessibility is no longer a concern for many English-speaking anime fans. While the fracturing of anime catalogues along the lines of each service may be a challenge for avid consumers, rippers conveniently fill in those gaps with relative ease and piracy continues to challenge official industry players across national and cultural boundaries. While much scholarship has been done on the impact of streaming services on current media industries, its effects on the shadow cultural economies which powered much of the engagement with international media forms like anime in the past has largely gone understudied. For some fandoms, such as East Asian dramas (Viki) and Webtoons, the labor of fansubbing seems to have been co-opted by official industries as a convenient source of labor, further blurring the boundary between formal and informal economy (Dwyer 2012). However, this co-option will likely not happen between the English-speaking anime fandom and the official distributors that serve them, due to the continued antagonism between fansubbers and official industry players. Despite the myriad ways in which both actors contribute to one another’s cultural practices, the discursive strategies employed by both official industry and fansubbers alike reveal how one can understand the distinct ethical systems and ideologies that emerge within the formal and informal economy.  

Bibliography

Dwyer, Tessa. "Fansub Dreaming on ViKi: “Don’t Just Watch But Help When You Are Free”." The Translator 18, no. 2 (2012): 217-243.

GJM. Kamisama ni Natta Hi episode one screenshot. Oct. 12, 2020. Digital image.  

Hills, Matt. "Transnational cult and/as neoliberalism: The liminal economies of anime fansubbers." Transnational Cinemas 8, no. 1 (2017): 80-94.

Terranova, Tiziana. "Free labor." In Digital Labor, pp. 41-65. Routledge, 2012.

Author Bio 

Susan Noh is a PhD candidate in the Media and Cultural Studies program at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research interests include the digital circulation of international media, fan studies, and the formation of global audiences.