Fansub Wars: Send in the Clowns

The seedier side of the otaku community regularly voices a nasty little script, that starts off with something along the lines of: "I love anime, and I download it all the time, but I never buy it because..." What follows is inevitably disingenuous, myopic, and nauseatingly self-serving. These arguments stunk on ice when people spewed them onto Usenet in 1993, trying to justify their collections of fansub VHS tapes, and they haven't become any less grotesque in the interim.

There's been a lot more of this nonsense lately, thanks to a pair of commentaries on fansubbing and the anime industry, one from Arthur Smith of GDH International condemning the fans for, well, not really being fans in any meaningful sense of the word, and another from Justin Sevakis of Anime News Network that takes the industry to task for not adapting to the changing expectations of the fans. These commentaries were probably themselves inspired by the recent implosion of Geneon (or at least Geneon's US anime licensing and distribution arm), which served as a dramatic demonstration of the sinking fortunes of the anime industry. Smith and Sevakis both, I think, are guilty of some exaggeration, but their basic premises seem sadly accurate.

As if to prove Smith's point, an awful lot of the responses from the fans have been of the "I love anime, but..." type. The reasons these people give for not actually supporting the medium they say they love are various, but usually include some subset of: 1) nobody cares about downloading, 2) it's too much trouble to get DVDs, 3) anime dubs are crappy, 4) it takes too long for things to come out, 5) DVDs aren't HD, 6) downloads are like advertising, and 7) DVDs are too expensive. These are all pathetic, after-the-fact justifications for a policy of grabbing as much free anime as possible regardless of legal or ethical considerations. They're so transparently poor as excuses for bad behavior that it it hardly seems worthwhile to address them individually, but for what it's worth: 1) listen to what the creators say, 2) Amazon, Netflix, 3) "audio" button on the remote, 4) patience is a virtue, 5) upconvert player and decent TV, 6) nobody paid for entertainment before illegal downloading?

Pathetic excuse #7 has a special place in my heart, since I'm a veteran of the days when anime cost $100 for a 40 minute LD. I was a starving student back then, and I own shelves full of those LDs. American DVDs are cheap as hell; I've eaten crappy lunches that cost me more than the average anime DVD that I buy. If you're whining about $20 for five episodes of a show you supposedly like, you're a contemptible loser. I'm not talking about anyone out there who is truly poor, and watches Lucky Star on YouTube at the public library, as his or her sole mental escape from life in the ghetto. I can't speak for the anime companies, but as far as I'm concerned, he or she should go ahead and watch Lucky Star on YouTube. Everyone else, sitting in your suburban basements or patchouli-scented dorm rooms, in front of your $1200 laptops and $40 a month cable modems: just find another goddamned hobby. You're parasites, and the whole anime community--from the overworked, underpaid artists who create the stuff, to the kid saving his allowance to buy a Naruto video--would be better off without you.

Manabi wags her finger admonishingly at fans who don't support anime creators.

Whew. That's about enough of that. I usually try to keep the tone positive here at Moetic Justice, but a nice frothing rant once in a long while is cathartic. I'll close with a few of my own thoughts about the use of downloaded anime, with rant mode off.

I do watch fansubs and raws, as is pretty obvious if you glance at the M.J. archive (or the screencap in this post...). I guess that my rule of thumb for watching downloads has two components. First, I never watch anything via download, beyond a sample episode or two, that I don't wholeheartedly enjoy. Easy enough. Second, I buy or rent everything that I have found I enjoy, plus a healthy sampling of shows that are new to me, when they become legitimately available in the U.S. (and even pick up the occasional R2 disc). Overall, I probably wind up with more anime coming to my monitor from legit DVDs than from fansubs. I like to think that this scheme provides a sort of economic symmetry between what I love and what I pay for, that compensates the creators fairly for their efforts, supports the industry and encourages the production of more of the shows that I like. Who knows if it really does; half of it is still illegal, and the whole is probably terribly hypocritical. At best, it's the copyright infringement equivalent of borrowing without asking. Ah well, it doesn't sound so bad when I put it that way, and hypocrisy is the least of sins.

And, maybe there's a hopeful sign--amid all the recent portents of doom for the anime industry--in the fact that the fansub wars have been simmering for more than a decade. There have always been obnoxious scofflaws who point to their stacks of fansubs, and launch into elaborate explanations of how they love anime, but... However, these people were, and probably still are, in the minority, and anime has done pretty well in spite of them.

A History of Fansubbing

Part 3: Early Digital Subtitles.

This April, we continue a series of articles on the history of fan-subtitled anime in the English-speaking world, with a discussion of the almost forgotten early days of digital fansubs. In the early- to mid-1990s, growing fan dissatisfaction with analog media for exchanging anime, such as Video Home System (VHS) tapes and crude homebrew laserdiscs (LDs) fashioned from Tupperware and aluminum foil (see Part 2) led a small group of pioneers to experiment with distribution schemes for digital video. The internet did not exist as such at the time, however, and existing technology such as magnetic core memory proved too bulky and unstable to physically ship between fans. A high-tech solution for the distribution problem was offered by the invention, in 1992, of the punch card (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Legendary fansubber Bryce Carson edits his latest project (ca. 1993).

Punch cards are light and able to store large amounts of data, up to 6 kilobytes in a standard 25 kilogram carton of cards. Early fansubbers, often impoverished college students eager to save on postage, created an innovative compression method called American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) art, in order to pack as much anime as possible into a shipment of cards. Sophisticated subtitling groups such as the Urusei Yatsura Project (UYP) drew full-color ASCII art representations of every frame of animation, by hand, then applied nearly professional-quality subtitles, based on translations by members who had become fluent in Japanese by listening to weekly Nippon Housou Kyoukai (NHK) news broadcasts on shortwave radio (Fig. 2). Dialogue, music and sound effects were represented by rich, life-like 3-bit digital sound.

Fig. 2. Frame from the 1994 UYP subtitle of Top o Nerae! Gunbuster, ep. 3.

Other fansub groups, such as Polar Animation, focused less on the technical excellence of their subtitles, and more on translating large amounts of anime. Polar was able to release full runs of several dozen series, including Kimagure Orange Road (Fig. 3), by employing a cutting-edge automated program to rapidly generate ASCII video. This program ran on top-of-the-line Amiga computers, reported to be on loan from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). Early Polar subs were subject to some artifacting from the ASCII compression process, and sported translations that were often less literal than hardcore fans demanded, but most observers feel that these difficulties were adequately addressed in the group’s later efforts (Fig. 4).

Fig. 3. Earlier Polar Animation subs lacked refinement. (Frame from Kimagure Orange Road, ep. 17).

In spite of advances in compression technology, distribution of digital subtitles by mail remained relatively expensive and slow. A single 25-minute TV episode, which could be stored on about 80 kilograms of punch cards, would have cost $1.25 to ship from Utica to Bangor in 1994, or approximately $420.00 in 2007 dollars. With a shipping time of 3-4 business days, the postal method achieved transfer rates of only 0.000000088 kilobytes per second (kbps).

Fig. 4. Sample frame from a later Polar Animation subtitle (Maison Ikkoku ep. 62).

Resourceful fans living near estuaries developed a clever method of transferring fansubs via laminated punch cards, carried by the ebb and flood of the tides (Fig. 5). Multiple fans could take part in distributing a video file, with individual users retrieving cards from the water, duplicating them, and returning cards to the current for others to share. This method was called bit torrent (BT), and could reach transfer speeds of nearly 0.00000046 kbps. A related technique, direct download (DDL) was even faster, but was practical only in urban settings, where cartons of punch cards could be gravitationally transferred from a sender on the upper floors of a building, to a receiver (or “leecher”) at ground level. New York University students, in December of 1996, used DDL to transfer the entire Patlabor TV series—on 11.4 metric tons of punch cards—from the top of the Chrysler Building to viewers at street level. The students managed to record, at the moment of file receipt, a data transfer rate of 438 gigabytes per second, which is impressive even when compared to the speed of present-day cable modems.

Fig. 5. Bit torrent file transfer in progress at Hell Gate, New York, ca. 1996.

But even at the height of the first digital subtitle boom, the days of watching anime recorded on punch cards were numbered. Production of new digital subtitles was dealt a serious blow in February of 1997, when the entire Polar Animation staff died in a tragic Feng Shui-related accident, while attending a party in a dormitory lounge furnished in a catastrophically unharmonious manner. VHS tape, despite markedly inferior video quality, made a temporary resurgence. The final blow to punch card fansub distribution was delivered by the internet, which was invented on March 4, 1999, by Al Sharpton.

Please look forward to part 4 of A History of Fansubbing, titled “HD-VCD: The Future of Anime?” It’s coming soon, and will be made available on bit torrent.