As this article goes to press, we are just hours away from the January 15th launch of Crunchyroll’s English dub of KonoSuba: God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World! I, for one, am ready to sit down and blast through one of the gaps in my familiarity with popular anime franchises and enjoy it in my native language.
That shouldn’t be a controversial idea, but the response to Crunchyroll’s announcement of its English dub library expansion and now the production of this English dub of a beloved comedy series has been heated. Angry “subs not dubs” fans flamed the announcements on Twitter and Facebook, leaving Crunchyroll and English dub fans to get defensive.
There are a lot of good reasons to enjoy a show in your native language, or at least a language you speak well enough to not need subtitles: some fans like to multitask while enjoying their anime, and being able to follow the story without having their eyes fixed to the fast-moving text lets them do that. Some fans prefer to focus on art and animation, rather than having to peek down at subtitles every other second or so. Some just don’t want to read when they’re watching cartoons. Personally, I hate reading so much I went out and spent hundreds of hours to learn Japanese. I’m that committed.
But KonoSuba in particular calls for an English dub because it’s a comedy. Tone, word choice, phrasing, and especially timing are all key elements of comedy that suffer when the viewer is reading subtitles. Even if the translator has done the excruciatingly difficult work (speaking as a translator who mostly does comedies) to carry the joke and all its humor into your language, odds are you’re going to read the punchline completely out of time with it landing in the animation and voice acting. That’s a disservice to the material, but it’s one we have to bear with unless we’re obsessed enough to learn a foreign language just to enjoy anime, or a studio takes up the project of dubbing the show into the language we need. Crunchyroll has thankfully taken up that project, or rather farmed it out to Bang Zoom! Studios.
Celebrate 3 Years of Konosuba with this exclusive clip from the upcoming english dub! 🎉 pic.twitter.com/oVgzYlvAny
— Crunchyroll (@Crunchyroll) January 14, 2019
As a fan of English dubs, I was concerned that Funimation and Crunchyroll parting ways as they did would result in fewer seasonal shows getting an English version. Taking a high-profile franchise like KonoSuba, as it’s preparing to release a theatrical film, shows that Crunchyroll, famous for being the home of subtitled anime, is committed to competing with Funimation for the eyeballs of the English dub fans.
That also implies there are enough English dub fans out there for their eyeballs to be worth fighting over. So the next time the “subs not dubs” crowd tries to shout you down for wanting to be able to watch anime while you fold laundry, wanting to expose your kids to English, wanting to enjoy the performances of some incredibly talented English voice actors and actresses, or whatever your reasons are for wanting to watch English dubbed anime, just remember that English dubs only exist because millions of people like them and are willing to pay for them.
and you thought english dubs were useless pic.twitter.com/5YlOlrWB7H
— Crunchyroll (@Crunchyroll) January 11, 2019
And at the end of the day, Megumin is still going to say “explosion” either way.
