I turn 77 today, reinforcing my title as Oldest Living Fansubber™. It reminds me how long I've been doing this (17 years - not as long as some, however), how many groups and people I've worked with (dozens, hundreds, respectively), and how few I've met in person (one). Most of my early colleagues have left the scene. Simultaneous streaming dominates anime. That's not a bad thing; anime is more accessible than ever before, to a wider audience. But fansubbing has shrunk to a fraction of what it once was.
I started in 2006, quite late in life. I had never watched anime as a child, because there wasn't any available in the US in the early 1950s. The arrival of cable TV in my rural town in the late 1980s ignited my interested in anime, thanks to the SciFi channel's annual anime movie festival. Then, in 2005, broadband Internet became available here, and I tapped into the proliferating fansub community via Internet Relay Chat (IRC). I was mostly a lurker, but one I day I offered some suggestions about improving Anime-United's release of REC. The group leader replied that if I thought I could do better, I should join their team. I did, working in QC.
Anime-United broke up almost immediately. The remnants, including me, were absorbed by a larger and better group named Yoroshiku. My first project there was again REC. With a few months, I had started editing; my first editing project was Tactical Roar, still a sentimental favorite. Later in 2006, I joined C1, again as a QC, and moved into editing there in 2007. For the next few years, I worked wherever I could, including now-defunct groups like Black Order, Animanda, GotWoot, Mendoi, Ureshii, and Erobeat (where I edited 80+ hentai scripts). However, I refused to take any competency tests. Believe it or not, in those days, major groups tested applicants for translation, editing, typesetting, or QC positions. I thought my work spoke for itself. Or to paraphrase the great Danny Glover, I was too old for that shit.
Working across so many groups, and accepting any and every script that was thrown at me, dimmed my initial enthusiasm, and at one point, I took a six months' "sabbatical" from fansubbing. When I started again, I worked with fewer groups - mostly Ureshii/Frostii/Monokage, FFF WhyNot, Kiteseekers, and Saizen. The tighter focus also allowed me to learn some additional skills: I picked up some basic timing and typesetting from the experienced staff at these groups.
As I've documented elsewhere, I also started my own group, Orphan, tentatively at first. It became my main focus when simultaneous streaming made fansubbing of weekly shows irrelevant, and mainstream fansub groups began to wither. Orphan flowered in the mid teens, releasing up to forty shows a year. It has now slowed down considerably, as have I, but the team still manages to crank out a project once a month or so.
The list of people to whom I am indebted - for teaching me the ropes, for giving me opportunities to try my skills, for supporting my efforts to subtitle old shows - is very long. I'm not going to list names (or handles, rather, since I rarely know real names), because I don't want to slight anyone by inadvertently forgetting to include them. You know who you are. I'm immensely grateful that you afforded me the opportunities to participate, contribute, and learn.
This is not a valedictory. I've worked on more than 3,000 scripts so far, and I don't intend to stop. I'm set in my ways, but I can still, under protest, learn new tools and techniques; for example, I use Discord now as well as IRC. The anime back catalog is far from fully explored. In short, subtitling anime remains a diverting hobby. Maybe it's even useful.
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