The Best Show of the Spring 2011 Season is...

The Spring 2011 anime season is winding down, and the inevitable debate has begun about the best show of the season.  Considering that the season had more than forty new series, the candidate list is surprisingly small: basically just Ano Hana and Hanasaku Iroha, both of which have vocal proponents.  Denpa Onna started out strong but petered out.  A few fans hold out for Deadman Wonderland, C, The World God Only Knows S2, or Steins;Gate.  However, they're all wrong.  The best show of the Spring 2011 season is... Fireball Charming.

I can hear the cries of outrage already.  How can a two-minute CG-anime starring two very strange robots outshine the moe cuteness of Ano Hano or Hanasaku Iroha, the violence in Deadman Wonderland, or the complexity in Steins;Gate?  The answer is simple.  Fireball Charming is funny, side-splittingly funny.  Its humor isn't based on gross-outs, like Hen Zemi or Yondemasu yo, Azazel-san, or whimsy and nostalgia, like A Channel or Nichijou.  No, the humor is based on sharp dialog, great repartee, and inventive gags.  In short, Fireball Charming is verbally funny.  Each episode is like a miniature 1930's screwball comedy.  I'm an editor, after all, and nothing appeals to me more than great dialog.

I can't comment on the accuracy of gg's translations, but the editing is tight, and the puns and references have been localized with great ingenuity.  The voice acting is superb.  The episodes look great, with high-def CG animation, and they're over in two minutes.  What's not to like?

So if you haven't watched Fireball Charming yet, check it out. You can marathon the whole season in about the amount of time you'd waste on one episode of Naruto Shippuuden.  You have nothing to lose (except, perhaps, your mind).

Do You Need An Editor? I Need A Timer!

Lately, I've been seeing a lot of "want ads" on fansub sites for editors.  This is unusual; editors used to be a dime a dozen.  Now they've become scarce.  Maybe all the English majors have full time jobs at McDonalds?  (Please, no hate mail from the Professional Organization of English Majors, aka POEM.)

As an editor, I've usually worked only on shows I like, but I have my "wants" too.  In particular, I have a backlog of resubbing projects, all of which are characterized by poorly edited subtitles.  The backlog includes:

• Polished Sub's Nagasarete Airantou.  Here the problem lies with the original fansub subtitles, which show a cheerful disregard for the rules of punctuation and capitalization.
• ARR's Urusei Yatsura Special.  These subtitles also need substantial reworking.

Unfortunately, bad editing seems to go hand-in-hand with bad timing, and I'm just awful at timing.  I can do it, but I'm slow, and whatever method I'm using must be wrong, because I end up with aching wrists and other ergonomic problems.  Consequently, these projects are proceeding at a snail's pace.  Indeed, my one successful effort at resubbing a series, Hand Maid Mai, only finished because I was able to enlist a real timer to help.

So here's the deal, fansub groups. I'll edit your series, even if I don't like it.  But in return, you have to time my resub projects.  The "exchange rate" is one-for-one: one episode edited for one episode timed.

I'm looking for other skills as well, particularly a translation checker for ARR's Sotsugyousei, which appears to be machine translated, and a translator for two specials from Haruka Naru Toki no Naka de: Hachiyoushou and the three OVAs from Harukanaru Toki no Naka de 2: Shiroki Ryuu no Miko.  But right now, I'll settle for a timer.

Let's make a deal!

Why Johnny Can't Edit

In his blog, my colleague Dark Sage has dissected the editing errors in the Spring 2011 season with precision, humor, and an appropriate degree of outrage. His reviews have made me wonder why editing mistakes are so pervasive in fansubbing, and I’d like to toss out a few hypotheses for discussion.

My first guess is that fansubbing, as a hobby, tends to attract people from technical disciplines rather than the liberal arts. Most of the people I fansub with are in software development, IT, engineering, and so on. Engineers are not known for the quality of their writing. (After all, if they liked writing and were good at it, they’d be English majors, wouldn’t they?) I’ve run many engineering teams over my career, and one of my jobs has always been to correct the written work of team members. However, this hypothesis isn’t sufficient. In my work, I’ve seen bad writing from communications specialists, technical writers, and other professionals. Something deeper is amiss.

More broadly, I’d hazard that the priority of writing skills in the US educational system has declined. Education “reform” has turned our schools into factories for passing standardized tests, which focus on reading and math. The courses that promote good writing skills have been eliminated in budget cuts. The creative writing part of the SATs has become optional. Many colleges no longer require essays as part of the admissions process.

Finally, belief that the rules of composition and grammar actually matter has disappeared. The usage essays of the late William Safire, or the indictment of modern compositional practice in a book such as “Eats Shoots and Leaves,” are treated as humor, irony, or curmudgeonly rants. One doesn’t need to look any further than the promotion of “alright” to acceptable usage to see that editorial laxness is ingrained. In short, no one gives a damn.

I was lucky in my educational experience. Back in the Dark Ages when I went to high school, educators at least gave lip-service to developing students’ talents, as well as drilling them in the basics. As a result, a student with a good academic record had access to electives that were off the beaten track. I used that freedom to learn touch typing (on a manual typewriter – no PCs in those days); I was the only boy in the class. I studied Latin. And I took a class in journalism.

Journalism class was far less about reporting than it was about composition. The focus was on writing: how to write articles that were organized well and easy to comprehend. Journalism taught me about parallel construction, use of the active voice, simplicity of vocabulary, clarity of references, and other techniques that are directly visible in my editing. Combined with the lessons from Latin – proper grammar, sentence parsing, vocabulary – journalism class gave me the foundation I needed for decent composition.

Where will aspiring editors learn these lessons today? Journalism classes are vanishing; indeed, journalism as a profession is on the endangered list. Latin is regarded as a luxury and is rarely taught. I fully understand that Mandarin or Spanish will be more useful in real life than Latin, and that science is better preparation for a viable career than journalism. Still, as a species we depend on communication. How will we fare if understanding drowns in a sea of Internet memes, texting abbreviations, and written trash?

[For those too young to understand the title reference, see this article: Why Johnny Can’t Read.]

What Kind of Anime Do You Like?

As my nickname implies, I collect all sorts of anime, but over the years, I’ve found that certain types appeal to me much more than others.  Rather than talk in generalities, I’ll list my favorite anime series.  My top ten, in alphabetical order (ranking them is too hard):

• Chobits.  I find this particular combination of science fiction, romantic comedy, and slice-of-life irresistible.
• Cowboy Bebop.  A show I can watch repeatedly.
• Crest of the Stars (and its sequels, Banner of the Stars I, II, III).  My favorite “space opera.”
• Genshiken (and its sequels).  This sharp-eyed but good-spirited send-up of the otaku world really tickles my funny bone.
• Kino no Tabi.  The tone of this series is unique.  I can’t watch it end-to-end, but the individual episodes are compelling.
• Monster.  A dark psychological drama that held me spellbound through all 74 episodes.
• Nana.  This slice-of-life shoujo is part soap opera, part romantic comedy, and always interesting, with a terrific musical score.
• Nodame Cantabile.  My favorite romantic comedy.  The sequels were not as good.
• Planetes.  Science fiction and slice-of-life beautifully combined.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.  My favorite mecha show; in fact, the only mecha show I’ve ever watched from start to finish.

Actually, about all this list tells you is that I like science fiction anime, and perhaps romantic comedy/slice-of-life.  But I also like some low or ecchi comedies (like Hand Maid May, Usagichan de Cue, Inukami), certain children’s shows (Hanamaru Kindergarten, Chi’s Sweet Home), and shows that are off the beaten track (Kaiba, Gosenzosama, Fireball).  I don’t much care for sports anime, shounen, or mecha, but there are exceptions even to those generalizations (Kekkaishi, Tengen Toppa).  And I’m a sucker for any show with cats.  I’ll even watch or work on a harem show if it has cats (Nyan Koi).

Which Anime Series Have You Liked Working On?

That’s an entirely different question.  I’ll work on almost anything, if I like the team, or if it’s a rescue of an orphaned series.  But some stick out in my memory, so here’s another top ten list, again in alphabetical order:

• Amatsuki (Ureshii).  I like shows set in historical times, and this was one of the better ones.  Regrettably, the TV raws were very poor, and no DVD version was ever done.  (Attention, resubbers!)
• Chi’s Sweet Home (Yoroshiku).  A children’s series with an adorable kitten.  What else is there to say?  This show taught me that 104 episodes of anything can become tiring, even if the episodes are less than three minutes long, and that 104 repetitions of a catchy opening song will fry your brain.
• Dennou Coil (Ureshii).  A good science fiction show about the possibilities, and dangers, of cyperspace.
• Gosenzosama (Ureshii/Frostii).  Probably the hardest editing job I’ve done.  This show had an utterly unique style of meandering sentences, deadpan dialog, and the occasional mind-boggling joke.  Finding the right tone, and maintaining it consistently, was a challenge.
• Hand Maid May (Orphan).  A foray into “resubbing.”  I really liked this early sci-fi harem show, and the R1 subs were poorly edited, timed, and typeset.  Redoing the subs taught me a lot about timing (e.g., I don’t like to do it) and typesetting.
• Kekkaishi (Yoroshiku).  One of the longest shounen show I ever worked on.  It started out as a mix of comedy and action, and then turned into straight action.  I missed the comedy, but the show held my interest.  It had a great opening song.
• Nana (Ureshii).  A difficult show to edit, because the characters spoke at a breakneck speed.  Compressing the subs to fit the timing of the dialog was hard.
• Nodame Cantabile (C1).  My favorite romantic comedy, with a wonderful opening song.  Koda’s karaoke was brilliant.
• Rescue Wings (Ureshii).  A seinen show, about grownups, and thus an almost automatic favorite.  The project went moribund midway through.   Restarting it was one of my few successes in rescuing a stalled series.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (Black-Order).  This over-the-top mecha show was a hoot from start to stopping point.  It got licensed before it could be finished.

Pretty much the same pattern as my favorites list.

Which Anime Series Have You Disliked Working On?

A couple of shows pushed me to the limit with clichés, bad writing, or stupid plots:

• Angelique 2006 (C1).  I can tolerate neo-romance, just barely, but this one was stultifyingly sweet.  Haruka Naru Toki de Naku de looks like a work of genius in comparison.
• D.Grayman (Black-Order).  A prime example of why I dislike shounen shows.  The project team abandoned it by mutual agreement after 61 episodes of mostly filler, to my relief.
• H2O: Footprints in the Sand (Ureshii).  A show that helped give the harem genre a bad name, or at least, a worse one than it had to start.
• Oishinbo: Japan-America Rice Wars (Yoroshiku).  The most boring anime movie ever, bar none.  90 minutes of policy debate about the pros and cons of liberalizing Japan’s rice import restrictions.  I’d rather go to the dentist.
• Planzet (Orphan).  Another foray into resubbing.  I committed to hours of retiming, re-editing, typesetting, and QCing to this project, only to realize that the movie was junk.

I did a couple of World Masterpiece Theater series and found them to be overly long and slow-paced, but at least they didn’t make me want to trash my computer or abandon anime altogether.

So there it is: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of my anime experience.  Hopefully, this gives you a sense of my likes and dislikes, so that if you want to ask me about working on a project, I won’t just laugh at you.

Rescuing Orphans

As my nickname suggests, I'm an anime collector.  And like many collectors, I like my collection to be complete as well as inclusive.  Thus, nothing bothers me more than anime series that are started and then abandoned.

I understand the reasons why this happens.  In fact, the groups I've been part of  have abandoned almost as many projects as they've completed.  The usual reason is loss of interest by a key project team member, like the translator.  Without a translator, a fansubbing project is dead in the water.  Another frequent cause is competition.  If another competent group is working on the same series (or if CrunchyRoll has picked up the series), it's easy for a project team to lose interest and decide to do something else, or nothing.  A group may disband or disintegrate without finishing its projects.  And there's a fourth reason: a team may discover that a series is utter garbage only after working on the first episode, or a couple of episodes.

Usually, a fansubbing team's decision to abandon a project doesn't matter.  Popular series always have multiple groups working on them (or, these days, they're streamed); if one group gives up, another will see it through.  However, niche series often have only one group working on them.  If that group abandons the project, the series is orphaned: partially done, and possibly never to be completed.  In my five years in fansubbing, this has happened to many shows, including Hidimari no Ki, Maple Story, Perrine Monogatari, Love GetCHU, Kiss Dum: Engage Planet, Gokujou, Charady's Daily Joke, Jewel Pet, Yoshimune, Dash! Kappei, Saint October, Prism Ark, Souten Kouro, Amuri Star Ocean, Jang Geum's Dream,and the grand-daddy of them all, Lime-iro Ryuukitan X Cross, which was abandoned by no less than three groups.  There's also a long list of projects that have been stalled indefinitely but not formally abandoned.

I originally got into fansubbing more or less by coincidence: I offered some mild criticism of a group's release in their IRC channel and was told to join the team if I thought I could do better.  (I did, and I did.)  But I stayed in fansubbing because I wanted to complete orphaned series.  Unfortunately, I lack the crucial skill needed for that task: I don't know Japanese.  Accordingly, I have to make myself useful to fansubbing teams and bargain for translation help in return for editing and QC.  I did this first with the third episode of Usagichan de Cue, a low ecchi comedy.  The price was editing and QCing 41 episodes of the World Masterpiece Theatre series Peter Pan no Boukan: a harsh exchange rate, but one I gladly paid.

Over the last few years, I've managed to get a few more done.  Yoroshiku Fansubs picked up and finished Sisters of Wellber Zwei.  Frostii, under an alias, did the last episode of Mission E.  And my own "Orphan Fansubs" finished the last two episodes of Kage.

I'm not the only fansubber interested in abandoned series.  While it was active, digitalpanic often stepped in to complete series, like Beet Excellion, the second season of Emma, and Sakura Taisen NY NY.  MBT finished Chocotto Sister and Moetan.  A number of groups did "one offs," like the previously mentioned Frostii project.  But these efforts were rare.

Lately though, and perhaps as a consequence of simultaneous streaming, more groups are showing interest in the catalog of abandoned shows.  For example, Kiteseekers is working to finish both Ultraviolet Code 44 and Mizu Iro Jidai.  Gotwoot is 70% done with the incomplete second season of Moonlight Mile, while Dattebayo is almost halfway through Ninku.  ANBU has picked up Dragon Quest, Wasurenai Marie & Gali, and M.3.3.W Fighting Beauty Wulong.

Yet the number of completed orphan shows remains low: MUJI's Gallery Fake and Wasurenai-Licca's Les Miserables Shoujo Cosette in the last few months, and that's about it.  Ninku seems to have stalled out.  A third attempt to finish Love GetCHU collapsed before it could off the ground.  Again, there are multiple reasons.  It's hard to find raws, let alone good raws, for old shows.  It remains difficult to keep staff engaged in orphan projects, because the audience for them is small compared to current series.  And unlike fine wine, these shows do not get better with age.

Still, I remain optimistic that some of these series will find an interested translator, and if they do, I'll be the first to volunteer to do the editing or QC.  I'd really like to complete Love GetCHU, if it's at all possible.  Hell, I'd even work on Lime-iro Ryuukitan X Cross, a show that I wouldn't be caught dead watching.  Rescuing orphans is a noble cause.  If you want to help - that is, if you can translate - or if you have an "orphan" project that needs editing or QC help, give me a shout.

Resubbing: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

In my last blog, I discussed how simultaneous streaming has impacted anime fansubbing.  This time, I want to discuss another recent development, namely, resubbing.

At its simplest, resubbing is the application of existing subtitles to new video and audio sources.  The initial impetus for resubbing arose from the availability of better sources, such as DVDs and BluRays, for shows that had been subbed in the early days of fansubbing, when video capture technology, video codecs, and subtitling tools were all quite primitive.  Initially, resubbing was quite hard to do.  Early fansubs had hard-coded subtitles that had to be extracted by hand or with more-or-less useless OCR tools, then restyled and retimed.  Those subs also had hard-coded signs and karaokes that had to be replicated as well.

The recent shift to softsubs has made the resubbing process much easier.  Dialog, signs, and karaokes can be extracted from a softsubbed show easily, using the MKVtoolnix tool set.  Some groups, like gg, just publish their scripts, because there’s no way to keep them secret.

As with “Crunchysubbing,” described in my last blog, there are many varieties of resubbers.  Here’s a rough classification:

• Resubbing to improve on the video/audio quality of an early fansub.  The original fan-made subtitles are applied against a DVD or BluRay source.  Examples include Redone, Retrofit, and Jumonji-Giri.
• Resubbing to improve on the video/audio quality of a current fansub, or to access material left out left out if, or censored from, a TV broadcast.  To boost DVD or BluRay sales, anime companies include extra material in the DVD or BluRay versions.  This can take the form of extra scenes (for example, in Lamune or DaCapo) or removal of censoring (all recent ecchi shows).  Again, the original fan-made subtitles are applied against a DVD or BluRay source.  Examples include Coalgirls, Polished, Mudabone, DmonHiro, Atsui, Kira, Tamashii, and Elysium.
• Resubbing to improve on the video/audio quality of an R1 (US DVD release) by using an R2J (Japanese DVD) source.  Because the remastering process from the original Japanese source to US DVD format sometimes impacts video quality, groups apply official R1 DVD subtitles to an encoded R2J source.  Examples include Dual-Duality, OnDeed, and Gray Phantom.

Many, but not all, resubbers in the first two categories use raws from other groups.  Resubbers in the third category, and some from the first two, encode their own.  Some resubbers clean up the original subtitles for editing, timing, or styling errors, but many do not.

As an editor and QC, I tend to focus much more on the subtitles than the video and audio.  Arguments about banding, haloing, and grain, or the value of FLAC versus lossy audio codecs, tend to leave me unmoved.  My aging eyes can’t see details all that well, and my aging ears don’t have the range to hear the fine differences.  In addition, most anime is drawn very simply, with straightforward audio and clichéd music.  So I have two serious gripes about resubbing:

• Lack of attention to the subtitles themselves.  While some groups put the subtitles through an editing, timing, and QC cycle, many do not.  Because DVDs and BluRays have different timing, and sometimes different aspect ratios, from the original TV broadcasts, this results in visible, obvious, and annoying subtitle and sign problems.  Every resubbed version of Seitokai Yakuindomo that I’ve downloaded (except Coalgirls) has obvious timing problems with signs; one version didn’t even include fonts.
• File bloat.  This is a contentious issue, so please remember that I’ve already disclosed my bias towards the words rather than the video and audio.  I think that many resub encodes are bloated.  To me, FLAC audio is pointless, and most TV anime is blandly drawn and easily compressed.  Hard disk space is not the issue; rather, it’s the bandwidth caps that most ISPs are imposing.  I don’t want to spend 11GB of my monthly quota for a 13 episode series (as in Coalgirl’s aforementioned Seitokai Yakuindomo).

Nonetheless, I usually investigate, and frequently archive, resubs.  Early fansubs were often done at 512x384, or even 320x240; the improvements in video quality can be impressive.  The additional material added to DVDs and BluRays means that a resub may be the only definitive version of some series.  And occasionally, a resub cleans up staggeringly bad editing or timing in the original fansub.  But I have a long and lengthening queue of resubs that need a lot of work on their scripts before I’d be willing to archive them in place of the original fansubs.

So if you’re resubbing a show, particularly from a fansub script, and you need help cleaning up the subtitles, give me a shout on IRC.  I can’t help much with timing, but I’m happy to fold, spindle, and mutilate the words for the sake of improved quality – provided of course, the series interests me…

Simultaneous Streaming and the Future of Fansubbing

Over its short and tumultuous life, fansubbing has seen many changes.  Codecs have come and gone; hardsubs have been replaced by softsubs; better tools have allowed for more typesetting and fancy karaokes.  But few changes have had the impact of simultaneous streaming.  Less than two years ago, CrunchyRoll began streaming translated versions of anime simultaneously with the air-time in Japan.  The effect on fansubbing was immediate and lasting.

CrunchyRoll deprived fansubbing of its fundamental raison-d’etre.  Anime fans could see their favorite series with adequate translations at the earliest possible moment: the same time as the series aired in Japan.  Almost overnight, the enormous online audience that had followed popular series deserted fansubs for CrunchyRoll.  Fansub teams had lost much of their audiences.

[Note that I use the term “adequate” with great deliberateness.  I don’t wish to start an argument about whether CrunchyRoll translations are good, bad, or indifferent.  Like fansubs, their quality varies.  Indeed, they are pretty much exactly like fansubs, because the core of the company that does translations for CrunchyRoll is ex-fansubbers, and their processes use pretty much the same toolset as fansubs.  The point is that CrunchyRoll subs suffice for understanding what is going on in a show.]

For some fansubbers, the arrival of CrunchyRoll, and the loss of their online audience, was the Apocalypse.  CrunchyRoll seemed to be getting more and more of the interesting series (and Viz and Funimation were simulcasting some of the rest).  Senior staff retired or quit; old-line groups disbanded or went moribund.  The few series that were not being streamed were subjects of fierce competition and significant oversubbing.  If the purpose of simultaneous translation was, as some surmised, to crush fansubbing, it seemed to be doing a good job.

But every reaction produces a counter-reaction, and for each group that has abandoned fansubbing, three or four seem to have sprung up instead.  These new groups view CrunchyRoll as a resource rather than a competitor – a free source of translations – on top of which they can add value.  They fall into a couple of categories:

• Crunchyrippers (HorribleSubs, CrunchSubs).  These groups capture the Internet video stream, separate the video, audio, and subtitles, and repackage the result in standard MKV format.  Their processes seem to be semi- to fully automatic, as the results are available within minutes of the CrunchyRoll simulcast.

• Crunchymuxers (Commie originally, many others).  These groups mux the softsubs from the Crunchyrippers onto better raws obtained from Japanese sharing sites or encoded from transport streams.  When it started, CrunchyRoll’s video quality was far from stellar, and these groups offered a better video experience, at the cost of some delay in time and larger file sizes.

• Crunchysubbers (Commie today, Underwater, many others).  These groups take the process one step further, by putting the derived CrunchyRoll scripts through the full “back-end” fansub process: timing checks, editing, typesetting, encoding, quality control.  They may add karaoke translations, and even karaoke special effects (within the limits that softsubbing allows).  Because the CrunchyRoll subtitles are an adequate place to start, the timing, editing, and QC steps can be quite fast.

More of these groups seem to show up every season.  No longer is it necessary to find a Japanese translator to participate in fansubbing.  Almost anyone with a computer can do it.

Not all fansub groups are willing to concede their turf to CrunchyRoll and its downstream value chain.  Alternate translations are still being offered.  For example, FFF did its own original translation of Shinryaku Ika Musume, without the incessant squid jokes and puns that feature prominently in the CrunchyRoll version.  Personally, I’m glad to have the FFF version, as I find CrunchyRoll overly localized; but that’s a matter of personal taste.  Still, competitive translations against CrunchyRoll are not common, and many groups have abandoned subbing current series altogether.

This has had some interesting consequences.  One is a renewed interest in anime’s back catalog.  Many worthwhile shows from the past have never been licensed or fansubbed.  While there were always a few groups who worked on older shows (for example, Live-Evil, digitalpanic, and C1), the unbeatable competition from CrunchyRoll seems to have encouraged more teams to look back into the past.  Examples include Licca (Superdoll Licca, A Little Princess Sara), Takara (Treasure Island, Nobody’s Boy Remi), Saitei (Tokimeki Tonight), and KiteSeekers (Ultraviolet Code 44, Mizu Iro Jidai).  Nanto, of the Skaro Hunting Society, is working on several series, and his recent blog entry has pointers to many other groups subbing historical anime.

Some of these teams are rescuing “orphan” series – series that were abandoned while incomplete.  I’ve always viewed rescuing orphan series as a noble cause, so I find this development particularly hopeful.  But the mortality rate among back-catalog projects remains high, perhaps because the online audience is so much smaller than for current series, and the projects require dedicated translators.

Another consequence, perhaps less obvious, had been the eclipse of the elaborate, hard-coded karaoke.  Karaokes started as simple, line-timed translations of opening and ending songs, and some groups (like The Triad) stuck with this.  But most teams moved towards syllable-timed karaokes with special effects that displayed the song rhythm with animation.  These effects got fancier and fancier, to the point where they required computer programs to generate them and retime them.  Karaoke elegance became an end in itself.

Simultaneous streaming exposed the futility of this effort.  CrunchyRoll episodes don’t even have song translations.  Crunchysubbers at most add simple line-timed translations.  Viewers find these adequate.  What’s the point of investing in elaborate karaokes, when most viewers will skip the songs anyway after the first episode?  [Although I must confess, I watched koda’s brilliant and disarmingly simple opening karaoke for C1’s Nodame Cantabile every time.]  The pendulum has swung back to simplicity, and most groups now do as little as possible beyond translating the songs.

As the dynamics from simultaneous streaming continue to play out, I’m sure that there will be further changes in fansubbing.  But regardless of future changes in the anime industry’s business model, it appears than fansubbing is here to stay.