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Anime Fansubs

Anime Fansubs is THE place for anime fans out there who want to share their fave anime-- truly, a haven for anime fans!

Everyone anime fanatic wonders about it and how it all came to be..In this page, I will be answering you its history and discover why it was popular before and how it became more popular now especially in this day of modern online technology.

Anime lovers and fans would always want to watch their favorite anime shows over and over or sometimes would want to watch ahead the succeeding series of their favorite anime series. However, since anime originally come from Japan and that the transition of publicity from there to another country would probably be more difficult and that if it might have arrived, the translations could have been awful.

That is why some die hard Anime fans would always go a mile to meticulously translate the language and would even have the generosity to share it with his/her co anime freaks. Thus,anime fansubs have been born.


In the early 1990s anime production grew in Japan, but despite the sudden proliferation of titles there were very few shows released in the American market. Most anime fans did not have regular access to these shows, so some fans decided to take it upon themselves to share their favorite anime with fellow fans. Groups would come together to translate favorite shows, attach their own subtitles and distribute these shows to other fans. This came to be called fan subtitling, or fansubbing or more commonly the anime fansubs.

There were two purposes for this. First was the previously mentioned intent of a fan to share something that he enjoyed with others who probably did not have access to it. The other purpose was to create a demand. By distributing these anime fansubs shows to other anime fans, these people were creating a fan base. With the fan base came a greater demand for the original material.

VHS fansubs tended to be of a much lower quality than licensed VHS tapes of the anime series. Because of this, what the fans really wanted was the ability to buy their favorite anime on a higher quality tape. The more fans that were created through a fansub, the more potential consumers there were for both the American and Japanese consumers to consider.

The problem with the original VHS fansubs lay in how expensive they were to produce. This documentary posted on YouTube lists all the materials needed for a fansubber to put his own subtitles on a show: a laser disc player along with laser discs of the anime, video tape recorders, a computer and a program like Sub Station Alpha which the translator would use to put the subtitles on the screen.

But as technology evolved, the process of subtitling anime became much simpler. All that is required now is a computer, an easy to use subtitling program and digital copies of the raw Japanese version of the anime, which many residents of Japan upload onto the internet themselves. Thus anime fansubs have evolved.

With the rise of digital fansubs, fans no longer had to purchase or trade for expensive VHS tapes in order to view fansubtitled anime. They simply needed to use a program such as BitTorrent or IRC to download the shows directly onto their computers. This also lead to a rise in the number of people who were creating fansubs, and incidentally an increase in the number of fansubs available to anime fans. However, this also came about when the legal distribution of anime in America on a rise, leading to what continues to be an ongoing debate of the necessity of anime fansubs in the present day.

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