Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
EDIT: Link was taken down thanks to someone in the comments here’s the archive for the page https://web.archive.org/web/20251004184506/https://fandomwire.com/crunchyroll-faces-cancelation-why-anime-fans-are-choosing-piracy-after-latest-update/
https://bsky.app/profile/lamhfada.bsky.social/post/3m2c3udxnjc2u
When property is valued over people, piracy is protest. Pirating undermines a system that guards profit while neglecting humanity. Every download is a refusal to accept laws that protect wealth over well-being.
And the Spotify ceo just stepped down so he could focus on weapons systems for Israel. The people running all of our media services are Nazis.
Fascism is the natural end stage of capitalism. Plenty of businesses that have no core connection and competency with the military are embedding themselves into the military. For now, most of the US top brass loathe the Trump administration, but eventually they will be replaced by loyalists. We might get a real life Enclave if something isn’t done to rid the fascists.
Ahh good ol’ Aegisub. I have great memories of subtitling anime in my late teens before I got a girlfriend and the fansub scene died when Crunchyroll took over.
I was also one of the people helping test Aegisub on Linux (2009-ish), I wasn’t a programmer at the time but I remember a dude called ‘verm’ in the IRC channel who did a bunch of work to make Aegisub stable on Linux. He taught me the difference between little endian and big endian, I guess he was bored that day
The whole “calling out Israel for genocide means you’re antisemitic” line is so worn out and honestly just exhausting. Israel has spent like 4+ decades trying desperately to associate criticism of israel with antisemitism.
I’ve been boycotting Crunchyroll for years, and I’m not stopping anytime soon.
“Piracy is a human right, collective ownership of the seas, comrades!” — Erik L. Midtsveen
Maybe instead of everyone calling it isreal and palestine, they should say the isreali government and innocent people.
They should say Netanyahu is committing genocide.
Saying israel instead of directly naming the culprits is sort of like when people say antifa. In the case of antifa it makes bad actors able to demonise the word and make it seem like a bad thing, so it can be used to twist peoples minds and make them think its a bad thing.
In the case of this genocide, it dehumanises the people committing the atrocities and diverts blame to the word instead of the people. Which has the effect of people like Netanyahu being able to reassociate the word with the israeli people and the jews.
So it absolutely isnt antisemitic to say israel is committing genocide, but it is unhelpful to divert the blame from the real asshats in charge.
Genocide is wildly popular in Israel right now
"Dubbed the “Sderot cinema” by Israelis online, watching Israel’s bombardment has become a popular pastime; people take turns looking through tower viewers. Some bring popcorn and snacks, and some snap selfies as the thud of airstrikes echo in the distance.
“When I look at Gaza from here and see buildings still standing, it makes me upset. … I want Israel to continue until it’s all flattened,” Rafael Hemo, an onlooker told CNN."
Edit fixed link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/global-outrage-has-grown-after-two-years-of-bombardment-in-gaza-in-israel-it-is-a-different-story/ar-AA1NSQWj
Appalling.
P. S. When I tried to open your link, it failed and sent me to the MSN front page, i removed some variables/identifiers at the end of URL and that seems to work:
Ok, but fascism is wildly popular in the USA right now. Would you make the same argument there?
Or, like me, are you more inclined towards believing that more likely a few terrible people in power have sway with a vast number of easily led racists and that mischaracterises the whole country?
Ok, but fascism is wildly popular in the USA right now.
Yes, we’re a fascist country now.
But more to the point, brining up a country that was founded on Genocide of Native Americans to argue that we shouldn’t speak ill of a country founded on Genocide of Palestinians is wild.
a few terrible people in power have sway with a vast number of easily led racists
This describes both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Again, weird take unless you’re pushing for us to drop the Nazi label from 1933-1945 Germany.
Are you a fascist?
No, I’m a Leftist.
Ok, so, you are not a fascist country, you are a country run by fascists with fascists in it. But this doesn’t represent the values of the entire population. Especially when trump rigged the election (by his own admission) that means that not even the majority are fascists. And then you have to exclude all those who voted for trump because they were duped by his campaign who aren’t fascist and are just more republican and 4ight leaning than left.
I feel the same way about israel and palestine. We are quick to speak to the separation of hamas and palestine as a whole, but when it comes to israel, the same voices are shouting its the whole country and not just a genocidal organisation and their followers.
I think its an important distinction.
I mean… yeah? It’s not really much of a mischaracterization if it’s true. At one point you have to accept that the we’re the baddies as a US citizen.
What do you think should be done to you?
What makes you think that relabelling Palestinians as ‘innocent people’ to prevent Netanyahu and his fascists from their Doublethink redirection of genocide to only be relevant to Jews but not Palestinians would work? They would immediately reframe ‘innocent people’ as Hamas-embedded terrorist supporters - they already do it. The better action is to call out the truth (Israel is committing genocide) and say it loudly as much as possible, one of many benefits is that businesses and artists and people don’t actually want to be associated with a genocide and we’re seeing that impact daily.
When people say “Israel is committing genocide” they mean the government of Israel, it is implied. It is silly to extrapolate it to blame for every man woman and child in Israel. Just as it would be silly to pin it down to only Netanyahu when he is the PM of far-right government with thousands of people directly supporting and enabling his actions, and is Israel’s longest serving prime minister - voted in multiple times by clear majority in elections, so while only he and his government are accountable to their actions, a large swathe of Israel is responsible for him being there.
Just as when people say “the USA has just bombed Iran unprovoked” they clearly mean the current government of the USA has taken this action - not just Trump, and also not some kid playing basketball in Philadelphia.
Thats a fine argument, and i agree with you. But I’m not talking about people who understand the implication behind naming the country and not the individuals. I am specifically saying that there are swathes of people who hear the word israel and its not a government, its not a country, its a terrorist, its a more abstract scary monster thing and for those people, it shifts blame from the government, to the country as a whole. Just like what happened with antifa. Antifa doesnt mean anti fascist to idiots. It means terrorist.
Netanyahu
Yes, Netanyahu!
I would very much like a streaming service that makes it transparent what it actually spends its income on.
Like - a streaming service where i pay $10/month and 90% of that goes to the studios/artists that actually produce the anime? I would take that.
But right now i’m worried that i pay $10/month and 90% of that goes to the shareholders of the streaming provider as “profit” while the studio gets almost nothing.
Yeah… sweet summer child you might not want to read Chokepoint Capitalism. It’s closer to 99% for BigContent lawyers and right holders and less than 1% for actual creators.
Lol, I’m sure it’s a good book and Cory Doctorow is well renowned, but I can’t help but think: “Defeat Chokepoint Capitalism by buying our book right now!”
Cory Doctorow’s works are almost always free to download, just a physical copy costs money.
And ironically enough even though most book by Doctorow might be DRM-free, maybe this one is, I can’t remember.
If you want I give you a free TL;DR: it’s not just monopolies, it’s also monopsies. When we feel trapped by buying with Amazon we often forget that authors often have the same feeling. So the “chokepoint” is not 1-sided but 2-sided.
Get thee to The Pirate Bay and send your direct donations on the side.
where would i send them to?
Enshittification, everyone. It comes to everything.
Animelab died for this
The problem here is that all these major anime providers are owned by Sony, so you’re kinda fucked if you want to boycott them.
Did you read the article - or even the title? This story is about people turning to piracy, not turning to another official source.
You’re not fucked if you have The Pirate Bay. :-)
Have you been living under a rock?
I live under a rock apparently!
Anime’s on tpb now? Fuck me i just use #transformers
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Greed kills
Lol. Crunchy roll was always crap. Watching anime in the raw is torture.
As far as I know we don’t even have fansubs anymore, any group nowadays is just a rip of whatever streaming has the anime, current anime if it’s not picked up by any streaming will get no subs, the streaming giants were successful and embracing it and enshitifying.
Some groups are still alive:
Funnily enough, i was considering just today whether i should re-open my old Crunchyroll account. But i guess i won’t do it now after all. IIRC there’s been a streak of bad press about crunchyroll; like, this today isn’t the only issue.
Corporations can’t stand it a logarithmic graph. They need freaking geometric progressions, and then they do stuff that gets them an anti-logarithmic graph.
And there goes the last streaming service I still paid to access. It was convenient exactly because of the subtitles…
Everything now must flow through my -arr stack.
The zionism thing was the icing on the shit cake. Fuck that genocidal ethnostate, and fuck all genocide enablers.
I cannot seem to find any verification that any of this is happening. An OPs link is dead.
Found this. Apparently they took the post down but here is the archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20251004184506/https://fandomwire.com/crunchyroll-faces-cancelation-why-anime-fans-are-choosing-piracy-after-latest-update/
