Hot take: I was watching dubs wrong for 10 years

I used to always watch anime with dubs because I could multitask while watching. Fold laundry, scroll my phone, whatever. Then last week I put on Attack on Titan season 4 part 2 and realized I had no clue what was happening. The dub voices felt flat and the lip sync was off. I rewound and switched to subs out of frustration. Suddenly I caught all these little dialogue nuances I missed before. The Japanese voice actors actually put way more emotion into their lines. Now I feel like I wasted hundreds of hours half-watching shows. Has anyone else had that moment where sub vs dub just clicked for them?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_jason18d ago

Wait, @clairem47 I think you're mixing up the seasons, Eren turning into a Titan happens way earlier in season one, not the later seasons. Honestly the flat vocal performance was the main thing that broke it for me first, the lip sync just made it worse after.

clairem4718d ago

Dub or sub debates always get people heated but your AOT example actually makes me wonder something. You mentioned the lip sync being off, was that the main thing that broke the immersion or did it start with the flat vocal performance first? Because with AOT specifically, Eren's Japanese VA sells those breakdowns and screaming scenes in a way that the English one just can't match, it sounds like he's actually losing his mind. Did rewatching the earlier seasons in sub change how you felt about key moments like Eren turning into a Titan or Reiner's reveal?

murphy.barbara18d ago

Honestly the thing that got me wasn't the lip sync or even the flat voices at first, it was the background sounds. In dubs they always crank the music down and the voices up super clean, but with subs you hear all the little ambient noises and the voice actors breathing and cracking mid sentence. I went back to watch that scene where Reiner breaks down on top of the wall and in the dub it's just him talking loudly, but in the sub you can hear him hyperventilating and sniffling between words. That raw audio quality changes everything.