Most of these horrible, horrible things happen in old official rips from more then ten years ago, but you’d be surprised at the shit that still pops up.
Reviews will happen. This is not me slacking. I’ve just been busy.
By the way, all of these are random puu.sh pics I’ve taken over the past few months, so that’s why they’re not all full screenshots. But you get the idea.
1. Make all lines the same length and ignore overlaps.
Screenshot comes from Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death and Rebirth.
This is nearly impossible to watch. I sat through all of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure with subs that did this, too. You have to constantly pay attention to the subtitles to keep track of what was there and what is new. You can’t even shift your focus to the image behind the subs, since you might lose focus just enough to wonder, “Did I read that line or was that there before?”
2. Have rainbow karaoke for everything.
I’m looking at you, WhyNot.
3. Have overlaps without some sort of differentiation.
Both this and the screenshot before it comes from WhyNot’s Bakumatsu Gijinden Roman.
Okay, so this is a typesetting issue, but even so, it’s a cluttered mess.
4. Have three-(or more!)-liners.
This is from Commie’s Monogatari Season 2, but fonts do render a bit differently on libass, so I don’t want to call them out on a 3-liner when it probably looks fine on vsfilter. However, there are some very obvious cases of multi-liners in other shows, and this should just not happen.
Not only does it cover up more of the screen than it should, it forces the viewer to dedicate a large chunk of time reading the subs before focusing on the animation. Breaking lines up means that not only will the viewer not miss out on the dialogue, but they won’t miss out on the action, either.
5. Forget to run spellcheck.
Picture from Chihiro’s Zettai Karen Children.
Look, I’m guilty of this too. I rarely spellcheck edits I do, saying the QC will check it. It’s pure laziness on my part. However, spellchecking will reduce the number of errors in your releases, and will make you look like less of a fucking idiot.
6. If you’re going to typeset, at least try to make it look nice.
This is from Princess Resurrection.
At this point, don’t even try. \an8 that shit and move on.
(By the way, this was their dialogue font.)
Also, don’t put effort in and mess up signs so badly that they do this:
This is from Planetes. The sign goes on top of the characters, apparently.
7. Insert stupid memes into your releases.
I don’t remember what this is from, either.
Look. I know this is funny and cool, but either leave it in the script comments or release a total troll release, labeling it as such. Otherwise, this just disrupts the flow and is unwanted.
8. Have obnoxious and unnecessary TL-notes.
Can’t remember what this is from, either.
If I didn’t know what an I-beam was (I didn’t), telling me that in a TL note isn’t going to change that. It’s a waste of your effort to put it there. I have to divert my attention to read it, and it covers up part of the screen for no reason. TL notes are handy in some situations, but it is not one of them.
9. Skip QC.
This is from Soul Eater if that’s not obvious already.
I don’t think I need to elaborate here. Also, if you’re a ripper and you just plan to slap the DVD sub on and release, at least watch your way through the entire first ep to decide if it’s okay to just release and move on. Otherwise, you end up with tons of issues like we’ve seen in this rant so far.
10. Use fonts that don’t support the characters your script uses.
This is HorribleSubs’s rip of Cardfight Vanguard.
I talked about this in my Vividred review, but that wasn’t the first time I saw it. It pops up a lot more often than you’d think. If you haven’t encountered it before, you’re lucky.
Sometimes, you don’t even get blank characters (like in Vividred) or boxes (like above). You get shit like this:
I don’t even know what happened here. I do love me some math symbols, though!~
Anyway, we could all add a bunch of things to this list, but I’m gonna stop at ten since it’s a nice number and open it up for your comments.