K-ON Catastrophe: Coalguys Sucks (and so does Fuwa).

It’s not very cool to rag on fansub groups openly, but I’ve had it. I suffered through Coalguys’ K-ON subs last year mostly because they were the fastest, but their subs got rougher and lamer. Now I see what they’ve done to K-ON season two and it makes me want to smash stuff and hurt people — and I’m not even a hardcore fan.

Simply put, they ran K-ON through the sewer. So now the girls use terms like “f**king b*tch”? It’s possible that the series has different writers, but that much of a change I find very, very unlikely. What’s much more possible is Coalguys’ addiction to profanity, sloppy translation, and general inaccuracy. Now the other unrealistic thing is that when the girls aren’t using gutter language, they sound like a parody of Christians! They’re not attending a private Christian school that I could ever tell, so the sudden change is also a result of poor translation or some stupid stunt. And the opening theme song suffers from the same thing — although that’s so obvious that it must be a stupid stunt. Finally, the contemporary American political expressions are equally and massively out-of-place. All this adds up to one giant disrespect of the series; I’d even go so far as to call it a rape.

This particular FS is not above this sort of attention-seeking behavior, if you remember episode 10 from the first season. Then, the main guy released a crude home video of him ragging off on wannabe otakus. They’ve been thrown off at least one hosting site, too.

I don’t know who else is doing this series, but it’s gotta be better than their effort.

In short, Coalguys SUCKS and I will never watch another one of their subs.

Update: Apparently Fuwa subs is the work of the same loser or group of losers. Their sub contains doubtful profanities and racial epithets. They suck too.

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What Is Bandai’s Problem?

What is Bandai Entertainment’s problem? It’s been nine months since True Tears and Shigofumi were postponed. Nine months and they’re still missing in action. I understand that it takes a while for series to be translated, voiced, the DVD booklets and covers to be designed, and the finished product to be distributed, but you’d think in nine months they could have said, “Yes, it’s still on.” or “No, fugghedaboutit.” Funimation had no such problem releasing Claymore at warp speed, so why can’t Bandai get it together? To top it off, the plans were to release True Tears with just subtitles!

I’m frustrated by this because it’s circular logic. Apparently Bandai thinks, “We can’t make money releasing this for North America because this because the series is so unusual that no-one will buy it.” Never mind that they’ve already paid the voice actresses, the writers, the animators, and everyone involved in producing the Japanese version. So you’d think they’d do whatever they could to recoup those expenditures, right? No! I don’t know whether it’s saving face or fear of failure, or what.

Meanwhile, the series have developed rabid fan bases who have watched them through the valiant efforts of fansubbers (all hail Moetaku and FTP-A). So the fans that drool over the fansubbed versions and who would willingly shell out $$$ will never be able to own the real thing, because the license-holder thinks that they can’t make any money.

Whatever.

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