Please please please use common sense when you're doing the subbing and editing of an anime. It's not that I don't appreciate you guys, I am very grateful that you have taken the time and trouble to translate anime for the enjoyment of others but...a little common sense would make me even more grateful.
What am I talking about? I'm talking about the size of the screen fonts, the placement of the words and the colour. Oh, and also commercial stuff. I have watched anime where the subber or the editor had the great idea to put their email address onscreen whenever no one is talking (which means no subtitles are needed). I don't object to the posting of one's email address onscreen but could you at least put it in say, the opening credits or the ending credits or even that short intermission in the middle? It's frustrating to read the next words that appear on the screen expectantly only to find that it's only an email address.
Now colour. I'm not being picky or anything but a nice strong yellow of reasonable size is best as it's easy to read and shows through any background. White is not good. Neither is pale blue. I can understand why some people would want pale blue as it is a lovely colour but face it, it's bloody hard to read especially against a light background.
And lastly, size. I have actually come across an episode of Inuyasha where the font was so miniscule that I needed to sit 2 cm from the screen with a magnifying glass to be able to read it. This is not funny as my mum always warned me against sitting too close to the tv and also, I don't own a magnifying glass.
I'm actually convinced that the tiny font was due to some error in editing and not an actual decision made by the editors but in case it is, please don't do it next time.
That's all. Thanks for reading.
I have the feeling that some people may think I am anti-Sailormoon. I'm not really. Though I should admit, shamefully, that I was once a fan of the series, so much that I even drew pictures of her. It all stopped when I saw that VIZ version of the anime. What were they thinking when they assigned the voice for Usagi? She sounds like a brat with a demented attitude and if I had a choice between having the world taken over by some weird, evil, alien and being rescued by her and the sailorscouts, I'll hail the aliens. They spend more time changing forms and posing than actually fighting, even Sango changes into her exterminating outfit faster and she has to do it without the magic. Most of them have only one or two pretty lame attacks and the storyline for every episode is about the same. It's really insulting to the intelligence.
And don't get me started on Mamoru. He was only cool and useful and important to the storyline in the first series. In all the others, he's just like another accessory for Sailormoon.
I have a really hard time when Darkwing, another friend of ours and I go to hire some anime for an all-night marathon. Darkwing is a SM fanatic and the other friend is very partial to it and rarely give other anime a chance but it's two against one, what can I do? Compromise, that's what. For every two SM videos, I am allowed to choose ONE non-SM video because they feel sorry for me.
Thank god they like Inuyasha too.
Okay, I like Saint Seiya. And if people think about it Saint Seiya is a lot like Sailormoon. Saori, the incarnation of the Goddess Athena, is a spoiled brat that doesn't really do anything except get into a life-threatening situation which means the saints have to risk their lives to save her. The storyline is fairly predictable on a larger scale than SM and the characters have only one or two attacks (but they're cool attacks) and spend most of the time posing and saying how cool their attacks are and getting really surprised when the attack is not as cool as they said. And I guess the fighting is a bit tedious after awhile (one point for SM for having shorter and less tedious fighting scenes).
But I like Saint Seiya for the same reasons DW and other people like Sailormoon; I just like it, end of story.
I was reading two volumes of X by Clamp (the same people who did Card Captor Sakura) last week when I should've been studying. Maybe I should have studied or maybe I should have started reading it from the very first volume (a very good place to start) or maybe it was VIZ. At any rate, I don't quite get the gist of it. What I found most confusing is the layout of the manga. Often I read the word captions in the wrong order because I found the layout very messy and annoying. I think I would've done the same thing when reading Fushigi Yuugi except that I saw the whole 52 episodes of the anime before picking up the manga. Give me comics in nice neat boxes any day like anything by Rumiko Takahashi, Crayon Shinchan, Doctor Slump, Snoopy, Garfield, etc.
What's with the feathers floating all over the place? They don't seem to be helping with the storyline at all and I checked very thoroughly throughout the two volumes looking for a bird to whom the feathers might belong but I can't find any! Yeah, yeah, I know that one of the girls is called Kotori meaning Little Bird but is that many floating feathers necessary?
And what is with the men and their really broad shoulders? It's like some evil fashion designer decided that jackets with HUGE shoulder pads are all the rage. The men look like upside down isosceles triangles with a little circle at the end for the heads.
The men aren't the only ones to have a strange quirk. All the female characters with the exception of one or two have gravity defying hair. Whisps of curly hair writhering all over the pages which would look normal if and only if the story is set beneath the sea.
Apart from that, I think I will go on reading it if I have the chance though I doubt I'll became a big fan. The Clamp people have a rather nice style if you'll excues the shoulders and the hair and I kind of like two of the characters, Sora and Arashi, I think they're called.
Yep, that's all. If you're asking what is my purpose for writing all this, well, there is no purpose.