So I recently did an interview for a forum member, and this topic came up. And seeing as how a related incident like this happened just yesterday, it feels like now would be a good time to talk about it.
Here's my problem with people who actively dislike #TV-Nihon's subs. They come off like religious zealots or dirty campaigners. Sometimes they do catch us making mistakes and stuff, but for the most part it's this smear campaign against a parody of what we are. They just say "Oh, that's the group that doesn't translate everything" and that's the end of that.
But those sort of tactics usually just end up being a "preach to the choir" type of thing. It's pretty easy to convince foolish people to believe superficial things, since they don't check the facts. But in this case, people who actually watch our subs already know what their opinions of our work is.
It's a preference. They come to our group because they like the kind of work we do and in the style that we do it. You can bully and pressure people into doing a lot of stuff, but you can't really change their opinions that way. I mean, if they didn't like our style and there were other options, they'd probably either complain or just watch other group's stuff. We have a plethora of ways for our fans to contact us, so it's not exactly as if they don't have a say in how we do things. (Oh yeah, anyone want to sign up to be a quality check person? Probably a good time to ask since summer vacation is coming up).
Getting back to the "preaching to the choir" thing. Mocking our work is pretty easy to do, and makes a lot of sense to those people, but it also only applies to those guys. It seems like they're under the assumption that just because they hold this opinion, everyone holds this opinion as well. They work pretty hard at this too. I've seen screencaps of our work on Tumblr, or jokes at our expense on our forums. I mean, that's fine and all, we're not above criticism or being the source of a joke, but who actually finds that stuff funny? It just seems like haters reenforcing their own hate.
I don't think any of our fans take the trolls seriously, but no one takes the Westboro guys seriously either. That doesn't make them any less annoying when you see their actions. It's just a sad reminder that there's a wide spectrum of people in the world, and some people don't have anything better to do than act like children.
If you find a mistake, e-mailing me, posting on the forums, writing on our wiki are great ways of letting us know. As long as you're not being rude about it, in general I feel like we're good at hearing out our fans, or at least explaining why we made the decision that we did.
And it may be fun and games for the trolls, after all, they've got to do something with their finite time on the Earth... but this stuff is serious business for us. We work really hard on them. Our group members spend a lot of effort, time, and money for this hobby. We argue back and forth about phrasing in quality check. Mistakes and wonky lines are going to happen, that's just life and part of the human experience. It's not going to be perfect every time, but we are making an effort to do our best.
tl;dr
Trolls are dumb and people who like their stuff are dumb. TV-Nihon ichiban.
