Why I pirate
I watched Suzume earlier this year in theaters and really enjoyed it, but when I heard Crunchyroll was releasing the BLu-ray, that really doused any interest in purchasing it. I don't like Crunchyroll as a company, and I have all these options to just pirate it on Nyaa, so why not?
I own the special edition for Your Name (which I think has a encoding error that has a bunch of visual bugs when you watch it) ((I asked Amazon about it and they told me to contact the original company to deal with it)) and the only reason I bought Weathering With You special edition was because it was on sale (watched that with a friend, that one was great)
But a localized anime on Blu-ray can feel like a real roll of the dice in terms of quality. I watched Castle in the Sky from G-Kids yesterday, hoping they had fixed the script with all the little lines that are missing. Nope, it's still got points where someone's saying Sheeta or something and there's something not down there. Maybe okay quality expectations for the 90s, but not in the 2000s!
And so many people work on translations even within the same company. Who knows who you're getting for some of these. When I saw A Boy and the Heron, I thought the script for it was pretty good for the most part. The one thing that really stuck out to me was all the grannies referring to Mahito as "Sonny" for "bocchama". That's super weird and casual, considering the term is usually used by servants to talk about the children of their employers. I usually see bocchama translated as "young master". Having these old ladies just going "hey, sonny" changes the nature of the relationship between the grannies and the kid
The real horror story I heard this year was the Shin Ultraman theatrical release that I went to (which had problems of its own) apparently has a terrible Blu-ray release that didn't even use the same script as a base
The honorofic and westernized naming stuff I've let go by the roadside, since I can't expect the industry to cater to my weeb preferences. But I think there's a definite question of lack of quality control for localized anime/toku that should be considered. These guys are paid to put out a professional release. I feel like customers should at least get subtitles that are all there and relatively accurate to the original text, even if it has to be localized to appeal to a larger western audience
