Pro-Tip To Anime Localizers, Quit Insulting Your Audience If You Want To Keep Them.

After the whole Prison School cringefest awhile back where someone thought throwing in a reference to GamerGate (a reference that was totally at odds with the actual meaning of the original and completely insulting for the sake of being insulting I might add) in one dubbed episode was a great idea, I was wondering if maybe notes had been taken on not trying to insult people when localizing foreign media.

On top of doing so being bad business sense (don’t shit where you eat is just common sense for anyone trying to make money), putting political or social messages where they didn’t exist originally is just going to insult the FANS, many of whom almost certainly got a fan translation of the original and now want to see the native version try to respect the source.

Unfortunately, it seems someone decided to one-up the previous stupidity with this nonsense:

For some bizarre reason, Funimation thought it would be a brilliant idea to insult fans of light novels and visual novels in their localization of Hajimete no Gal.

This is asinine for several reasons:

1. This material was not the original intent of the media.
2. Many anime are BORN from light novels and visual novels, and many who watch the animation likely saw it first in light novel and visual novel format, so insulting the people who decide to watch the adaptation is a great way to make them not want to watch your bastardized dub and stick with a fan sub of the original media, because at least most fan subbers know people who watch what they subtitle don’t want to be insulted, they just want escapism in a way they understand in their native tongue.
3. Based on what I looked up on the show and its source, it’s something of a commentary on the usual setups of romantic entanglements in light and visual novels, so why blatantly insult people? Even if the show were critical of light and visual novels, let whatever message the original had speak for itself, don’t slap the fans in the face by shoving words in mouths that never said them originally, as the fans can tell and will refuse to watch your insult to what they were watching.

I could go on, but I believe I’ve laid out the stupidity and incompetence well enough as stated above, so with that in mind, I present the following question to the localizers:

Do you just not care about the source media and want to write your own scripts? Do you have a soapbox you want to get on and you feel the need to hijack other media for use for that end? Do you not want to retain fans and possibly make money off them?

If you answered yes to any of the three questions above, then expect to lose money and patronage. The fans were making do with fan translations that cost them nothing and didn’t insult their intelligence and fandom before, and they will continue to do so as long as you keep this nonsense up.

And I for one will not pity you when your finances are in the red because you chose to spit on your own meal ticket.