It’s been a few months since Vince Staples jokingly volunteered to “shut the fuck up forever” if fans/haters would donate $2 million to him, but he might have to reactivate that campaign now that he has declared his support for one of the most controversial opinions in the history of pop culture: He prefers dubs to subs.
If you have no idea what he’s talking about, then congratulations on being cool when you were in high school, but for the rest of us it means that he prefers to watch anime re-dubbed with English voice actors rather than subtitled in English with the original Japanese audio.
It’s a controversial opinion because some anime fans consider watching with subtitles (“subs”) to be the more authentic experience, since some of the deeper nuances of the original performance could be lost in translation—literally!—when replaced by English audio (“dubs”). It’s also a holdover from the bad old days when getting any kind of anime to the West was a ridiculous hassle, leading to cheap, half-assed dubs that were made with as little effort as possible. Anime is pretty big in the U.S. now, though, so a studio can expand its market considerably by putting some money into a good dub, not to mention the fact that it’s easier to appreciate an animator’s work when you’re not reading the subtitles.
Anyway, Staples was surprised that so many of his Twitter followers watch anime with subs, noting that they’re all technically dubs anyway since “it’s a cartoon,” and he then tried to call out some anime hipsters by asking if the pro-subs crowd was still “on this shit” when they were watching Pokémon as kids.
From there, Staples’ takes started to get hotter and hotter, first by accusing his followers of being “too good for Pikachu” and then by declaring that the monsters from Digimon “would have beat up” the monsters from Pokémon.
He also (rightfully) shot down a claim that Yu-Gi-Oh! was better than both of them.
Staples ended this fiery thread by noting that he’s going to Japan in a few weeks and is just going to make his own anime.