so strange to me when people pretend that reading subtitles doesnt severely affect your experience of a show. like, unless its very low on dialogue, youre gonna spend most of the time staring at the bottom of the screen. like, its totally valid if thats a valid tradeoff for you, or if it isnt dubbed, but it clearly IS a tradeoff
today on posts from a parallel universe: ????????
this has not been a problem to me, ever*, and I watch stuff with subtitles on all the time (including stuff in languages I am fluent in, because parsing audio is a pain sometimes.)
*(ok technically I had problems with subtitles when I was a tiny child, which I’ve always attributed to not yet being able to read very fast. Maybe this is an acquired skill you need and I picked it up early because of American cultural imperialism and my parents (correctly) hating dubbing)
I was *already* missing most of the details of what was happening on the screen [link], so there isn’t much to lose by turning on subtitles.
Oh yeah, reading subtitles absolutely severely affects my experience of a show, because I can actually understand what anybody is saying and therefore what’s supposed to be going on. ;P
I think the original post is about anime due to the “if it’s not dubbed” bit, but like… I have somewhat accidentally never watched an anime in my life. We’re talking 100% spoken English media here, for me. I just have bad enough auditory processing that the “tradeoff” is between understanding while only looking at the characters 90% of the time (rough estimate, but I know I can read a Terry Pratchett novel in four hours, I read *fast*), or not understanding at all.
(I also have a *lot* of issues with dubbed media. I would always rather hear the original inflections since I’m going to be reading subtitles anyway. Is hearing completely different voices and performances supposed to affect your experience of a non-English-original show less than “the one-inch-high barrier of subtitles”? :S)
(I mean, I will grant, ability to read fast and comprehend what you’re reading is frustratingly rare, at least in the US. One of the big things that’s driving me crazy at my job is being told by the support team “it’s unreasonable to expect us to read all that” when I ask for help and try to give them the information they’ll need. So maybe it’s a more average experience to find yourself absolutely hobbled by subtitles. But really… that doesn’t sound like a subtitles problem.)
I think you’re being overly uncharitable. People who have a harder time with text or images than with audio deserve sympathy too.
Note that I *didn’t* say subtitles don’t make it harder for me to parse visuals! They *do*, and I can absolutely see how someone’s sensory processors could be set up in such a way that subtitles do more harm than good. It’s just that *my* sensory-processing bandwidth is so small and so text-weighted that *most* of the things being sacrificed are things I would have had to sacrifice regardless, and *many* of the benefits received in exchange are things I needed.
(I recently read a *transcript* of a TV episode after watching it with subtitles and discovered that–despite the subtitles being helpful on net–I had *still* missed some of the dialogue. I’m really not that good at interacting with stories on a synchronous basis in general. Real life is *somewhat* easier because it doesn’t run on Chekhov’s Gun rules: the background details I missed very often *don’t* ever become important.)
i probably am being overly uncharitable. reading comprehension / reading speed is a sore spot with me anyway for a number of reasons, and ever since we went to work at home and therefore text-only support at work, those reasons have been piling up, to a point where being outside the standard deviation on that bell curve is a huge part of why i’m in a major depressive spiral and currently unable to work. (well, being outside the standard deviation and other people being *assholes* about it. but also just having to answer the same question five times when i’m trying to get help, and then being penalized for having long calls.)
anyway. yeah. i guess this one hit more of a sore spot than i realized, one where i don’t have a lot of sympathy to spare right now. :S
Tags:
#*hug* #conversational aglets #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #depression #discourse cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
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