This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.
I regret everything about my life that led me to this point.
Every Bad Ending Begins With Good Intentions
As your beloved protagonist of the aniblog version of Hiatus x Hiatus, you know I can get a bit… distracted. So keeping me on-target with requests is a totally fine thing to do. (I promise I’ll look at scanlations eventually!)
This particular tale of woe begins with one such innocuous ask:
Ralon17 was not lying. After perusing nyaa, I found myself staring at 20-some seemingly viable releases. Normally I’d peace out after that much nonsense, but then I happened across some drama, and I can’t resist that particular siren’s call. All courtesy of one of the solo-groups (PromareDayOne a.k.a. PromareWeekOne):
PromareDayOne: “KudouUsagi is a liar. They claim that they made their own fansub and that it’s not based on mine, but by pure coincidence it has the same spelling mistakes as v1.1 of my subs.”
PromareDayOne, once again: “Keep in mind that all fansubs released so far for Promare are to some extent based on mine, so if I hadn’t released mine there might still not be any subtitles for this movie.”
Nothing for it other than to download 121 GB of the same movie and find out what the fuck is going on.
And You Thought I Was Lazy
After going through these releases, I have come to the conclusion that Covid is not enough.
More, please~
Housecleaning (only unspoiler if you care about process documentation):
Spoiler for
I tried using MPV as my test suite for these releases, because after all the commentary informing me mpv is what “the scene” has thrown in with, I was willing to give it a shot. However, it is very difficult to track screenshots across multiple releases when image saving results in shit like “mpv-shot0001.jpg”. No settings? No way to validate the version or update the program? I can’t use this for testing, folks. Not without losing my mind.
Imma fuck those mice.
For reviews going forward (with new releases), I will check the visuals out with mpv. The typesetters, at least, are owed that. However when it comes to the actual script? Cut me a bit of slack, onegaishimasudesu.
Thx for caring
Also, there are a lot of screenshots in this post and I didn’t comment on every single one like I normally do. If you’re honestly confused as to what point I’m trying to make, or what the error is, the comments section is open. Any line that requires more than a sentence of explanation as to why it’s wrong has been left out of this post. Therefore, everything highlighted should be either a simple grammatical error or a spelling mistake. Think of it as Where’s Waldo, except you’re looking for his simple cousin who isn’t doing the best job of hiding.
But again, just ask. I’m happy to give you personal attention, but like not in the creepy gym teacher way.
Unless…
The thing to understand about Promare releases is that the descriptions and the comments on Nyaa are all fucking wrong. This is less that the releasers are liars than it is they fundamentally have no fucking clue what they’re doing.
Across these 21 releases, there are only 11 unique scripts. All are based on the US GKIDS translation:
Yes, I could have used Visio, but MS Paint is way more my brand. Was planning to clean it up, but then I didn’t.
I think that clarifies things, but just in case, have a screenshot of the Excel I used to keep track of what was going on:
You know the scene’s in a good spot when a post requires me to spend more time in Excel than in my video player.
Feel free to check my results by extracting the subs and comparing them in Notepad++ with the Compare plug-in. But yeah, I’m pretty confident this is accurate.
Release Breakdowns
PromareDayOne v.1.1 (Not Recommended)
Spoiler for
tl;dr: Some retard transcribed a camrip of the official subs for Promare thinking it’d get him laid by middle schoolers awed by his ability to write down simple words he saw on a screen.
Except he sucked at it.
When others released their own versions of Promare, he then went around accusing everyone of stealing his subtitles and telling folks who actually did shit he was impressed they weren’t low-effort derivatives of “his” amazing work that he spent his whole life on. Then he cried when people weren’t appreciative of his free diarrhea pie. Boo fucking hoo.
My super power is bullying.
PDO’s constant gaslighting around what his release actually was (again: a low-effort transcription of a camrip) made figuring out what was going on with all these releases a major pain in the ass. It even confused the other groups, making their release notes untrustworthy garbage.
Luckily, it seems he quit “fansubbing” after realizing Nyaa has a comments section.
Thanks greenskins, you’re the real heroes.
Scripts
All these are formatted as Unique Script Name {The Script’s Source}.
PromareDayOne v.1.1 {GKIDS US Official Translation}
You’d think it would be easy to copy a professionally translated script without adding in errors every time you tried to put your own spin on things. Well, it is easy. PDO just sucks at life.
AEDNuLL {PromareDayOne v.1.1}
Made 4 whole script changes to PDO’s 1.1, fixing none of the errors.
Leeson {PromareDayOne v.1.1}
Fixed a portion of the obvious mistakes in the 1.1, but not nearly enough to escape this category.
Groups
AEDNuLL (untagged)
[DB]
[Judas]
[Leeson]
[sensual]
[Shigin]
[zza]
Things get more pathetic when you realize the only changes this kid made served to make things worse. How many hours did he say he worked on this, again?
Script Examples
As a transcription, these subs hew very closely to the official GKIDS translation. However, they are punctuated by mistakes made in the process – either accidentally or a result of intentioned incompetence.
Due to the added errors, these are objectively worse than the official subs. Welcome to the common theme of this post.
KudouUsagi v.0 (Not Recommended)
Spoiler for
There are some good ideas here. Unfortunately, there are more bad ones.
Scripts
KudouUsagi v.0 {GKIDS US Official Translation}
Released under [Carpenter Rabbit].
CosmicDuck {KudouUsagi v.0}
This fixed like one or two things from the [Carpenter Rabbit] release.
Groups
[Anime Land]
[Beatrice-Raws]
[CarpenterRabbit]
[CosmicDuck]
[Hakata Ramen]
[Meakes]
[Mr.Deadpool]
Script Examples
Honestly, when this kid doesn’t fundamentally misunderstand the English language, some of the changes make sense.
“Is this a legitimate decision?” in the official release makes no sense. It technically counts as a proper sentence, but it means nothing here. Changing “legitimate” to “official” is a valuable edit. Of course, it should be “an official”, so they just changed a bad translation to bad English, but you can tell there was a human behind these changes. Fatally flawed and undeserving of sympathy or love, but a human nonetheless.
KudouUsagi v. 2 (Not Recommended)
Spoiler for
Scripts
KudouUsagi v.1 {KudouUsagi v.0}
They changed a lot more, and it got worse in the process.
Groups
[DB]
[KudouUsagi]
Script Examples
How is it that in your second try you make the end result worse? To riff off Young Frankenstein, this kid’s thinker would be labeled Abby Cess.
ScenikEight (Not Recommended)
Spoiler for
Scripts
ScenikEight {GKIDS US Official Translation}
This script had a lot of changes compared to the original translation, but most of them didn’t seem to serve a point. I’m not accepting friend applications at the moment, but I find it hard to believe editors are that hard to find.
Groups
[Mr.Deadpool]
ScenikEight (untagged; .ass release only)
Script Examples
It’s like this shit was TLC’d in a vacuum. And by that, I mean the kinda vacuum that incels buy solely to fuck.
Rounded for his pleasure.
How does one make it through life without having a single desire to improve themselves? I don’t know when ScenikEight’s value as a human being expired, but it must have been quite some time ago.
Untouched GKIDS US BD Release (Recommended, Albeit Sadly)
This is the blandest, most soulless translation you could possibly get, for a film where the bombast is its primary selling point. But I can watch with these scripts without getting a migraine, which is more than I can say for anything else those brainless dregs masquerading as fansubbers put out.
Spoiler for
Scripts
GKIDS US Official Translation
Groups
“Promare US BD Remux”
0-effort release, which resulted in a better product than every other group aside from [CBM].
[CBM]
CBM wins by doing absolutely nothing at all.
[Tess]
They included a second script with fancy dialogue styling, but they forgot to adjust the timing, so it’s a complete fucking mess.
Script Examples
I would not hire this translator for any official purpose beyond janitorial duties.
Slightly Molested GKIDS US BD Release (Not Recommended)
These haven’t earned a section of their own. Enjoy a variety of failures.
This version has fewer changes versus the source script, which makes it better. Still edited by some ESL rando, unfortunately.
Groups
[DB]
[Hakata Ramen]
[PromareDayOne]
[Shigin]
[ZetaRebel]
Meakes (normie pirate tagging)
Script Examples
I’m so fucking tired.
End Thoughts
Happy thoughts, D_S, happy thoughts…
To the members of any group mentioned in this article, please understand that I am saying this with the utmost sincerity and love:
You are not helping. You are a net drain on the scene, the fandom, and the world as a whole. Kill yourselves. Slit your wrists open with barbed wire, shove a fist down your throat, and see whether the blood loss or suffocation kills you first. Either way, please die uncomfortably.
It’ll be cute, I promise.
I get it, strawfansubber-kun. You spent “a lot” of time on the release. But what the fuck does your effort matter? Whether you spent 300 fucking hours on the release, or 1, if you came to the same failed result, does that make it better? Let’s level set: if some jerkoff spends 10 minutes to run makemkv on a blu-ray they stole from Best Buy, and you still can’t fucking beat that, it’s time to beat off. I hope your parents find you in a ditch the locals later name Cum Gully.
BD release groups have always scraped the bottom of the talent barrel, but this carnival of cock-ups has me reconsidering whether anything released in the past 5 years is worth archiving. I alluded to this in the comments on my Great Pretender review, but I legitimately had a crisis of faith after this comparison. People, please. The viewers, and the shows themselves – no matter how bad they are – deserve more than this.
Do better.
13 thoughts on “Subtitle Comparison: [21 Groups] Promare (It’s a Bad Trigger Movie)”
A little insight:
One of the reasons autistic weebs love MPV so much is that it’s highly customizable. Unfortunately, the defaults are shit. So anyone who doesn’t want to spend an hour or so working on a config that doesn’t suck C++ thigh-high femboy cock is left with a a terrible media player.
If organising screenshots is one of your main concerns, try adding using “screenshot-template=”%f-%p-#%#00n”” (no quotes) in your mvp.conf. Example output:
[Team Confidence] Great Pretender – 16 – Tokyo Grift [05C3ECBE].mkv-00_00_00-#1.png
[Team Confidence] Great Pretender – 16 – Tokyo Grift [05C3ECBE].mkv-00_00_01-#2.png
Now, onto actual comments on the post:
This is the absolute state of BD Releases. Most of the time, the script is ripped from Erai-Raws and HorribleSubs WEB and muxed into terribbly encoded BD raws, with terrible re-timing and TS if you’re lucky. Then, leech re-encode groups take an already terrible encode, make it worse. And have non-native English speakers try editing badly edited official subs on their phone so they can claim they edited the subtitles.
As for WEB, it isn’t much better. HorribleSubs shut down if you haven’t heard, so people have been using Erai-Raws and a bunch of other automated rip groups that have popped up to take it’s place.
The only actual fansubbing group that isn’t dead and just comes along to pump out badly QC’d BD Batches every few months (Looking at you DDY) is GJM. I’m convinced the only reason they’re still alive is their complete and utter genuine hate for Aniplex.
All the releases for Promare are god awful, ScenikEight did his release when only POD and some basic edits of POD’s v1.1 script were around, after he saw how bad the TL’s were. He pretty much just used the POD v1.1 timing and nothing else in his release. So it was the best and only real choice for a while until the USBD came out.
As you suspected, he’s not a fansubber. He’s a degenerate who learned Japanese to do vocaloid covers on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/EIGHTScenik/videos
So not only was that his first sub, there was no QC or TS/TLC. Given the circumstances, the results weren’t as bad as they could of been.
end of disjointed rant and explanation. WTF is with this site’s new theme though? It looks like I zoomed in 200% to the page and the text didn’t scale.
I’m going to read what you actually wrote when I sober up tomorrow, but idk, I just set the site to max width. Figured it’s easier to read nested comments.
Looks shit from your view, huh? I can switch back. Just so much fucking empty space when I view the site normally.
Adds the following in order (ignore the hypens that’s why they are there):
– Year, Month, Date but you can switch this in any order.
– Organization e.g. -_-
– Minute and seconds of the episode screenshotted.
The code for mpv is hard to get use to but it’s all lua
Last comment I swear. Everything in mpv.conf if it’s not in a quotation mark it will not work minus the first two or three lines within mpv.conf
# High quality video rendering for fast computer.
profile=gpu-hq
deband=no
Depending on what your system says and what OS etc (don’t think this matters).
Anyway ended up going with this:
# High quality video rendering for fast computer.
profile=gpu-hq
deband=no screenshot-template=”%F_-_#%#00n_-_%tm-%td-20%ty” screenshot-directory=”Whatever your full PATH of FOLDER is” loop-file=”inf” <– only because I wanted the file to infinitely loop. Yes, I'm weird.
Ahaha you actually went and did it. It’s incredibly depressing to see that the best release for this movie is simply the GKids BD translation. I was legitimately hoping there would be something I missed.
Going forward, know that you can generally count on movie releases (especially those with earlier camrips) to have similar situations: everyone and their mother making their first fansub release and making it hard to find actual quality. So anytime you feel like you’re too happy in life, make a similar post.
On the other hand if you want to compare less horrific releases, one show I’d like a better opinion on is Non Non Biyori. It looks like Kokujin-kun did a review of m.3.3.w’s translation of it a while back, but there’s a bunch of other releases, with at least 3 original (I think) translations and your usual variety of styling, timing, editing.
A little insight:
One of the reasons autistic weebs love MPV so much is that it’s highly customizable. Unfortunately, the defaults are shit. So anyone who doesn’t want to spend an hour or so working on a config that doesn’t suck C++ thigh-high femboy cock is left with a a terrible media player.
You can find good resources for making an MPV config here:
https://iamscum.wordpress.com/guides/videoplayback-guide/mpv-conf/
https://mpv.io/manual/master/
If organising screenshots is one of your main concerns, try adding using “screenshot-template=”%f-%p-#%#00n”” (no quotes) in your mvp.conf. Example output:
[Team Confidence] Great Pretender – 16 – Tokyo Grift [05C3ECBE].mkv-00_00_00-#1.png
[Team Confidence] Great Pretender – 16 – Tokyo Grift [05C3ECBE].mkv-00_00_01-#2.png
Now, onto actual comments on the post:
This is the absolute state of BD Releases. Most of the time, the script is ripped from Erai-Raws and HorribleSubs WEB and muxed into terribbly encoded BD raws, with terrible re-timing and TS if you’re lucky. Then, leech re-encode groups take an already terrible encode, make it worse. And have non-native English speakers try editing badly edited official subs on their phone so they can claim they edited the subtitles.
As for WEB, it isn’t much better. HorribleSubs shut down if you haven’t heard, so people have been using Erai-Raws and a bunch of other automated rip groups that have popped up to take it’s place.
The only actual fansubbing group that isn’t dead and just comes along to pump out badly QC’d BD Batches every few months (Looking at you DDY) is GJM. I’m convinced the only reason they’re still alive is their complete and utter genuine hate for Aniplex.
All the releases for Promare are god awful, ScenikEight did his release when only POD and some basic edits of POD’s v1.1 script were around, after he saw how bad the TL’s were. He pretty much just used the POD v1.1 timing and nothing else in his release. So it was the best and only real choice for a while until the USBD came out.
As you suspected, he’s not a fansubber. He’s a degenerate who learned Japanese to do vocaloid covers on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/c/EIGHTScenik/videos
So not only was that his first sub, there was no QC or TS/TLC. Given the circumstances, the results weren’t as bad as they could of been.
end of disjointed rant and explanation. WTF is with this site’s new theme though? It looks like I zoomed in 200% to the page and the text didn’t scale.
I’m going to read what you actually wrote when I sober up tomorrow, but idk, I just set the site to max width. Figured it’s easier to read nested comments.
Looks shit from your view, huh? I can switch back. Just so much fucking empty space when I view the site normally.
Yeah, I agree it looks better with a higher container width but on max it looks way too cramped.
Try turning it down by like 5-15%
Also, small correction. Just remove the starting and ending quotes in the screenshot argument:
screenshot-template=”%f-%p-#%#00n”
Thank you by the way!
I’ve been playing with this MPV since I’ve downloaded it and the above post is pretty solid.
Thanks a million, fam. <3 <3 Yes, this'll do it. All right, uninstalling MPC.
While I haven’t found a solid code to equal to the seek time = screenshot, this one is pretty solid D_S:
screenshot-template=”%F_-_20%ty-%tm-%td_-_%tMm%tSs”
It removes the following:
– extension
Adds the following in order (ignore the hypens that’s why they are there):
– Year, Month, Date but you can switch this in any order.
– Organization e.g. -_-
– Minute and seconds of the episode screenshotted.
The code for mpv is hard to get use to but it’s all lua
Last one for the night:
screenshot-template=”%F_-_%tm-%td-20%ty-#%#00n”
<— this removes the screenshot number. As they don't have a way to have… screenshot time = seek time.
Gives in the following order:
– file name, month, date, year, screenshot number example below:
[Group Name]_-_Title_-_four digit, month-date-year, then screenshot number.
You can change the following #%#00n to be in front or behind to help keep the files organized.
Last comment I swear. Everything in mpv.conf if it’s not in a quotation mark it will not work minus the first two or three lines within mpv.conf
# High quality video rendering for fast computer.
profile=gpu-hq
deband=no
Depending on what your system says and what OS etc (don’t think this matters).
Anyway ended up going with this:
# High quality video rendering for fast computer.
profile=gpu-hq
deband=no
screenshot-template=”%F_-_#%#00n_-_%tm-%td-20%ty”
screenshot-directory=”Whatever your full PATH of FOLDER is”
loop-file=”inf” <– only because I wanted the file to infinitely loop. Yes, I'm weird.
Cheers!
I’m super picky on the hypens, and it’s a bitch to reedit the post. So pick your poison when you’re organizing your files.
Ahaha you actually went and did it. It’s incredibly depressing to see that the best release for this movie is simply the GKids BD translation. I was legitimately hoping there would be something I missed.
Going forward, know that you can generally count on movie releases (especially those with earlier camrips) to have similar situations: everyone and their mother making their first fansub release and making it hard to find actual quality. So anytime you feel like you’re too happy in life, make a similar post.
On the other hand if you want to compare less horrific releases, one show I’d like a better opinion on is Non Non Biyori. It looks like Kokujin-kun did a review of m.3.3.w’s translation of it a while back, but there’s a bunch of other releases, with at least 3 original (I think) translations and your usual variety of styling, timing, editing.
With a lot of recent anime movies, I just go with the official translations. I can’t be bothered to deal with the fansubber aids-soup.
I will never watch an original anime from Trigger ever again, that’s how bad Promare was.