Fansub Review: [Commie] Black Rock Shooter (Episode 01)

C-Tier, Fansub Review — By on February 6, 2012 5:07 am

This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.

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Another BRS entrant.

Release format: MKV (326 MB, 10-bit)

Japanesiness: No honorifics.

Group website: http://commiesubs.com/

8thsin’s translation critique: http://8ths.in/2011/12/02/winter-2011-anime-subtitle-comparison/#Black

Ji-hi’s screenshot comparisons: N/A

 

Karaoke.

The insert song was not subbed.

Ending. Only the ending aired this episode.

The colors changed depending on the screen. They look a bit hard to read in the screenshots but they were all right in motion.

 

Typesetting.

Amazing, pro-tier typesetting. Truly fantastic.

Okay, hold on. Gratz to whoever came up with this name. Well, half gratz since the album and the song both suck, but still. The other groups (Nishi/WhyNot) had pretty lame names like Dawn Consultation. This actually has significance (even if it’s totally inaccurate).

At least one group had the balls to cover up the Japanese.

Finally, a group that was able to translate this title.

 

Script.

Though I thought Commie might have been able to play this off well by leaving Kotori Asobi as Kotori Asobi instead of “Little Bird Game”, they dropped the ball here with this gibberish. Nobody is gonna understand what this means unles
s they watched two other releases and had people explain the translations in the comments section on their fansub review website. They attempted to do something with explaining this shit later on, but it still didn’t fit right.

And also, lol punctuation.

many, many

They fuck this up many, many times.

Oh, I get it. That’s the color, so the subs match it. Awesome. Amazing. Groundbreaking!

And this here had an effect for the line — the text just kept increasing in size.

Wow… color changes and effects in the main script. This is basically…

Commie’s future.

Now, it’s fine to try new things out. But is this kinda shit necessary or even good? I’m not seeing any reason for doing it.

H-sHey

There’s nothing else I need to say.

Much like WhyNot, they fucked this up and left out the “You put me in this wheelchair” bit I got from Nishishi’s. Forgive me for expecting accurate character backstories from my subs.

macaron, actually.

That’s an interesting way to phrase it. And by “interesting”, I mean “stupid”.

I thought the “Have this messed-up one.” line from one of the previous groups’ subs made more sense.

There’s nothing wrong with this at all. Just wanted to point out that this group clearly had the most fun with their subs. Wordplaytastic. Not that it resulted in a better release, but still.

 

Watchability: Watchable.

Overall grade: C+

The karaoke’s fine and the typesetting works… sometimes. The script’s also good as long as you ignore the stupidity. Like WhyNot, they fucked up wheelchair-chan’s entrance (which is kind of important) and similar to all groups thus far, they weren’t able to handle Takanashi/Kotori Asobi. Is this show really that difficult? Its fight scenes don’t even have any dialogue and they take up like 1/3 of the show.

Of WhyNot/Commie/Nishishi, Nishishi’s is the best so far.

Okay, review over. Go to Commie’s site and listen to Horizon music. http://commiesubs.com/horizon-batch/

Grade:
Show:
Tags: , , ,

39 Comments

Xythar says:
February 6, 2012 at 5:16 am

Disclaimer: I didn’t work on this show.

I actually thought the script for this one was the only one so far to make the whole “because little birds can play when there are no hawks around” exchange at all coherent. Yeah, you still lose out on the whole Kotori Asobi -> Little Birds Play connection, but beyond that it makes sense. See the “lol punctuation” screenshot for what I mean, I thought that was a good way to get the meanings across without resorting to TL notes.

The second line of the wheelchair part (after “You brought this on yourself”) was “It’s all Yomi’s fault” or something, wasn’t it? I don’t remember the exact wording, but that’s basically what Nishishi had except that the line wasn’t repeated twice. I’m still not even entirely sure what she is trying to say in that scene, but I’d withhold judgment until we know for sure. Maybe 8th can weigh in?

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Dark_Sage says:
February 6, 2012 at 5:22 am

Hopefully he does. If I’m wrong, I’ll have to change up the grades here.

The exchange was better with Commie’s but it still didn’t make sense when the two girls were doing wordplay off the name. To the average viewer it would come across as gibberish.

What I got from the wheelchair part was, “See how I’m in a wheelchair? See how I’m suffering? Well, this was Yomi’s fault and I’m going to hold her responsible for it until the day I die.” Nishi’s was the only release to even get close to that meaning. It’s significant because it explains why Yomi is so subservient to Wheelchair-chan — she feels guilty.

If I’m wrong, I’ll be eating serious crow, but if I’m right, this really is something worth bitching about.

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Xythar says:
February 6, 2012 at 5:30 am

Yeah, it’s true that part doesn’t make a lot of sense if you don’t know the Japanese meaning of the name, though to be honest I’d have trouble coming up with a better way to handle it. It would look too weird to call her “Little Birds Play” or something when everyone else in the show has a normal sounding (non translated) Japanese name, and personally if I was editing I’d die of embarrassment if I ever had to insert a “{an8}TL Note: Kotori Asobi means ‘Little Birds Play'” line in the script without any hint of irony. That’s some keikaku means plan shit right there.

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Dark_Sage says:
February 6, 2012 at 5:35 am

You don’t even need a TL Note. It requires editing in some meaning that wasn’t there before, but it can be done. For example, when she first says “Her name is Kotori Asobi?!” you could go with “‘Kotori Asobi’ as in ‘little birds play’?!” instead.

There is a slight impediment to the flow there but it gets rid of the need for a TL Note and it allows the viewer to connect the dots. “Oh, so Kotori Asobi means ‘little birds play’. Got it.”

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Xythar says:
February 6, 2012 at 5:38 am

Fair enough.

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8thSin says:
February 7, 2012 at 4:20 am

Commie’s line is a context error. I think something like “this is Yomi’s doing.” would work the best here.

I personally don’t like Nishishi’s “all Yomi’s fault.” (the “all” part) because that changes the nuance a LOT. Notice how the camera zooms into her leg. The production team made it very clear she’s talking about the injury, and the dialogue (subtitle) only needs to assist the video in that scene IMO.

WhyNot line is the closest to what’s actually being said, except probably “I got this from Yomi.” instead of “I got it from Yomi.” would’ve been better because it’s confusing what “it” is.

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8thSin says:
February 7, 2012 at 4:23 am

Also, you should review [AsukaSubs-subDESU]. I’m only 5 minutes in, and it’s already comedy material.

Same deal with CCS, but they use niconico in the second half, so it’s not as much fun.

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Xythar says:
February 7, 2012 at 4:25 am

“Got” implies receiving the doll or wheelchair more than the injury, though. You wouldn’t normally use “got” in that context otherwise. To be honest after reading all the subs I was thinking something like “You see this? It’s all thanks to Yomi” might be best, though that would also be pretty close to what Nishishi has.

For reference, the official Nico subs have:
See this?
Yomi did it.
Yomi did it.

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8thSin says:
February 7, 2012 at 5:38 am

Oh, I see what you mean.

niconico’s “(You) See this?” is a pretty good solution to it that makes dictionary translation for the second line possible.

BTW, I just realized entire CCS is niconico edit. Except there are typos and missing lines lol

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KKRais says:
February 6, 2012 at 5:21 am

Inb4 everything that went wrong in this release gets blamed on me.

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KKRais says:
February 6, 2012 at 5:24 am

Note: The color changes/increasing size fuckery was me messing around due to being completely uninterested in working on it.

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Xythar says:
February 6, 2012 at 5:25 am

I actually liked all that stuff, in both this and Nise. Haters gonna hate.

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Dark_Sage says:
February 6, 2012 at 5:33 am

I thought it was interesting as a one-off thing just for Nise. But seeing it here made me think “Wait, what if they do this for every release?” And that did not sound appealing at all.

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Xythar says:
February 6, 2012 at 5:34 am

Sounds like it’s time to start subbing everything as kinetic typography. :>

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Progeusz says:
February 6, 2012 at 9:32 am

You should watch Commie’s releases from last season that came out after Horizon 06. Mainly Horizon (diving!) & UN-GO. Glorious stuff. Gotta download Commie’s BRS to see how it looks, I like these little things.

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FalseDawn says:
February 6, 2012 at 10:55 am

Why don’t we all just put the subs on a scrolling reel across the bottom of the screen? Surely that’s the way forward?

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Ogawa says:
February 6, 2012 at 11:45 am

I wouldn’t mind if they did it for all the releases, as long as it fits and doesn’t go overboard. I like the subs not being always just normal static boring subs :P
I was kinda sad they didn’t keep doing it for Nise, at least the Fire Sisters thing.

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Xythar says:
February 6, 2012 at 5:25 am

Well, you did bring this on yourself after all.

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KKRais says:
February 6, 2012 at 5:27 am

Oh, you.

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Ran-ran says:
February 6, 2012 at 6:31 am

Am I expecting too much for good typesetting from Commie’s BRS…?

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KKRais says:
February 6, 2012 at 10:29 am

Yes. Yes, you are.

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tormaid says:
February 6, 2012 at 6:39 am

It should also be pointed out that whoever encoded this did not freezeframe: http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/3797/whyunofreezeframe.png

I noticed almost 10 of these without really paying much attention.

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Jukey says:
February 6, 2012 at 7:15 am

>RHExcelion
>Freezeframeing

(☞ﾟ∀ﾟ)☞

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TBA says:
February 6, 2012 at 9:56 am

10 places… I think it’s better to find another source for v2.

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ar says:
February 6, 2012 at 3:12 pm

I think it’s time to find a new encoder… (lol)

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Anon says:
February 6, 2012 at 8:26 pm

Fuji TV’s MPEG2 encoder sucks. Frames like that occur after almost every scene change. I’m guessing every group was just too lazy to freezeframe to fix it. Besides the Nico Nico Douga stream (which didn’t have the frame problem, and had more details than Commie and WhyNot), there is no other timely alternate video source (KTV airs it 4 days after Fuji).

tl;dr- just watch the Nico Nico Douga simulcast cause fansubbers are too lazy.

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blargh says:
February 6, 2012 at 7:12 am

Have you expanded into translation accuracy as well now? If both Commie and WhyNot have nothing about wheelchairs, maybe the line says nothing about wheelchairs.

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herkz says:
February 6, 2012 at 7:37 am

Dude, didn’t you know?

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Jukey says:
February 6, 2012 at 8:20 am

I don’t think he did.

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Progeusz says:
February 6, 2012 at 9:23 am

>Go to Commie’s site and listen to Horizon music.
YES

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Progeusz says:
February 6, 2012 at 10:24 am

>open it in six tabs, each one with ~20 seconds delay
last hour was epic

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Rubedo says:
February 6, 2012 at 6:01 pm

Could you review Smile Precure? This wasn’t really an issue with Suite Precure because the only group that did it was Doremi-Curecom, but now there’s like 3 or 4 groups doing this one.

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ThumperZ1 says:
February 6, 2012 at 6:22 pm

Actually, macaroon is correct for English. French is macaron.

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ThumperZ1 says:
February 6, 2012 at 6:26 pm

A macaroon is a type of light, baked confection, described as either small cakes or meringue-like cookies depending on their consistency. The original macaroon was a “small sweet cake consisting largely of ground almonds” (per Wiki)

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Anon says:
February 6, 2012 at 10:24 pm

The confusion around Wheelchair-chan’s line may have resulted from the vagueness of the line itself. She says, “ヨミがやったの。” Translated literally, it means, “Yomi did this.” She doesn’t elaborate on what exactly Yomi did, although the shot clearly pans over her crippled body while she’s speaking. Due to this, I think it’s safe to assume that Yomi was responsible for her disability.

Of course, I’m not a translator by any means, so please take this with a grain of salt.

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Xythar says:
February 6, 2012 at 11:03 pm

Yeah, and to add confusion to the mix that verb can also mean “to give”. It’s a really vague section of dialogue and pretty much every group interpreted it a little differently.

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Revy-chan says:
February 7, 2012 at 7:05 pm

When it is referring the to give as a verb, it uses the the particle に, not が.

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Warsie says:
February 11, 2012 at 7:06 am

03:50-53 pissed me off, instead of saying “in englis” they should’ve said “in japanese”. It broke the suspension there, and i’ll have to ignore that

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