Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles for no good reason

2 days ago 1

Since the beginning of the Fall 2025 anime season, a major change has started taking place at the anime streaming service Crunchyroll: the presentation quality for translations of on-screen text has taken a total nosedive compared to what has been on offer for many years, all the way up until the previous Summer 2025 season. Now, more and more subtitles on Crunchyroll are looking like this:

Poor presentation quality like this isn’t entirely new to Crunchyroll, as a portion of the subtitles on the site have always been of third-party origin — that is, provided by the licensor — and Crunchyroll just puts them up with zero oversight. This in itself has caused numerous issues over the years, but the pressing issue here is that low quality presentation like this can now be found even in first-party subtitles created by Crunchyroll’s own subtitling staff. For comparison, here’s the kind of presentation quality that first-party subtitles were providing just earlier this year:

Given the technical capabilities on display in the above screenshots, it should be clear that first-party subtitles for Fall 2025 shows shouldn’t look as bad as they do. Yet for some reason, what we’re getting is this low quality presentation reminiscent of third-party subtitles, where translations for dialogue and on-screen text aren’t even separated to different sides of the screen – everything is just bunched up together at either the top or the bottom. Lots of on-screen text is even left straight up untranslated.

And that’s “destroying subtitles”?

It sure is when it’s anime we’re talking about! Anime as a medium has made prominent use of on-screen text basically since its inception. The amount of it varies from series to series, but almost every anime out there makes use of on-screen text at one point or another, with some featuring downright ridiculous amounts of signs (what on-screen text is called for short). With all this on-screen text, it is also very common for there to be text visible on the screen potentially in multiple positions, even when characters are speaking.

As such, if you are in the business of localizing anime for non-Japanese audiences, you need to be able to deal with on-screen text. At bare minimum, when subtitling anime, you should be able to do overlaps (multiple lines of text on the screen at the same time) and positioning (the ability to freely place subtitles anywhere on the screen). Anything less and you are likely to run into trouble the moment you get to something as simple as a next episode preview:

A screenshot from a next episode preview. It features a static sign saying 'Next episode preview' on top left, a similar sign for the title of the next episode on the bottom right, and you have dialogue running through the whole preview while these signs are visible, meaning you need at least three overlaps and positioning to handle it gracefully.

Overlaps and positioning are really just the bare necessities for dealing with on-screen text in anime though – ideally, you should also be able to use different fonts, colors, animate text in various ways, etc. Making use of all these possibilities is an art unto itself, and this art of on-screen text localization is commonly referred to as typesetting. Typesetting is important even when dubbing anime, as all that on-screen text is going to be there in the video all the same!

So why would Crunchyroll get rid of typesetting?

That is a good question. It is no exaggeration to say that up to this point, Crunchyroll with its typesetting was the unambiguous market leader when it came to presentation quality for official anime subtitles… though for the most part, other services dealing in anime have never even bothered to try. Sentai Filmworks’ Hidive is just about the only other anime service that even attempts to do typesetting, though they license so few shows per season that they are a tiny player compared to the Big Boys of anime streaming.

And it is very likely the existence of these Big Boys that has played a key part in Crunchyroll’s eradication of its typesetting. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video probably need no introduction to anyone reading this – both are very popular general streaming services. Despite anime being only a minor part of their catalogs, a large chunk of today’s anime watching worldwide happens through said services thanks to their sheer user counts alone.

Crunchyroll clearly seems to know this, which is why it has been sublicensing its anime properties to both Amazon and Netflix for multiple years at this point. But with such sublicensing comes the matter of dealing with the subtitling standards of general streaming services. I’m not going to mince words: these standards are awful, at least as far as anime is concerned. Netflix for example insists that you stick to at most two lines of text on screen at once, which makes sense most of the time… if you’re talking about dialogue alone. Unfortunately, it becomes completely inadequate when dealing with anime’s plentiful on-screen text. Moreover, the standards of these services actively refuse to give you tools like positioning and overlaps, even though the TTML subtitle format they use supports said features!

With such typesetting-hostile standards to deal with, Crunchyroll had basically two choices for how to make sublicensing to Amazon and Netflix work with their existing subtitles that feature actual typesetting: Either 1) try to negotiate with the services for permission to make use of more TTML capabilities (that the subtitle renderers of said services should already support!) or 2) start mangling subtitles with typesetting into something compatible with the awful subtitling standards of the general streaming services. I am not aware if Crunchyroll ever attempted the former, but I can confirm that it eventually started doing the latter.

Editors among Crunchyroll’s subtitling staff were given an additional job to convert finished high quality subtitles with typesetting into limited low quality TTML subtitles without typesetting, compatible with Amazon & Netflix subtitling standards. They got paid extra for the manual effort required by the process.

Overlapping on-screen text and dialogue makes for a miserable anime watching experience with limited TTML subtitles. Video clip from Devilman Crybaby (Winter 2018, Netflix)

Unfortunately, after a couple years of this kind of manual conversion work, the Crunchyroll leadership seems to have decided that it isn’t enough, and that Crunchyroll must do away with high quality subtitles with typesetting entirely and only produce low quality TTML subtitles without typesetting from now on. But if they already had a working process for high quality subtitles at home and low quality TTML subtitles elsewhere, why would they just decide to give that up in order to produce exclusively low quality subtitles? It doesn’t seem to make very much sense, even as a cost-cutting measure. There should be so much value in being able to advertise best viewed on Crunchyroll to potential audiences for long-term growth, right?

To understand how this is happening, we need to look into some relevant history. Specifically, what happened after Sony bought Crunchyroll and merged it with Funimation, another US anime distributor that Sony had bought previously. But in order to also understand why this is happening, first we need to look at what both Crunchyroll and Funimation were like before this fateful merger happened, as well as how they approached anime subtitling over the years.

A short history of Crunchyroll and its subtitling standards

Crunchyroll launched in 2006 as a pirate streaming site focused on East Asian media content, featuring fansubbed anime, live action drama, music videos, and so on. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the site back then – as a rule of thumb, pirate streaming sites are always worse quality-wise than if you just directly downloaded the pirated releases they use as a base, and the sites mostly exist to make their admins illicit money through ads, begging for donations, and other shady crap. It is important to note though that legal anime streaming basically wasn’t a thing at this time.

Things started to change in 2008, when the Japanese anime studio Gonzo started experimenting with legal internet distribution for some of its titles. They struck deals with a couple companies for this, which is how Crunchyroll got its first few legitimate licenses. However, all the pirate material remained on the site while this was going on. Also in 2008: Crunchyroll managed to raise 4 million USD in venture capital funding while still operating as a pirate site, which drew vocal criticism from existing anime distributors at the time (for obvious reasons).

However, it was likely this exact venture capital funding that enabled Crunchyroll to negotiate a major deal with the Japanese broadcasting company TV Tokyo, which was announced at the start of 2009. This announcement brought with it the news that Crunchyroll was going full-time legitimate and getting rid of all its pirate content. With this move, Crunchyroll found itself in a position of having to start producing subtitles of its own (instead of just uploading fansubs) and somehow present said subtitles to its customers.

For the subtitle production part, Crunchyroll managed to strike a deal with a bunch of fansubbers to take on the job. This single decision was a fateful one, as it was the foundation for basically everything that came after – with former fansubbers on the job, the tools of the trade were set according to the standards of fansubbers: the subtitling software of choice was to be Aegisub, and the subtitle format of choice was to be Aegisub’s native format, Advanced SubStation Alpha, or ASS for short.

ASS is an extremely powerful format in terms of formatting and styling capabilities, and with Aegisub, it is easy to produce ASS subtitles that make use of said capabilities. However, as a streaming site, Crunchyroll needed to be able to present these ASS subtitles in the browser somehow, and the only full-fledged ASS renderers that existed were only available in the traditional local media playback environments targeted by fansubbers, which meant that Crunchyroll couldn’t make use of said renderers on the web directly.

Now, there are two main ways to subtitle videos, with opposing pros and cons:

Hardsubbing – the subtitles are burned into the video itself. Simple to playback as you only need to be able to play video, but inflexible for updates and multiple languages as you have to recreate your video files over and over again with expensive processing called encoding.
Softsubbing – the subtitles exist as their own separate media track that the video player renders on top of the video in realtime during playback, making softsubs complex to playback, but updates and multiple tracks are very cheap as you only need to deal with tiny subtitle files while the video files remain unchanged.

As such, one way Crunchyroll could have solved the subtitle presentation problem would have been to simply hardsub its ASS subtitles, but despite the challenges it posed, Crunchyroll decided to go with softsubbing instead (which was also the fansub standard at the time). And so Crunchyroll set out to build its own ASS renderer in Flash, the primary technology used to play video on the web at the time. Here’s a screenshot of some of the first subtitles ever officially authored by the fully legitimate Crunchyroll, rendered in the current ASS renderer but adhering to the limits of the company’s very first Flash subtitle renderer:

As can be seen, even the very first version was already capable of handling both overlaps and positioning. Now, the positioning was limited to the eight edges and the center of the screen, making for just nine possible positions total, but even that was enough to handle the humble next episode preview at the very least. Beyond these, the first version also supported fading animations. It wasn’t much, but it did cover the bare minimum for dealing with on-screen text in anime.

Over the years, Crunchyroll managed to slowly improve its Flash subtitle renderer to enable the use of more ASS features. Custom colors, multiple fonts, multiple styles, rotation, and full positioning were implemented (albeit in somewhat hacky and unwieldy fashion). This went on until 2018, when Crunchyroll was faced with a major issue: Flash was seeing rapid decline in use, and web streaming was shifting over to HTML5-based technology. However, with a custom ASS renderer built in Flash, Crunchyroll couldn’t easily make the change, as it would mean having to essentially rebuild the custom subtitle renderer they had from scratch in HTML5 (as much like in the Flash days, there still were no solutions native to the web available for rendering ASS subtitles).

However, Crunchyroll managed to come up with a way to solve the problem of moving from Flash to HTML5 with the help of another new web technology called WebAssembly, which allowed developers to take code that wasn’t developed for the web and compile it for use on the web. With WebAssembly, Crunchyroll could take libass, one of the few fully-featured ASS renderers out there, and use it for their new HTML5 player. Now, not only did all their old ASS subtitles render nicely in HTML5, but the possibilities for typesetting at Crunchyroll had taken a huge leap forward. And the subtitling staff at Crunchyroll was more than happy to make use of this newfound power.

You couldn’t see typesetting like this on Crunchyroll back in the days of Flash. Video clip from Bocchi the Rock! (Fall 2022, Crunchyroll)

That said, despite having a technically fully-featured ASS renderer to work with, there were still limitations. Code compiled with WebAssembly runs worse compared to its original native counterpart, which limits how heavy the typesetting can be (with the flexible features of ASS, it is very easy to produce typesetting that simply cannot be rendered in realtime even on powerful computers, resulting in notable lag during playback). A commercial service like Crunchyroll will also generally want to keep its content watchable even on lower-end devices, which further reduces how complex any typesetting can be.

And this is the limited but functional standard of typesetting that Crunchyroll users got to enjoy (with first-party subtitles) up until the fateful season of Fall 2025 that prompted the creation of this article.

Before we move to the conclusions for this section, though, it is worth noting that while Crunchyroll currently uses softsubbed ASS subtitles whenever it can, there are platforms and devices (like various TVs) where this kind of ASS rendering simply isn’t possible to do. Crunchyroll is available on some platforms like this, which means it has been making additional hardsubbed versions of everything on top of the usual softsubbed ones.

So, what can we learn from all this? At least one thing is abundantly clear: for most of its existence, the leadership at Crunchyroll had at least some respect and understanding for anime as a medium. They understood that it was important to be able to deal with on-screen text in their subtitles, and allocated enough resources to make typesetting possible. The company even managed to improve in this regard over time, albeit very slowly.

That said, anyone familiar with anime fansubs of the 2010s and 2020s probably can’t help but feel disappointed that even the highest effort typesetting from Crunchyroll could only ever be on the level of fansub releases from around 2010 at best. Why 2010 specifically? Because from 2011 onwards, fansubbers started widely incorporating advanced motion tracking into their typesetting. Observe an example of such fansub typesetting from over a decade ago, the likes of which has never been seen on Crunchyroll:

Video clip from Kill la Kill (Fall 2013, Underwater fansubs)

Now, while fansubbers giving away their work for free might get away with saying just get a better computer to anyone whose devices can’t render softsubbed typesetting like this in realtime, an official service that lots of people pay for doesn’t really have the same luxury, which is the main reason why you don’t see stuff like this softsubbed on Crunchyroll. But this is not an insurmountable problem, so make no mistake: official anime services could absolutely offer typesetting with similar level of quality to the best of fansubs. The basic solution to the performance problem is very simple, even: you simply hardsub the typesetting. This would work from streaming to physical disc releases and only the sky would be the limit in terms of the typesetting quality you could offer, as realtime rendering would no longer be a concern!

Now, as mentioned earlier, hardsubbing does make things more complicated and expensive on the backend as you need to encode and store multiple copies of video. Crunchyroll is already dealing with this, though! But if costs are an issue, the system is pretty easy to improve in theory: if you keep the dialogue softsubbed, only the parts of the video that actually feature typesetting would be hardsubbed, and with some clever engineering and an understanding of how modern media formats work, you would only have to keep multiple copies of the typeset parts. And since the average anime episode has on-screen text only for a small percentage of its total runtime, combining softsubbed dialogue and hardsubbed typesetting like this would make for a highly cost-effective setup.

Typesetting like this would be possible to do even for official anime services. Video clip from Komi Can’t Communicate (Fall 2021, NovaWorks fansubs)

And since with a mixed system like this you would only have softsubs for the technically simpler dialogue, you could even convert these dialogue-only ASS subtitles to a simpler but more widely supported subtitle format for playback, which theoretically should do away with the need to keep fully hardsubbed copies around entirely, without any real loss in quality! I actually built a minimal version of a mixed system like this myself when I was doing some anime streaming work a few years back and can confidently say that this would be extremely doable for any official anime service… as long as they just cared enough.

Keep this example of fansub typesetting in mind for later. Video clip from Danganronpa: The Animation (Summer 2013, UTW fansubs)

Unfortunately, any interest Crunchyroll had for improving their subtitle rendering for typesetting seemed to run out after the 2018 transition to WebAssembly libass. Not that it actually ever seemed to be all that high to begin with, though, as evident by some of the low-hanging fruit that Crunchyroll never bothered to pick in this regard; the most obvious of which would be Crunchyroll’s dogged insistence to restrict typesetting font choices to Core Fonts for the Web. Free for commercial use fonts have been plentily available since the Flash days, and custom fonts have been well supported on the web for a similarly long time.

Anyway, it would have never been all that hard for Crunchyroll to support custom fonts for typesetting, especially after the 2018 move to HTML5. The underlying technology was there and font files are tiny in size compared to the video files being streamed – this would have been an extremely simple and effective improvement for all typesetting efforts. Yet Crunchyroll never reached for this improvement, which is why Comic Sans has kept appearing in Crunchyroll typesetting with depressing regularity.

It is also disappointing how regularly the anime staples of opening & ending songs are still left untranslated on Crunchyroll, though this issue is admittedly much harder to solve than you’d expect. Still, it is possible to do so, especially with Sony’s resources behind the company today. That goes double when Sony is involved in anime production in any way, as then the songs being used should be well-known to all relevant parties well in advance of airing for timely rights-clearing. So if Crunchyroll/Sony is in any way involved with an anime’s production, it should basically always be possible for songs to be translated the moment the first episode is released.

But that’s enough about Crunchyroll’s history. Now it’s time to look at the other company mentioned earlier and see how they’ve fared in comparison…

A short history of Funimation and its subtitling standards

In the early 90s, Japanese-American businessman Gen Fukunaga was approached by his uncle who was working as a producer for Toei. A proposal was made: if Fukunaga could start an anime company in US, Toei would license the rights to the Dragon Ball franchise to it – a franchise that was already making mad cash in Japan. Sensing an opportunity, Fukunaga found investors, and thus in 1994 Funimation was born. A year later, Dragon Ball was on US TV, dubbed and edited to “conform to American sensibilities and tastes”.

Promotional art for the Dragon Ball Z anime, featuring some of its cast members.

In the early 2000s, fueled by Dragon Ball’s success, Funimation started expanding its business by getting home video distribution rights for 4Kids Entertainment licenses and non-Japanese kids’ cartoons, the latter eventually expanding into getting involved in production too. But beyond increased investment in kids’ cartoons, Funimation also started experimenting with more anime licenses of its own, the 2001 anime adaption for Fruits Basket being one of its early standout releases.

Out of these various expansion attempts, “more anime” seemed to be the one to work out best, and towards the end of the 00s that became the main direction of Funimation’s business. This move was helped along by a bunch of licenses obtained from now-defunct US anime publishers Geneon USA and ADV. And in the spring of 2009, hot on the heels of Crunchyroll going legit, Funimation announced that they too were getting into the anime streaming business. The resulting anime streams from Funimation were hardsubbed and looked like this:

What you see here is exactly what you got: plain text at top center or bottom center, with dialogue on bottom, and translations for all on-screen text piled up top. So while overlaps were technically supported, full positioning did not seem to be possible, which made things quite awkward the moment there was more than one sign visible on the screen at the same time. This was also the standard you could expect from Funimation’s DVD and Blu-ray releases. And beyond the way too common dialogue three-liners (which are generally terrible for readability), sometimes you even saw four-liners:

The subtitling software that Funimation was using at the time was Telestream MacCaption. In terms of usability and general authoring features, it was no match for Aegisub, although it was actually capable of doing some overlaps, positioning, and styling – Funimation just never chose to make use of these capabilities for its anime subtitles.

This remained the Funimation subtitle standard all the way until 2016, when Funimation struck a deal with Crunchyroll. Going forward, subtitled releases for Funimation licenses would be found on Crunchyroll, while dubbed releases for said titles would be on Funimation’s new streaming platform, FunimationNow.

However, the only thing that really changed is that instead of Funimation content being hardsubbed on their website, it was now softsubbed on Crunchyroll to the exact same standard: plain text on top center or bottom center, often with three or more lines of dialogue at once, even.

Nothing else of particular note happened during this time period when it comes to Funimation’s subtitles. However, it is worth mentioning that Funimation dubs did have simple hardsubbed typesetting sometimes; this only seemed happen at the whim of the dubbing side of Funimation though, as these hardsubbed signs were never present in the subbed versions, nor were they a consistent feature of Funimation dubs in general.

In 2017, Sony purchased Funimation as part of its growing collection of international anime distributors (Sony had previously bought Madman Anime and AnimeLab in Australia and Wakanim in Europe). As a result of this buyout, towards the end of 2018 the license sharing deal between Funimation and Crunchyroll was dissolved and soon after Funimation started serving new subtitled streams on FunimationNow, which were softsubbed and looked like this:

No longer were the subtitles even making use of overlaps. Where dialogue translation used to go on bottom and sign translation on top when both were present, now all text was stuck on the same side of the screen together, either on top or bottom, but never both at the same time anymore.

How this further reduction in subtitling capabilities came about cannot be said for sure, but there are several possible explanations. For one, another major thing that happened at the end of 2018: Funimation signed a big sublicensing deal with the general streaming service Hulu, which meant dealing with Hulu’s subtitling standards and authoring accordingly limited subtitles – because as could be expected, the subtitling standards of a general streaming service did not account for the needs of anime in any real way.

Another possible reason for these less-than-great changes in Funimation’s subtitling standards was that around this time the company started using the cloud-based subtitling toolkit OOONA Tools by the localization service provider OOONA. OOONA Tools, by default, do not allow for the creation of subtitles with overlaps. While it can be done in OOONA today by tweaking the options or by using OOONA’s track features (which are quite similar to those of MacCaption, incidentally), it is possible that at the time these features were either not available or that it wasn’t possible to correctly export subtitles with overlaps to the WebVTT subtitle format that was being used on FunimationNow.

Regarding that last possibility in particular, there is this OOONA FAQ entry that mentions how not all formats support […] overlapping subtitles and that Currently, it’s supported in IMSC1.1, ITT and Videotron Lambda CAP exports. However, based on my own testing, OOONA Tools can properly export subtitles with overlaps in more formats today than just the ones mentioned here (including WebVTT), meaning that the FAQ entry is in fact outdated – but it was likely true at some point.

In any case, this was the extremely limited standard of subtitling that Funimation customers had to live with until the service was shut down in 2024 as a result of the Funimation-Crunchyroll merger.

Now, what can we conclude from all this? If nothing else, one thing seems abundantly clear: the Funimation leadership never truly cared about or respected anime as a medium. From the very beginning, it’s clear that Gen Fukunaga (a businessman in his 30s at the time) got into the business with the mindset of making money with kids’ cartoons, and this only became more evident with how Funimation tried to expand into more types of kids’ cartoons before eventually realizing that anime is where the money was at.

But even with this eventual focus on more anime, no resources seem to have ever been dedicated to make typesetting an actual thing at Funimation, despite how obviously beneficial it would have been for their key product of localized anime. And the way Funimation never even bothered to figure out how to make the most of MacCaption, the expensive enterprise subtitling software they kept using for over a decade… while I speculated about possible technical reasons for Funimation abandoning even overlaps when they started producing softsubs for FunimationNow, there was always one possible additional reason: they just didn’t care at all. They ran into a problem, no resources were dedicated to fix the problem, and the subtitles got permanently worse as a result.

Remember the fansubbed version of this from earlier? Here’s Funimation in comparison. Video clip from Danganronpa: The Animation (Summer 2013, Funimation)

The whole move to OOONA was questionable in itself, as while OOONA was capable of exporting subtitles to both WebVTT for FunimationNow and TTML (or SRT, a very limited subtitle format) for Hulu in 2018, so was MacCaption. Why start paying for a monthly subscription service when your existing paid-for enterprise software should be able to deal with your needs just fine? I suspect the primary motivation behind the move (which could have even originated from the new parent company Sony) might have been the fact that it was trendy for companies at the time to move everything they possibly could to The Cloud™, regardless of how much sense it actually made… but that’s enough about OOONA for now.

Ultimately, Funimation’s subtitling standards were extremely poor to begin with, and they only managed to make them worse over time. That is something that only utter indifference or outright disdain for anime as a medium could bring about, which seems to have been the exact attitude that Gen Fukunaga cultivated at the executive levels of Funimation – and his followers appear to have carried the torch even after his departure from the company. But more on that in the next section, when we finally get to the Funimation-Crunchyroll merger.

The Funimation-Crunchyroll merger and its consequences

Following Sony’s 2017 purchase of Funimation, in 2019 Sony bought out Gen Fukunaga from the company entirely, which led to him stepping down as the General Manager, with Colin Decker taking his place. Soon after, Sony formed the Funimation Global Group to consolidate all the international anime publishing services it had bought, with Decker in charge of the joint venture as the CEO. Then, in late 2020, Sony announced that they were going to buy Crunchyroll, placing it under the executive control of the Funimation Global Group. The acquisition was completed in August 2021, coming with a statement from Sony that their goal is to “create a unified anime subscription experience as soon as possible”.

Crunchyroll and Funimation logos side by side.

Then, in March 2022, the news came that Funimation, Crunchyroll, Wakanim, and VRV (Crunchyroll’s more general streaming service) would all be merged together into a single streaming service that would exist under the name of Crunchyroll (as it had the strongest brand of the lot). Funimation Global Group LLC was renamed to Crunchyroll LLC, with Funimation executives remaining in charge. Soon after, Colin Decker stepped down as the CEO, with Rahul Purini (previously COO) taking his place. The merger was complete.

However, as is often the case with mergers & acquisitions, layoffs were on the horizon. In 2023, 85 people were laid off globally in the name of employee redundancy. More layoffs have happened since then, with the most recent one being from just a couple months back in August 2025.

Things weren’t much better for those left behind, as laid out in this Bloomberg article from 2024. Staff from Funimation was notably hostile towards those from Crunchyroll:

Tension between the camps arose almost immediately. In a Zoom meeting announcing [Sony’s purchase of Crunchyroll], Funimation workers accused Crunchyroll of being pirates, alluding to the site’s history, according to two people who were present.

While Crunchyroll workers were quickly frustrated with the new executives from Funimation:

Current or former employees describe Crunchyroll’s new management–primarily from Funimation–as out-of-touch with employees and the anime fans the company once prioritized. Some executives write off anime as “kids’ cartoons,” they said, and resist hiring job candidates who describe themselves as fans.

And while all these internal troubles were going on, Crunchyroll CEO Rahul Purini was excited to talk about how interested he is in AI-generated subtitles.

How typesetting gets destroyed

In 2025, the executives came up with an idea: Crunchyroll should move away from Aegisub and ASS subtitles with typesetting and start producing exclusively limited TTML subtitles without typesetting in OOONA Tools. The likely end goal of this is to get rid of Crunchyroll’s unique ASS-based subtitle rendering entirely in favor of something more “industry standard” like TTML-based subtitle rendering. This would mean no longer having to pay staff for manual ASS-to-TTML conversion, as well as being able to drop the relatively expensive fully hardsubbed encodes for limited playback environments where ASS rendering is not possible (but some sort of TTML rendering usually is).

However, a major change affecting all aspects of the company’s subtitling pipeline doesn’t happen overnight, especially considering Crunchyroll’s large back catalog of ASS subtitles with typesetting that couldn’t be automatically converted to limited TTML subtitles without typesetting. So while the subtitling staff was to be (begrudgingly) busy experimenting and onboarding with OOONA and doing manual ASS-to-TTML conversions for back catalog titles, technical work would also need to be done to prepare for this vision of a TTML-only future.

For this purpose, Crunchyroll seems to have decided that it would take its existing manual ASS-to-TTML conversions produced by the subtitling staff and treat them as the new master subtitle files. These TTML “masters” would then be—for the time being—converted back to ASS with Closed Caption Converter for use with the current ASS-based subtitle rendering. And so, with the start of the Fall 2025 anime season, a plan like this was pushed to production; while regular ASS subtitles were still being produced by Crunchyroll’s subtitling staff, these ASS subtitles with typesetting were generally left unused, while only limited ASS-to-TTML-to-ASS conversions without typesetting were being presented to customers on most shows.

Implementing this interim pipeline with Closed Caption Converter didn’t seem to go exactly as planned, though, as some Fall 2025 shows on Crunchyroll ended up having no subtitles at all on release, including the premieres of the latest seasons of hit shows My Hero Academia and Spy × Family.

With the internet taking note of all this, on the 9th of October 2025 Crunchyroll responded to a press inquiry by Anime News Network with the following statement:

Over the past few days, some users experienced delays in accessing the content they wanted and subtitle issues across certain series. These were caused by internal system problems – not by any change in how we create subtitles, use of new vendors or AI. Those internal issues have now been fully resolved.

Quality subtitles are a core part of what makes watching anime on Crunchyroll so special. They connect global fans to the heart of every story, and we take that responsibility seriously.

Thank you for your patience. We’re committed to continuing to deliver the authenticity, quality, and care that fans deserve.

Following this statement, some of the new Fall 2025 shows have had their ASS-to-TTML-to-ASS subtitles switched out to the previously unused regular ASS subtitles. Other shows haven’t. And some shows in the Crunchyroll back catalog have been updated with ASS-to-TTML-to-ASS subtitles, though the exact timing of these back catalog updates is unknown.

With all of this, the future of typesetting on Crunchyroll is unclear.

And that’s how we’ve found ourselves in the situation we face today. Remember what the first Crunchyroll subtitles from 2009 looked like? Yeah, these new subtitles adhering to limited TTML standards are even worse than the subtitles from 2009 in terms of how on-screen text can be handled! In other words: The presentation quality of Crunchyroll’s first-party subtitles has reached an all-time low in 2025.

There is only one conclusion that can be drawn from that: the Funimation-turned-Crunchyroll executives still do not have any respect for anime as a medium. In addition, they seem to be treating Crunchyroll and its ways of doing things as the ways of pirates – which isn’t entirely incorrect, as Crunchyroll’s use of Aegisub and ASS did originate from the ways of pirate fansubbers. But fansubbers deeply care about anime as medium (they wouldn’t be illegally subtitling it for free as a hobby otherwise), which in turn means that the ways fansubbers have developed to subtitle anime are in fact extremely efficient for the job – much better than basically any “industry standards” for subtitling, even.

But that clearly doesn’t matter to the executives. The only thing that seems to be on their mind is how to best make money with kids’ cartoons that none of them personally watch, and what they seem to consider “best” is getting rid of everything positively unique about Crunchyroll in favor of doing things the Funimation way, even if that means ditching Aegisub and ASS in favor of OOONA Tools and TTML and getting rid of typesetting in the process. This conclusion is further supported by the fact that Crunchyroll has kept Funimation’s old MacCaption-based workflow around for its Blu-ray releases, with notable reduction in typesetting quality on Blu-ray as a result:

Then there’s the whole plan of moving to OOONA in general, which is even more questionable than it was back in the Funimation days. Crunchyroll has a lot more to lose in terms of subtitle quality than Funimation ever did, yet the executives seem to want to go back to their “old reliable” regardless. I can’t even see it saving them any money in the long run, considering that Aegisub is completely free software while OOONA will incur constant ongoing costs with its per-user subscription pricing. Rather than authoring limited TTML in OOONA directly, paying the subtitling staff to keep the manual ASS to TTML conversions going would likely be cheaper!

Beyond that, there is also the thing about OOONA being an Israeli company. It is certainly a choice, not only in 2018 but most certainly in 2025, to heavily invest in the services of a company from a country that is actively committing genocide. However, to quell some unsubstantiated internet discourse I have seen in relation to this, I do want to emphasize that OOONA being Israeli is not really directly relevant to the quality issues this article is about.

The reason for this lies in enterprise subtitling software (“industry standards”) being universally poor when it comes to producing high quality typesetting for anime, so it wouldn’t really matter which software suite a switch was being made to – no matter what, moving away from Aegisub would destroy typesetting as it currently exists on Crunchyroll. And while Crunchyroll’s CEO has expressed his interest in AI subtitles, at least currently there has been no signs of any kind of AI (Israeli or otherwise) being used to create first-party subtitles on Crunchyroll.

Why Crunchyroll is so confident it will get away with this (or: how capitalism ruins everything)

Finally, I want to talk about the possible reasons for Crunchyroll executives feeling so confident about getting away with making their own primary product so much worse. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that international anime licensing operates primarily on an exclusive licensing model. This means that generally only one service will be able to offer a specific title in specific language(s) in specific region(s), unless the service voluntarily decides to sublicense it out to others. This in turn upends the assumption that the existence of multiple anime services would be beneficial to consumers, as the services don’t actually have to engage in competition on customer-beneficial factors like service quality almost at all – instead, they can just focus on hoarding as many exclusive licenses as possible.

Screenshot of three comments from a Reddit AMA. Check the link in the caption to read the contents in full.

This kind of “competition” twisted by exclusive licensing is more like a casino, where the customers might occasionally be thrown a bone, but at the end of the day, the house always wins. And the anime companies very much prefer to keep it that way, even if it means never being able to offer full coverage of new anime seasons – a limited amount of exclusives is much more important to them. Dreams of infinite growth are what drives the modern-day game of capitalism, and spending money to please customers rather than shareholders goes directly against said dreams. It’s all about spending as little money as possible to make as much money as possible.

This is why the capitalists in charge of all the big companies these days are so excited about AI too: nothing gets them going more than the idea of not having for pay for those pesky human employees. This is no doubt the actual reason why Crunchyroll CEO Rahul Purini is interested in AI subtitles. It doesn’t matter that anime localization costs are a drop in the bucket compared to the overall costs of anime production, even if you were talking about super high quality work with fansub-level typesetting. Any excuse to cut the wages of real human workers is one step closer to the next yacht purchase for the executive upper class.

…Whew, got a bit heated there. Anyway, the most likely reason why Crunchyroll executives believe they can get away with reducing the quality of their own service so much? Because Crunchyroll doesn’t have any meaningful competition thanks to the primarily-exclusive licensing model used by the international anime industry. Even if they make the service worse, what can you do about it? Cancel your subscription and not watch the new anime you’re excited about?

What you can do about it

If you are currently subscribed to Crunchyroll, cancel your subscription. When asked for a reason, mention the bad subtitle quality and lack of typesetting. You could even link to this article. Beyond that, and this applies to people who aren’t subscribed to Crunchyroll as well: spread the word! Share this article around, talk to people about how Crunchyroll is destroying its subtitles, make it so that Crunchyroll executives can’t ignore the issue. And the most important thing: Keep it up until Crunchyroll actually makes a clear public commitment to keep typesetting anime.

Why ask for an explicit commitment? Because back in 2017 when Crunchyroll tried to drastically lower its video quality as a cost-cutting measure, vocal user complaints and subscription cancellations forced them to backtrack on it, eventually leading the company to make a statement and not just one but two technical follow-up posts where it explicitly promised to do better, and in the end, video quality actually improved compared to what was previously available. Ideally, the same would happen with Crunchyroll’s typesetting here.

Screenshot of the first technical post from 2017 linked above, showing it's title of Improving Video Quality for Crunchyroll and VRV.

I also want to emphasize that the recent statement Crunchyroll made about its Fall 2025 subtitles isn’t really worth anything. It’s worded in an intentionally obfuscated manner as to what actually has been fixed – is it the lack of typesetting or just the issues with subtitles not going up for new releases? Then it just outright lies about there being no changes with how subtitles are being handled, before ending on empty platitudes about quality subtitles that mean nothing without concrete actions to back them up.

And so far, the actions of Crunchyroll have made the future of typesetting on the service anything but clear. The lower quality subtitles in the back catalog are especially alarming, as the back catalog was exactly where Crunchyroll also started with its 2017 video quality reduction plans, all the while remaining careful with changes to simulcasts where people were paying closer attention – which is exactly what seems to be happening with subtitles on Crunchyroll right now.

To sum things up: Without a clear public commitment to stick to higher subtitling standards that include typesetting, it is very likely that Crunchyroll executives will just delay their typesetting-killing plans and try again later. That’s why you need to cancel your subscription, encourage others to do so, and keep talking about this issue until Crunchyroll explicitly promises to do better.

Together, we can save Crunchyroll from itself!

Acknowledgements

This article would have never been as thorough and detailed as it is without the assistance of the following people:

The multiple current and former Crunchyroll and Funimation workers who came forward to indepedently confirm the many previously unpublished details found in this article. Huge thanks, all of you.
BigOnAnime – for his great help with researching the historical technical details of Funimation’s subtitling standards. Thank you.
enonibobble – for his help with various screenshots and technical analysis of Crunchyroll subtitles. Thank you.
Faye Duxovni – for bringing Crunchyroll’s use of old Funimation workflows for Blu-rays to my attention and providing the screenshots of it that are used in the article. Thank you.
Ridley, witchymary, Jhiday – for proofreading this article before release. Thanks, all of you.
People on social media who answered public questions I asked or otherwise helped with various small pieces of research. Thanks, all of you.

External coverage

I’m not the only one to have made note of Crunchyroll’s recent subtitle shenanigans, so here’s some additional reading/watching on the subject elsewhere:

Why did Crunchyroll’s subtitles just get worse? by Miles Atherton (former head of marketing for Crunchyroll), on the newsletter Anime By The Numbers. This includes some additional details (like numbers!) that I didn’t go over here (because this article was long enough as-is), so I can recommend giving it a read.
The Absolute State of Crunchyroll by YouTuber Mother’s Basement. This is a good watch just to see how bad the new Crunchyroll subtitles look like in action. Additionally, I didn’t really talk about how badly timing quality has been affected by the recent changes too, but this video has some good examples of that as well.
Are Subtitles Getting Smaller? by Jerome Mazandarani on Anime News Network. This Answerman column is nominally about subtitles getting visually smaller, but most of it ends up being about the Crunchyroll subtitle situation. Jerome does keep incorrectly saying that general streaming services use the very bare-bones subtitle format SRT rather than TTML, though, and while these services do support SRT for ingestion (ie. content partners can deliver subtitles as SRT) and anime companies might even be making use of that, TTML is what the services actually use internally. SRT does not officially support any kind of positioning whatsoever, which means that even placing subtitles at the top of the screen would be impossible with it if the normal placement was on bottom.
The Crunchyroll Sub Flub by Lucas DeRuyter and Coop Bicknell, also on Anime News Network. Nothing particularly new in this one if you’re familiar with all the other coverage, but it’s nice to see this get discussed on the This Week in Anime column regardless. The more eyes on the subject, the better.

I’m Daiz, a digital distribution expert and high quality media enthusiast. I have over a decade of experience with Japanese-to-English media localization, including anime subtitling, and I also care deeply about consumer rights. You can follow me on Bluesky, or drop me a mail.

I’m working on getting Bluesky comments embedded at the end of the posts. For the time being though, you can read and join the discussion here!

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