Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
EDIT: Link was taken down thanks to someone in the comments here’s the archive for the page https://web.archive.org/web/20251004184506/https://fandomwire.com/crunchyroll-faces-cancelation-why-anime-fans-are-choosing-piracy-after-latest-update/
https://bsky.app/profile/lamhfada.bsky.social/post/3m2c3udxnjc2u
So we’re banning everything from Israel now?
Yes.
Given how things have been going, it seems an appropriate course of action.
That is the purpose of a boycott yes. Here are some other examples
Abolitionist boycotts of Southern goods over slavery - https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/boycott-sugar-slavery-bds/
Boycotts of German goods over Nazi policies- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_anti-Nazi_boycott
Boycotts of South Africa over Apartheid - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Apartheid_Movement
Ongoing boycott of US goods by Canada over a threatening stance taken by US government- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Canadian_boycott_of_the_United_States
Yes
I don’t want to support any company that is either directly or indirectly funding genocide and fascism. It’s not complicated.
If you found out that Netflix powered their servers using an orphan grinding machine, would you still subscribe to them?
So you don’t buy anything that comes from USA, Italy, China, Russia…, or that does business with a company based here? That’s pretty much all of them
yes
Be serious.
I’m so super mega serious. Seriously. I’ll try it more basic, but deadly serious:
"What going on?
Me not understand.
Why hate thing? Is cause ai, or cause Israeli, both? Something else?
Why do I care who is hitting the keyboard characters to sub a story i already know/love?
Israel, the country committing a genocide? The country actively and openly exterminating an entire ethnic group? And the product isn’t even good anyway?
Yea, it’s actually so easy to tell them to fuck off. If you can’t figure that out your moral compass is broken and you should send it in for a warantee repair.
AI gets subs wrong, and thinking that doesn’t matter is both ableist and just a terrible lazy product, but that’s not the pressing matter.
It’s Israel. Because giving money to another party is not a value neutral action. Using a site that pays money to Israel—and you either know what that means or are purposefully avoiding the subject—means you are supporting Israel. Your consumption does not occur in a vacuum.