kindanostalgictbh asked:

What do you think about anime becoming more mainstream these days? Do you ever miss watching pirated anime on 480p streams that need to buffer every 5 seconds?

I was never much of an anime fan, but the main thing I miss is fansubs. It used to be that you got a lot of choice when it came to translations, and now every single group is just passing off officially licensed translations as their own work. I remember watching shows where they would take a minute or two after an episode to explain some kind of cultural nuance, or expand on the plot with liner notes from the original light novel. You even had people doing fairly sophisticated karaoke effects for the theme songs, despite how totally unnecessary that was. All of these things are gone now, because nobody can compete with official localizers.