Fansubbers are Falling Behind:

Fansubbers haven't been keeping pace with all the good anime out there recently.  We're missing the newest episode of Little Busters EX, the Hayate no Gotoku ova, the Tamayura ova, the two latest Kenichi ova's, the Noucome ova, Atelier Escha's final episode and Break Blade's final episode.  That's practically an entire season of unsubbed good anime just laying around out there in the void.

Generally speaking, if an episode of anime isn't translated within a week, it takes up to six months for someone to eventually get around to subbing it, so an episode going unsubbed beyond that window of opportunity is a mild catastrophe.  It took something like six years for Pretty Cure to be subbed in full, and a decade for Ojamajo Doremi to do the same.  Once a series is neglected even once, it's hard for subbers to catch up ever again.  To make matters even more aggravating, plenty of these series have been subbed in various foreign languages, which means English, the most widely spoken langauge in the world, has fewer anime fans than pitiful tiny languages like Greek or whatever who are already a step ahead of us.  That's just shameful.  Outside of the native country of Japan, English should always be the first language an episode of anime is translated into.  Practically the whole world speaks it by now, and just with that one translation everyone else on Earth would have the chance to enjoy the show.  But even with English's billion speakers or whatever, we still can't find a translator for such great shows and these precious series languish in obscurity.

Likewise, even though Little Busters is pretty much accepted as the greatest visual novel of all time, its translation continues to remain stalled in an eternal abyss, as well as its sequel Kud Wafter that's given equally high praise.  Rewrite: Harvest Festa hasn't even been worked on yet.  Sword Art Online's 14th volume, Alicization United, came out in April, and now it's almost July.  Four months and the book still isn't translated?  At this rate the next volume of the series will come out before English speakers can even read the previous one.  Less popular series, of course, are even less frequently updated.  Zero no Tsukaima's light novel translation has been stalled for years it seems.  If a light novel, manga, or visual novel isn't picked up immediately by an enthusiastic team, you can just abandon any hope of it being translated at all.  This is why anime adaptations are such a godsend.  In general, anime is always translated, eventually.  No other medium has as good a record of success.  So basically, all Japanese culture has to come through the medium of anime, due to fansubbers' predilections.  Grisaia no Kaijutsu and Daitoshoken no Hitsujikai, untranslated famous visual novels, will be fansubbed once they become anime, and thus the products will be saved from the abyss.  If only every product had such a happy ending.

The most popular unadapted manga currently, Assassination Classroom and Terra Formers, will both be getting an anime soon.  I expect good things from them.  If you take these two series plus the two soon-to-be adapted visual novel series, my rankings could climb back up to 160 soon enough.  But it's impossible to judge a series' worth before they come out, no matter how popular the source material, because there's always terrible shows like Mahouka proving that popularity can sometimes be wildly wrong.

Until the summer anime season comes out, there's always more World Cup action.  The USA's my last team left to root for, so hopefully the USA will just seize the day and break on through all the way to the championship.  With a record number of viewers and ticket purchasers, the eyes of the whole nation are fixed on our men's national team.  Now's the time to shine, folks!