Every Anime on This Site Now Has a Fansub History. Here's Why That Took So Long.

Anyone can write: That sentence is true of almost every anime that ever crossed the Pacific before 2010. It's also completely useless. It tells you nothing.

The questions worth answering

• Which group did it?
• Did they finish?
• Did they drop it the day the license hit, or keep going out of spite?
• Was the fansub actually good, or just fast?
• Did the manga side have its own entirely separate war going on — one that never touched the anime at all?

Those are the questions worth answering. So that's what got answered, show by show, group by group, source by source.

Where it came from

Some of it came easy. AniDB dumps that laid a show's entire release history out in front of us — dates and ratings and vote counts — letting the real story surface on its own: who finished first, who people actually watched, who had the numbers but not the regard.
Some of it took real digging. Scene history archives. Old fan forums preserved by nobody in particular. A LiveJournal post from 2005 comparing two competing translations line by line. A Wayback Machine snapshot of a group's own announcement explaining, in their own words, why they were stepping back.

---

Correcting the record

And some of it meant correcting the record. Popular fan memory gets things wrong constantly — not out of malice, just because a good story travels farther than an accurate one. A group everyone assumes was the origin of something turns out to be the group that came second. A "rescue" that gets remembered as one clean event turns out to be two separate companies, two separate years, doing two separate things.
This site would rather state the boring correction than let the better-known wrong version calcify as fact.
That's the actual shape of 1,800 entries. Not padding. Not filler. A real, sourced, occasionally messy account of how these shows actually reached the West — told the way it actually happened instead of the way it's usually remembered. For now: every series on this site has a real history behind it. Go read one you didn't expect to find anything on. That's usually where the best stuff turns out to be hiding.