The Last Blossom's subtitles slipped. What our free shelf says about language

At last Sunday's screenings of The Last Blossom, the English subtitle track ran several seconds out of step with the picture, Anime News Network reports. GKIDS has answered publicly, is weighing replacement screenings, and says the cocoon screening will go ahead as arranged. Our index has both on file, under 2025. Neither page states a free episode count, and we hold no episode rows for either.

That leaves a question we can answer with our own numbers: what does one of our pages tell a reader about the language they will hear?

The census

942 entries in our index hold at least one official free YouTube row, and all 942 live pages were loaded twice today from the United States. 921 returned the identical reading on both passes. The other 21 moved while we were reading them: the count changed between passes, or the page failed to answer once. Everything below is those 921.

Of those 921, 772 state a free episode count, 8,027 episodes in total. 103 carry the note "Japanese audio" and state 815 episodes. 206 carry "Chinese audio, English subs" and state 2,079. That makes 309 pages saying in plain words that the audio is not English. 463 carry no language note at all, and state 5,133 episodes between them.

A silent page is not a promise

The note comes from a language value we record on each video row. It prints only when every recorded language in a viewer's free set is non-English and labelled. A row recorded as English silences it, and so does a row whose language was never recorded. Silence therefore has two causes, and our own index says which.

Of the 463, our index shows 231 holding a row we recorded as English. 230 hold no English row at all, and hold at least one row whose language we never recorded, which is what silences the note. 2 hold no live rows reachable from the United States. That accounts for all 463. Roughly half of the silence is not caused by English. It is us not knowing.

Two complete runs, one wrong label

Boogiepop Phantom is filed as a TV series from 2000, 12 episodes. Its page states 12 free episodes and carries the note "Japanese audio". We hold 12 rows numbered 1 to 12 with no gaps. All twelve uploads were opened today, all twelve played from a United States request, and each reports an authored English subtitle track alongside an automatic Japanese one. The channel is "It's Anime powered by REMOW", which carries a YouTube verified badge.

Our index records Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Season 2 as a TV series from 2023, 12 episodes, and we hold 12 rows numbered 1 to 12 with no gaps. Its page also states 12 free episodes with the note "Japanese audio". All twelve were opened today, all twelve played from a United States request, and each reports an automatic English caption track, which establishes English audio. Eleven of the twelve titles end with the channel's own "(EN dub)" label. That note is wrong: the language value on those twelve rows says Japanese. The channel is "GUNDAM CHANNEL INTL", whose numbering runs on from the first season: our episodes 1 to 12 are its 13 to 24.