These are my own thoughts, and they do not reflect any group or team, be that CantoCaptions or otherwise.
Why am I even writing this? Because I don't want my thoughts to be lost. Someone out there has to hear this.
The reason I'm remiss to recount the early 2000s with fondness aside from faux-nostalgia is that that the early 2000s were a ton of bad news for some people. I know a lot of people in America who feel that this time in particular was filled with a sense of hope or we, but even then there were signs that my community Hong Kong VHS store or DVD store would not last.
Internet piracy in the 2000s (which I make no moral judgement about, but here's the truth of the matter) damaged the already-beleagured Hong Kong movie and dubbing industry, which used to be much bigger than the US one. Because Hong Kong was first to industrialize before areas in Mainland China, people across China flocked to Hong Kong, creating a massive movie and film industry, which I'm sure many of you know about.
Additionally, despite what people will tell you now, anime and manga used to be a novelty product, and sometimes, if people couldn't find the Japanese dub, they would just pick up the Cantonese version at a Used Video Store or Home Video Story. Because everything is now dubbed over anyways, this tidbit of social history has become a fossilized trivia fact rather than any lived-in memory. People cannot internalize that this happened because it would require putting Cantonese back in a position of fame and relative power, largely because of how the anime culture of the time has, also, due to the 2000s, shifted over either to the English originals or Japanese raws. What used to be a viable alternative, way before people really cared that much about Japanese original dubbing, in the days of the pre-internet to early internet became an interesting bootleg, then a niche product, then another faded memory lost forever to the sea of time.
When the internet opened a little bit (before YouTube and in the age of internet forums) there were already some signs of trouble (see why HKers romanticize that era). Then, a lot of people's attention moved to YouTube (which at first mirrored the movie and media landcape at the time). But YouTube is NOT the same as television and could not sustain big-budget Cantonese movies. And, as a direct consequence, after the "opening up" of the internet, HK movies were first increasingly pirated with a peak of "watch Hong Kong moviess online" during 2004, before falling off a cliff in the following years. This also impacted the Cantonese dubbing industry, and with it came a gradual loss of soft power, which used to also sustain diaspora in keeping their mother tongues.
But it got worse. Cantonese movies and television were gradually cut off from Guangzhou broadcasts (despite mass protests) despite frustrations by locals, causing an enormous decay in soft power as Mandarin-language movies got a foothold. The semi-permeable Chinese internet, closed off unless you knew the workarounds (including that little toy from the the people who run Shen Yun) also gradually began to resemble the US one, and the government continued with a push for more and more people to speak Mandarin. Most kids probably don't remember the original femme fatales in those 50s HK dramas and don't weigh them as much as Mainland China's Mandarin-speaking MCs. Mainland China itself now has ZZZ and stuff like Genshin, which leads people all across the world from India and Iran over. And a lot of people have just grown up on English-speaking Minecraft videos, where their friends basically only speak English back.
With the loss of influence, even if parents wanted to teach their kids, the schools would basically obligate them to speak Mandarin too. So in both sides of the ocean, there's now pressures on Standard Cantonese. Wikipedia would never mention this stuff, but it's everywhere in hushed whispers whether it be in private conversations, tucked-away corners of YouTube, or little chatrooms. You can even see that Daoist master making YouTube shorts where some districts of Guangzhou can't speak Cantonese at all anymore. So now, my most tangible concern is that what's left in the US will dwindle too under standard US societal assimilation (a lot of my nieces and nephews can't speak it either, let alone write).
The nostalgia that a lot of people lived through is socially incompatible with a lot of people's personal nostalgia. What about my VHS store? My used DVD store? My anime subculture with their localized names? My version of 4kids censorship? (There's a scene in the Cantonese dub of Re:Zero where Rem actually watches Subaru die immediately after hearing him plead, and that just felt so much more right. Because it filled a trope where even cruel or bad characters can have a twinge of guilt for what they've done.) This stuff doesn't even make it past Hong Kong due to US cultural hegemony and increasing Chinese soft power.
Incidentally, it would be very difficult for me to make a video essay about Cantonese-dubbed anime on YouTube, and it would take an incredible amount of labor with my current schedule. I'm always filled with a paranoia (not helped by the worrywarts in the community) that not enough people would appreciate it. If I'm making art for myself, I don't need an audience, but here, I obviously do. I think we're in a political din where people can make Cantonese content for a Cantonese audience or only some Cantonese content for a Western audience while being worn down on both ends.
Sometimes I feel like one of those border minorities in the border states of neighboring empires except we weren't really being digested at scale until recently with the advent of the internet.
- I'm also fully cognizant of the ironies here:
- I'm writing this in English (bitch, of course. I don't want you to /not/ read this shit.
Some of my sentence structures are EXACTLY the SAME as yours /because/ I grew up fighting you dorks.
- It is not easy to balance cultural preservation and engagement with doing other stuff in my free time.
But even if nobody is there to experience my art, it's still there.