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Why does nobody talk about subtitles ruining the way you watch a show the first time
I always had subtitles on for everything, even shows in English, and I never thought twice about it. Then last month my roommate and I started The Bear together and she asked me to turn them off because they bug her. I said fine, whatever, and about two episodes in I realized I had no idea what any of the characters' voices sounded like. I had been reading every single line for years and my eyes never left the bottom third of the screen. All those close up shots and little facial expressions I supposedly loved in shows like Breaking Bad, I straight up missed most of them because I was glued to the words. I turned the captions back on for one episode to test it and caught myself reading ahead before the actor even spoke. Now I only use them for accents I really can't follow, like Peaky Blinders. Does anyone else feel like captions quietly turned watching TV into reading a book?
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hayden58719h ago
Man, I could not disagree more with this take. Some of us have ADHD or auditory processing issues and captions are the ONLY way we can actually follow what is happening on screen, so calling them a problem feels pretty out of touch. You also said yourself that you caught details in facial expressions and voice when you turned them off, but plenty of people never had them on in the first place and still missed stuff, so maybe the captions were not the real issue. Reading ahead is not some big crime either, it does not ruin the acting, it just means you know the line coming, which is honestly how half of rewatching works anyway. And the idea that captions turn TV into reading a book is wild because books do not have sound, motion, or faces at all, so it is a totally different thing.
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