I know what you mean, yeah. I 'feel' luck that Spanish is my native language since it seems to heavily separate me from the broad weeb 'community'. I'm positive you understand and know the kind of guys I'm referring to.
Understandable fam, I'm in the same boat actually. Well not Spanish, but I am Moroccan, probably the closest non-EU country to Spain ironically. The whole "weeb" thing and community around it in general doesn't exist here. I think Anime is just considered like a normal nerdy hobby like any other in a lot of the North African countries (I went to Algeria and Tunisia as well), it was often considered just " kid cartoons", but as the years went by it became more widely accepted. While it is still considered a nerdy hobby, people look at it here the same way as any other foreign media instead of a specific niche.
Absolutely, but it's even more than that as you alluded to.
There have been bigtime seiyuus that have taken parts in H-productions and I don't mean one or two semi-obscure guys. In Japan voice acting is very competitive industry and taken very seriously. I've talked to native JP in some comment sections and gotten slightly mixed responses but some of them say that a lot of Japanese view animation + voice acting as a more serious enterprise than live-action productions. The total opposite of people 'overseas'. Anyway, I agree with you.
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EDIT:
I'm not from the U.S. but I have a pretty good guess as to why U.S./'western' dubbing is garbage these days. It's due to the ultra-corrupt unions that do not allow talented voice actors to thrive while at the same time rewarding crappy ones. If you recall, in the 80s & especially the 90s there was an up and coming dubbing industry that never seemed to get off of the ground. That's the reason or at least part of it.
Exactly. It's more of a professional and serious medium in Japan, which in its case is even beating live-action in broadness like you mentioned. While in the West many still downplay animation as a kid thing, in the exception of the occsional adult centric show which doesn't change much considering how little that happens in actual cinema, and that reflects as well on the lack of experienced VAs and unique voices. Plus, in general the majority of the voice actors sound the same and try very little to ground or add unique differences to their tones, which again reflects heavily on the views of the average US consumer on animation the corrupt agencies/unions around it. Heck, you probably know about/remember when the Oscars called animation a "genre" and "for kids", that even Guillermo del Toro had to correct that dumbass take during his award acceptance speech for
Pinocchio. It's no wonder dubbing is still so centered around big name actors and only in rarity are professional VAs involved, while even then those "professional VAs" are often not that professional..
Either way, it's still whatever. There are outliers out there in the mix too, so I hope respect for the medium grows more eventually, though it's hard to change the current state of the industry in the US
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