I usually need subtitles to watch movies and actually er, understand what people are saying, but at the same time I kind of don't like them cus they can really fuck up the pacing, or spoil a line delivery. for example, if I'm watching a horror movie and a character says something like
Wait, do you hear… Shit!
the whole line will often be displayed at the same time. I read a lot faster than people usually talk, so in this case I know that something bad is about to happen a couple of seconds before it actually does. this obviously isn't great for the tension the movie just spent the last fifteen minutes building, it's like hearing a cat vomit right before an orgasm.
to a lesser extent, this can also be really bad for jokes. a lot of jokes really depend on the cadence and tone they're delivered in, which doesn't really translate to text most of the time. seeing the entire joke as text beforehand can take away a lot of the punch.
to an extent, a lot of this can be remedied with just better quality subtitles. It's really not hard. but I think something else worth trying might be some kind of dynamic subtitling - that is, putting each word on the screen as the speaker says it. obviously this isn't going to work for everyone, and I imagine a lot of people would find it more annoying than useful… but I dunno. I'd really appreciate it.
