FANDUBSARENOTLEGAL
You are distributing content you do not own.
There are no professional fandubs.
If you advertise fandubs, partake in them and put them on your resume, you look unprofessional.

If you want to do fandubs as a hobbyist with your friends, or as “ADR practice” - go ahead. But you should NOT be sharing them publicly or distributing them, they should be private among you and your friends only.

When you begin to distribute content you do not own, you infringe on the rights of the license holder; even if that title “doesn’t have a western release*”. No ifs. No buts. No “I only claim to own [blank]!” - that doesn’t mean you can distribute a product that is not yours.

Not even the official actors or ADR writers or ADR directors or people on production in Japan have the right to stream episodes of dubs they have done on websites. Heck, many licensors don’t want us saying words as a character we play without permission!

*a title that is subtitled officially but isn’t dubbed is still actually licensed in that respective country. Titles distributed on Amazon or Crunchyroll without dubs are still under a license contract, and those companies most likely hold the dub rights as well as distribution

Aight phone gonna die and I wanna sleep. Legality question aside, I was trying to bring light to how this effects your professional image and make new VAs aware about something they might not know. If you wanna keep fandubbing knowing that, I really don't care. It's your career.

Final response:
-what can I do instead of fandubs if I want to gain experience/what can go on my resume? Some ideas include audio dramas, radio plays, motion comics, visual novels, original animation, and indie games.

-who decides if it is unprofessional? The people above in the chain, often in Japan. I’m passing on what I’ve learned from the industry to keep younger people ready to jump to the pro side from making a blunder.

-regarding keeping them private: By keeping your fandubs private to say a community discord, it helps make it easier to control info out there about yourself if you do a bunch of fandubs and then wanna try to do pro dubbing work.

-but you did fandubs: I did them when I was a teenager, stopped doing them when I learned they were frowned upon within the industry, didnt put them on my website and kept them out of my public, professional appearanc, which is the advice I am passing on.

-about “fair use”: actual fair use lawyer @itsreallystar weighed in on some points. I admit to not being fully qualified to answer and address such concerns and I’m sorry, I should have kept it to a simple “it’s unprofessional and if you are pursuing pro work here is advice”

I apologize for my curt language of the OG tweet, for those who believed I was hypocritical for not citing my own personal background as a teen, and for not providing alternatives outright and how that propagated gatekeeping and May have scared or hurt the feelings of newer VAs.

And now I will be actually done responding and probably off twitter aside from a few Jojo’s shitposts for my watch through and some RTs.