I share the same experience of preferring subtitles over dubs, coming from an English country. This is most popular with Japanese media like anime (like movies

I share the same experience of preferring subtitles over dubs, coming from an English country. This is most popular with Japanese media like anime (like movies like 'Your Name'/'Kimi no wa na' or Attack on Titan). It also fits for foreign language films (e.g. preferring the original German for The Lives of Others/Wings of Desire). Crucially, outside of preference, subtitles are occasionally necessary for translating text on the screen (e.g. on building signs, newspaper front pages, posters, chalkboard writing), as information is conveyed solely through writing without spoken dialogue. For example, consider the chalkboard scene in "Komi san can't communicate": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoH8I-NC5tM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoH8I-NC5tM . It's key to the story that a character has trouble communicating verbally, so subtitles are essential to understand the written communication on the chalkboard. (You can then compare to a more extensively subtitled version that translates all the text on the board; good subtitles make a difference to storytelling: https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/qdjgba/the_blackboard_scene_komi_cant_communicate/ https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/qdjgba/the_blackboar...).