There are two kinds of anime fan and they have been arguing since the VHS era. The strange part is that both sides are largely correct, which is exactly why nobody has won.
The case for subs
Performance intent. The Japanese voice cast recorded to the director's brief, usually with the animation in front of them. Everything about the timing, the breath, the pauses between lines was built around those takes. A dub is a reconstruction.
Untranslatable register. Japanese encodes social distance in grammar. Whether a character says omae, kimi, or anata for "you" tells you the entire relationship, and English simply does not have those gears. Honorifics do similar work — the moment a character drops -san for a given name is a plot beat you can hear.
Lip flap. Dubs have to fit English into mouth movements animated for Japanese. That constraint bends line lengths and word choices in ways that occasionally flatten a scene.
The case for dubs
You get to watch the animation. This is the strongest argument and sub watchers tend to wave it away. Reading is not free. Every second spent on the bottom of the frame is a second not spent on the thing somebody drew.
Modern dubs are genuinely good. The reputation was earned in the 90s, when dubbing meant rewriting entire plots and renaming characters after American cities. That era is over. Contemporary dub casts are largely made up of career voice actors working from far better scripts.
Accessibility. Dubs are the version that works for people with dyslexia, low vision, or anyone watching while doing something else with their hands.
Where the sub side overstates it
Subtitles are also a translation, and often a more compressed one than the dub script. A subtitle has to be readable in the two seconds it is on screen, which means it cuts. Dub scripts have the whole line's duration to work with and can sometimes carry more of the original meaning, not less.
And "I prefer the original performance" is doing less work than it sounds like for the large majority of viewers who do not speak Japanese. You are judging a performance in a language whose emotional register you cannot fully read. That is not nothing — tone carries — but it is not the same as hearing it the way a Japanese speaker does.
Where the dub side overstates it
"You are missing the animation" assumes reading subtitles is effortful for everyone. For habitual sub watchers it stops being conscious work fairly quickly, the way reading a road sign does not feel like reading.
And dub quality is genuinely uneven across studios and titles. "Dubs are good now" is true on average and not true of every show.
The actual answer
Watch it however gets you to episode twelve. The fandom's real problem has never been that some people read and some people listen. It is that a hobby built entirely on enthusiasm somehow produced a purity test.
That said — if you have picked a side, you have probably picked it firmly, and there is a certain pleasure in announcing it without saying anything.
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