Is there a reason for this broken "Fly"?

Question

The picture below is a partial screen cap from time mark 1:44 of episode 24 of Haikyu!!, 2nd Season. My main question involves Karasuno's team banner, with the calligraphy for Fly. Several times this season the banner's translation is shown with the word "Fly" broken into two lines. In each episode, there was obviously room for the "y" to appear on the same line with the rest of the word.

1. Was splitting it a pure mistake, possibly caused by some production issue? I can imagine that maybe the translator was rushed and confused, or perhaps somehow could not tell that the entire word "Fly" would have fit on a single line.
2. Was the split done out of habit? I've seen that Japanese is sometimes written horizontally and sometimes vertically. Perhaps the translator just did not realize how odd it would look in English to see a 3-character word split.
3. Was the split a pure artistic choice? It seems unlikely, but maybe there is some concept within the Japanese calligraphy that could be expressed in English by splitting the word "Fly". I can sort of get it -- Fly, by its very nature, is a vertical concept.

Since the same frame contained Aoba Johsai's banner, I might as well ask the opposite question concerning it. Why did the translators not split the word "Court" from the rest of the slogan so that it would appear below "Rule the"? This would allow the translation to not overflow the banner, as well as avoid a partial overwrite of a second calligraphic character.

The cinematography of the banners here is interesting. They are intentionally juxtaposed thematically, not as they actually were placed in the stadium. Perhaps the key is not in the individual slogans, but in the viewing them as a set.

Answer 1

This is likely a bug in Crunchyroll's subtitle renderer. Relevant excerpts from the subtitle file for this episode:

[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: fly,Open Sans Semibold,58,&H00E3E0E1,&H000000FF,&H002D2625,&H005C574B,1,0,0,0,100,100,0,52,1,0,0,9,667,133,69,0

...

[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,0:01:43.41,0:01:45.66,fly,sign,0000,0000,0000,,Fly

Nothing here indicates that the word "Fly" was supposed to be broken across two lines. If it was, there would be a \N newline in the markup like so: Fl\Ny. (I cannot think of any reason why any reasonable person would want to break it as "Fl" + "y" anyway.)

I do not know what technology Crunchyroll uses to render its subtitles, so I cannot speculate any further as to the exact cause of this issue.

---

As to how I obtained this file in the first place - I could spin you a narrative about how Crunchyroll clearly uses softsubs (since you can turn them off or change languages without Crunchyroll having to re-load a different version of the video), and so the softsubs must be transmitted to your browser, and from that point it just becomes a trivial matter of intercepting the web request that contains the softsubs and going from there. But really, I sailed the seven seas. (Don't worry, I pay for a Crunchyroll subscription.)

Answer 2

(Consider this a comment to the answer by @senshin . Using answer format so that I can format text normally and show an image.)

Since you (senshin) went to extra effort for your answer, I felt inspired to reply in kind. You state concerning the script excerpt:

Nothing here indicates that the word "Fly" was supposed to be broken across two lines.

I agree, but I think your excerpt reveals the bug. (It is possibly still intentional, but I doubt it.) Let's look at a few of the script parameters, from the [V4+ Styles] section.

MarginL: 667 (left margin)
MarginR: 133 (right margin)
MarginV:  69 (vertical (top) margin)
Alignment: 9 (probably means text is right justified)
(duration = End - Start = 0:01:45.66 - 0:01:43.41 = 2.25 sec)

The [Events] section repeats these values, probably allowing them to work within the primary values assigned by [V4 Styles]. But since these second values are all 0, the base values are not further bounded. (I added duration to make it clear that Start and End were time parameters, not location.)

Assume those are values forming an area in which to place the text, "Fly". Okay, what are the units, and in what context? Continuing with the assumptions, the units are pixels, with (0,0) being the ULC of the image. I experimented to decide the resolution, at first thinking they might be might be for a 1000-wide image, and scaled to the user's desired resolution. That didn't work; it needed to be smaller. Since 480p (858x480) is a standard resolution almost anyone can use on their pc or tablet, I tried that. The numbers line up, and the rendering software would scale as necessary. This bounding area looks something like:

The key to "Fly" being broken is MarginR. Note Irfanview's Selection stats at the top of image.

clipEnd   = imageWidth - MarginR = 858 - 133 = 725
clipWidth = clipEnd    - MarginL = 725 - 677 =  48
Irfanview clip = @(MarginL, MarginV) 48 x 132 = @(677, 69) 48 x 132

The only part of "Fly" that fits is "Fl". Hence, "y" must be forced to the next line. My final assumption is that right-alignment for a forced text break is a norm in Japanese text tools, unlike English where it would be left-aligned.