Site Update - 14th of May 2025

[bondejeger]

..Arguments aside, looks like we got to 1,000 messages.

I did my part!
But I think I’m just gonna end it here, I’m getting nowhere and it’s like talking to a wall at this point.

 

[T-sama]

I did my part!
But I think I’m just gonna end it here, I’m getting nowhere and it’s like talking to a wall at this point.

Says the wall who when can't make an argument resorts to "you just don't want to pay!" lol

 

[Luchoo]

I just joined MD on the 4th. The takedown happened minutes before I decided to start re-reading Negima!...

Sorry for my bad luck y'all...

 

[jetabyss13]

Honestly best thing to do rn is just watch how the situation unfolds. and better back up all of your stuff

personally, im thankful I only just have a few series and artists to whom I stick to

I always preferred works that are already finished or are almost finished, but damn this is gonna hurt for a lot of the newer and ongoing stuff :x

 

[Bok3tto]

Ya know what, I agree with that. I'm just a bit conflicted with my inner self.

Honestly you’d have to be some special kind of asshole not to be conflicted. Scanlation is fun, but like we gotta disabuse ourselves of the notion we’re doing the lort’s work or whatever.

I feel that your argument with RonBWL conveniently fails to acknowledge what he said about people who can't read Japanese/Korean not knowing what series are interesting.

You can’t make this argument and then go on to acknowledge the existence of MTL-ing because then it’s just disingenuous. You can use Google Translate, DeepL (which is actually pretty good), Papago and other apps to look something without going through the rest of the process in disseminating the work by bypassing payment methods or violating copyright laws.

As for not knowing what’s interesting—some webtoons sites post a teaser chapter for free, but also sometimes you have to be unafraid to take a chance on a story. If you don’t like it there are resale sites, but like this thing of ’but stealing is okay because it might not be good quality so I have to test it first’ is just not it. It hurts the industry, it hurts artists, it’s also not fair to readers.

There's no point to 'lines of communication' when you can't use them to begin with.

You’re not giving people enough credit: If we have internet we have email, phone, social media at our disposal. Seven Seas hates being contacted directly but if we can figure out how acquire raws and scanlate shit we can figure out how to get through to them.

Do you really expect people to sift through tens of thousands of series that are possibly low quality slop to find something worth lobbying about?

You’re way overshooting the mark here and also not giving anyone here or any of our readers enough credit. If you like something—maybe you stumbled on a panel on Twitter and clicked ‘translate’ under the tweet and got a good vibe from what the author had to say and want to see officials, it’s worth lobbying for. If you see an anime you like and it’s based on a manga that’s not licensed and you want to see more, that’s worth lobbying for. You can do all that without stealing from an author.

But also if your reason for scanlating is thinking you have this mandate to ‘sift through tens of thousands of series that are possibly low quality slop to find something worth lobbying about’ then that’s not about the work itself that’s about clout-chasing—in which case why not just apply for a job and go legit.

Other series that may be good but more niche; how would you expect people who do not know Japanese/Korean to find out about them to lobby for?

Again, because you go on to bring up MTLing, you don’t have to know Japanese or Korean to see what’s up, but also this is just arguing for complacency, lack of accountability, and sheer entitlement.

You don’t have to find something perfect to want it licensed, you have to be willing to indicate interest, ask for it, and recognize that stealing is not only a felony but incredibly disrespectful to creatives.

Assuming that raws are available online and someone actually goes to MTL each series one by one to find a gem (which is ridiculous), you get a couple of outcomes:

1. MTL is at a pretty good quality enough to read, so why lobby for translation?
2. MTL is bad, you mistake a gem for a trash because you didn't understand the story.
3. MTL is bad, but you still see potential somehow in the story.

Yeah, totally ridiculous because it sounds like there’s a mandate when none exists, but also if you know enough to know an MTL is pretty good quality or bad, then you don’t need scans.

You find something you like online somewhere—a few free pages on Renta or a sample on Amazon or Bookwalker, you hold up your phone camera to the screen and you fire up an app and see what you think. Maybe you order it or you pitch it to a publisher, but you always lobby for a licensed translation because committing a felony or disrespecting authors should not be your default.

 

[shoujocon]

I can only imagine that for a while it had consistent sales and someone at the top likes it, is it digital release too? That seems to help sometimes since they don't have to worry as much about publishing costs, when it's actual magazine they're merciless.

I think it's less that Japanese don't like those mangas and more that due to their various fucked up social issues many just want easy to digest self insert escapist slop to feel better about life.

It also doesn't help that the big money comes from pathetic otakus and such, espcially male ones, who want harem shit full of waifus and overpowered protagonists that have as much personality as a cardboard cutout.

I do think with digital publishing a lot of series that would get cancelled before were able to last longer and are even still ongoing, so there's that at least, but many publishers and executives didn't adapt to that and easily cancel things with potential.

i don't really get why you blame people for actually buying stuff they find entertaining. simple but fun stuff sells, it's not uniquely japan thing either. plenty of simple stories targeted at the female demographic too, aren't you familiar with a typical rich guy falls in love with an average working woman story that's copied over million times.

 

[T-sama]

i don't really get why you blame people for actually buying stuff they find entertaining. simple but fun stuff sells, it's not uniquely japan thing either. plenty of simple stories targeted at the female demographic too, aren't you familiar with a typical rich guy falls in love with an average working woman story that's copied over million times.

Not blaming people for buying what they find entertaining, what I'm criticizing is that a lot of the popular stuff is slop for self insert and escapism, which have hundreds or thousands of series all similar to each other.

Meanwhile actually interesting and original works die because a lot of people don't want to think, they just want easy escapism so they can feel better about themselves.

 

[shoujocon]

Not blaming people for buying what they find entertaining, what I'm criticizing is that a lot of the popular stuff is slop for self insert and escapism, which have hundreds or thousands of series all similar to each other.

Meanwhile actually interesting and original works die because a lot of people don't want to think, they just want easy escapism so they can feel better about themselves.

you might find other stuff interesting but it doesn't matter to the people that choose to buy stuff they like for their entertainment. a story being interesting is a relative thing as well, you might find something interesting but others don't.

"a lot of people don't want to think, they just want easy escapism so they can feel better about themselves", first there's literally no rule that entertainment has to be complicated or though provoking, usually people like stuff that's fun, that's what's most popular usually, and second even if they want to do what you said, again that's what they want and that's what they pay for so where's the problem?

if you care about the high culture stuff, remember that culture has to be created and for that you need to have creators, like anything else someone has to invest in that for it be created and exist.

 

[jetabyss13]

We should all take this as an opportunity to learn Japanese ourselves and get a credit card with zero international fees.

Sponsored by Capital One.

 

[shoujocon]

We should all take this as an opportunity to learn Japanese ourselves and get a credit card with zero international fees.

Sponsored by Capital One.

Are there even cards like that? I mean, unless your account would be in yen already. I pay with a debit and there's no special fees just what exchange fee is.

 

[Dor1tos]

So if you lose the oppurtunity to take the bus, and you have to walk every day instead, it’s an appeal to emotion huh.

Yes, because the bus service being run in a way I believe is wrong is not my fault, nor is it my responsibility despite your repeated insistence that it is.
If the bus service wished to remain running, it should have expanded its routes, offered more competitive fares, and replaced its drivers with people who have a better handle on what they're doing.

 

[bondejeger]

We should all take this as an opportunity to learn Japanese ourselves and get a credit card with zero international fees.

Sponsored by Capital One.

https://djtguide.github.io/
I don’t pay any fees on my credit card or paypal, but shipping is expensive. I buy physical copies of everything I scanlate, and the shipping is nearly as expensive as the volumes themselves.

 

[BestBoy]

we can’t get it NOW

Me waiting 11 months for Azuki Manga to get within 17 chapters of the fan translation of Ryoumin 0-nin (30/47 chapters)
Me waiting 2.5 years for J-Novel to get within 5 chapters. (41/47 chapters)

It is a glacial pace and I don't think they'll ever catch up to the raws (currently at 128 chapters).

 

[Malkraz]

You’re making excuses because you don’t want to pay.

ur on a piracy site retard

 

[Bok3tto]

1st outcome is basically no different from the visibility benefits of piracy that he has been arguing for and you against, so unless you want to change your argument, we won't discuss how people arriving at the 1st outcome will lobby for translation.

Again, publishers pay authors an advance and the sales pay down the author’s debt. While you run through this argument in your head, you want to remember that publishers pay authors an advance—which the author then has to pay back in royalties, after which they see some cash themselves. Authors can have different contracts that might give them a cut of gross sales or whatever, but they still have to pay back that advance first.

This is also a job—hours of time and experience poured into pictures and a story that we’re passing around for free. Lobbying for a translation is a few minutes to an hour every few days and it’s not violating copyright.

This leaves 3rd outcome as the only possibility for lobbying for translations. However not only do you have to convince other people that this story is good enough to lobby for despite you not fully understanding the bad translation, you also need to convince enough people to show active, visible support towards the publisher for them to consider taking any action.

This is where word of mouth comes in, and it can be done without disseminating scans—screenshares, writing a synopsis, voice chat, going old school without violating copyright or screwing the artist out of income.

Not to mention how you would have to share the shitty MTL of this story to convince them which again leads back to piracy. You need to get pass (1)people who hate MTL and refuse to give it a shot, (2)people who despite your efforts don't share your opinion and think story is shit, and (3)people who are satisfied with the shitty MTL and don't want to lobby for a paid official one (looping back to 1st outcome).

To be perfectly clear: Lobbying is an actual job that requires skill and time to convince people of the value of pursuing a particular course of action, often in one’s best interest. We all made a choice to scanlate something for reasons only we know instead of reaching out to publishers because we all have an entitled, customer first mentality that is exacerbated by our access to social media, graphics programs, raws, etc.

A lot of us joke about how we’re all POSs for being here and doing what we do, but it’s really more that we’re all looking for a place to belong and something to call our own, we’re just doing it at the expense of an artist. If we have time to comb through thousands of pages or even scanlate a chapter, we have time to reach out to other fans and make a concerted effort to reach out to publisher. We also understand why the DMCA takedown was necessary and also presumably have the self-awareness to understand that you can’t always have what you want to figure out how to learn from that.

To emphasize again, the publishers would need a large enough showing in their 'lines of communication' to consider taking action.

Exactly but we would need to actually put in effort using those lines of communication—and recognize that even then it might not work and we might not get what we want, and we can still choose to not violate copyright law and fuck over artists.

After all that has been said, do you still think these 'lines of communication' do anything without the contribution of scanlations?

Again, according to Wikipedia fan translations first entered the chat over 50 years ago and no one can say for sure how much they contributed to manga’s visibility in the U.S. but that does not justify current activities because since 1970 we’ve gained more access and have more lines of open communication with creators and publishers. We actually have more understanding of how publishing works, more insight into the industry’s practices and the lives of authors, and therefore more justification to stop than we do to continue.

It's crazy effort to look at raws on your own but many people here fail to also mention the time involved. Unless you are a neet who also have no other hobbies, who has the time for this?

Time for a new hypothetical:

Authors gets an average a ¥3,236,000 (~$21,000 USD) advance, maybe based on a one shot, for serialization. They draw a salary of about $1,000 USD a week and maybe get a job to keep them housed, fed, and clothed while they work at creating 40-50pp a week or a month. Sometimes they get pages fees that starting out are in the neighborhood of $200 USD. In Tokyo, according to Google, the average 1BR is about $700USD a month depending on the ward, sometimes that includes utilities but not cellphone and other stuff. The sales pay down their debt and then they draw royalties that go to their accounts plus a percentage of sales from merch and other events that can range from 8-12% based on their contract. Most of what they make is going to pay down that advance.

They spend hours drawing a weekly or a monthly solo, sometimes more than 80hrs a week with perhaps 3 hours of free time, because they’re new and can’t afford assistants yet. They’re subjected to regular surveys in which readers give them feedback and there are character popularity polls their editors expect them to address—sometimes at the expense of their story. They keep random hours, health isn’t always great, but they’ve got a contract. They’re expected to interact on social media with fans, trolls, vendors, others and always be pleasant and encouraging. They give permission for fans to make and sell doujins to generate good will. They’re asked to give interviews, do signings, appear at conventions, and still keep up their work. Their sales are going through the roof but they’re still paying down that ¥3,000,000 when one day a western fan on Twitter shares a panel in English—which hasn’t been licensed—and tags them. Someone mentions a site like Mangadex, author sees comments under pages they didn’t approve and that their editor and publisher didn’t sell the rights for. Thousands of hits, hundreds of comments, no money coming back and they’re still paying off that advance and trying to make ends meet.

While we’re talking about exploiting artists:

• Togashi Yoshiro (YuYu Hakusho / Hunter X Hunter) developed a back issue that makes him unable to sit in a chair while he draws. Fans demand more HXH, though so fuck him—right?
• Takeuichi Naoko (Sailor Moon) has been vocal about her burnout.
• Miura Kentaro (Berserk) died of an aortic dissection due to work related stress.
• Nagata Kabi (My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness) wrote about how even the success of her first book didn’t exactly make her rich in the sequel, My Solo Exchange Diary.
• Chiba Tetsuya (Ashita No Joe) was also a university professor.
• Terada Katsuya (The Monkey King) took on illustration work basically working two full jobs and iirc he dropped TMK.
• Kohske (GANGSTA.) dropped because she had MS and announced she could see how scanlations were cutting into her sales.

Yeah, maybe that’s a Japan problem, this labor thing, but also we could like choose not to add to it with our shenanigans, maybe. Just a thought.

 

[Bok3tto]

Me waiting 11 months for Azuki Manga to get within 17 chapters of the fan translation of Ryoumin 0-nin (30/47 chapters)
Me waiting 2.5 years for J-Novel to get within 5 chapters. (41/47 chapters)

It is a glacial pace and I don't think they'll ever catch up to the raws (currently at 128 chapters).

Exactly. Can’t wait for a legal chapter because we gotta have it now—we all have this thing, like we picked ours up when there was like a 6 month gap, just before it was licensed, took it over from the previous group, and ran with it because our raws provider insisted we were doing SO much better work than the officials, we all have this insane ego like we think we’re creative geniuses and readers feed it with this entitled attitude. It was almost freeing to see the entire chapter list wiped clean, I tellya. 😂

 

[Malkraz]

u really typed all that like it would get read

 

[Bok3tto]

u really typed all that like it would get read

you’re doing the most here and I love that for you

 

[jetabyss13]

you’re doing the most here and I love that for you

The Punpun pfp gives him infinite aura.

 

[xEternalSoul]

You’re way overshooting the mark here and also not giving anyone here or any of our readers enough credit. If you like something—maybe you stumbled on a panel on Twitter and clicked ‘translate’ under the tweet and got a good vibe from what the author had to say and want to see officials, it’s worth lobbying for. If you see an anime you like and it’s based on a manga that’s not licensed and you want to see more, that’s worth lobbying for. You can do all that without stealing from an author.

But also if your reason for scanlating is thinking you have this mandate to ‘sift through tens of thousands of series that are possibly low quality slop to find something worth lobbying about’ then that’s not about the work itself that’s about clout-chasing—in which case why not just apply for a job and go legit.

What a joke. Just like your argument with Ron, you aren't arguing against my points in good faith. You go on to quote the 3 outcomes of MTL I mentioned and still failed to apply it to your 'translate under a tweet'. Yeah sure, you may possibly get good vibes about a specific teaser or your MTL goes bad and you don't recognize a gem. Tell me again how you managed to convince others to lobby as well in a large enough amount to suggest to a publisher that it's worth translating and distributing internationally? Companies don't revolve around a small interest, they aren't going to take action for just a 100 people.

But also if your reason for scanlating is thinking you have this mandate to ‘sift through tens of thousands of series that are possibly low quality slop to find something worth lobbying about’ then that’s not about the work itself that’s about clout-chasing—in which case why not just apply for a job and go legit.

I have 0 idea what you are trying to talk about with this clout chasing nonsense, if you think everyone has time and effort to go through so much junk when they could just pick up a different hobby I think you are delusional.

This is where word of mouth comes in, and it can be done without disseminating scans—screenshares, writing a synopsis, voice chat, going old school without violating copyright or screwing the artist out of income.

Again a delusional opinion that thinks many people are willing to pay for works on just simple synopsis or word of mouth. Not everyone is a billionaire with tons of money to spend on random series like these. Guess what works for word of mouth or short synopsis? Recommendations for manga/manhwa/manhua that are free online due to scanlations. People can actually check out the series themselves and if they really like it, buy the product to support.

Your hypothetical paints a false picture that scanlating does not afford them international visibility which then translates into actual collaboration, expansion to new mediums like anime, and bigger sales. Exploiting artists have nothing to do with the consumers and it's a problem of the industry or the superior entity such as editors/publishers. A famous example would be Solo Leveling, how did you think it got so big ? There are now sequels, games, anime, other collaborations due to international interest after people were exposed to it due to groups scanlating the manhwa.