What a joke. Just like your argument with Ron, you aren't arguing against my points in good faith.
No worries. Totally get that the rhetoric and insults you’re using in your responses are just a symptom of your feelings of helplessness and frustration. It is what it is.
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.
No worries. People who don’t have experience in publishing or other industries/professions/etc. can find it really easy to criticize them as being unfair or capricious, but in fact publishers put a lot of thought into their negotiations and transactions. It’s a lot of money changing hands, after all, and it’s peoples’ livelihoods.
The ‘gem’ scenario isn’t foolproof, but it’s also not ensured by scans and in general it doesn’t make what we do okay.
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.
Saying ‘I won’t even try to do the right thing because you can’t prove to me personally that it works’ is like saying ‘if you believe homeless people deserve to be fed and housed then why don’t you do it yourself’ and is not engaging in good faith here. The point is that legal—and therefore objectively better—ways exist to get what we want.
Arbitrarily choosing ‘100’ when everyone knows it’s a small number is not making a good faith argument, and doesn’t make scanlating something for only a small audience any less exploitive. It literally does not matter how small the audience is, it’s still doing something wrong.
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.
Don’t be so hard on yourself. You suggested it was somehow feasible or even necessary for anyone not in publishing sift through thousands of works to find a mythical gem that publishers would absolutely accept, and it sounds like you’re realizing that‘s a stretch—it almost sounds like a stunt someone would engage in for clicks, in fact.
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.
No worries. Publishers release teaser chapters, they also make chapters free for a limited time in bulk, you can get samples on B&N and Amazon. Often that’s enough to give you a sense of the writing and art and sometimes you just have to take a chance on something and let the author tell a story instead of reading an entire pirated manga and then deciding if you want to buy it.
If you decide to do the latter and someone points out that you did something objectively wrong and you get upset, then maybe you should explore that with someone offline who could provide a perspective informed by a more rounded worldview and more life experience, or at least more respect for social contracts or even the laws that protect us from each other and ourselves.
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.
Some authors ask fans for help, some allow fan translations—if asked—or even solicit them. However taking that as blanket permission to translate anything we come across out of some misplaced sense of responsibility is blatantly disrespectful. Like you don’t show random authors who aren’t licensed, or even licensed authors, scanned panels and expect them to thank you. It’s like saying ‘oh, we’re not paying you, you’re getting exposure’. It’s easy to be confident of your rightness in here, but offline IRL we all know not to do this.
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.
So wild, like when we call ourselves ‘consumers‘, and say things like ‘thanks for the meal’ about art, it makes us sound like zombies gnawing on artists‘ brains and howling for more, slavering and grasping at their coattails as we produce our derivatives. That whole sentence makes it sound like we’re entirely faultless and editors and publishers are villains and artists are animals we’re killing for food or milking for… milk. Lol
In fact, everyone’s exploiting artists. We’re wringing the life out of them. Editors and publishers recruit and manage, publicize, sell licenses and merch, demand return on investment. And we do the same thing, we’re just not paying them. We’re so hungry for ‘content’ we’re bypassing copyright law to get what we want and then being all surprise Pikachu face when publishers slap us on the wrist. It’s weird and probably happens because we’re doing this all online and don’t see artists as real people.
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.
Scans were not the sole driver of Solo Leveling’s success. Most action-related IPs aimed at teen boys and young men, which is the most vocal segment of readership, and reflective of a male-dominated industry, get licensed translations, and everything else. The anime/manga industry caters to them because it’s what they know. Really, though, if scans were all it took to make things visible and get them licensed, shojosei readers would not be fighting for shelf space—and with that, this discussion has run its course.
