The first time I hear paypal ringing my phone, someone donated me $5, I didn't feel happy, or at least not immediately, but I felt disbelief, someone actually paid me for what I did. I asked, and they gave, I thought the whole "donation" stuff was all some fairy tale, something people do to decorate the credit page, give it a little text for people to read on the toilet as a hypothetical thought experiment or they were running a money laundering operation.
All the other scanlators, all the other people on this planet, and they gave me their hard earned money, their time, their sweat, their effort, crystalized into the form of a Lincoln portrait printed in green on paper cloth. It feels like I have finally grown past the leeching phase of my life, I have spent so long only taking from others, and now I'm finally doing something, giving back to community, back to some unknown person on the other side of the screen, and that person in particular felt gratitude, enough to give me money for it, even. I didn't place the ko-fi links on my credit page every chapter or anything, I don't even display that link half as frequently as I post comments, you know how little I comment, and every time I did, it was concealed away, behind spoilers, behind strikethrough, behind irony, behind the physical barrier of an image, you couldn't just see the link and click on it, you had to actively look for it, take the time to manually type the link from the image down into text, and go through the entire donation process.
And people, actual people, a lot of people, went through that effort to dig up that link to give me their money, effort on top of effort, done solely to give me money over a hobby I had no business being paid for. It was intoxicating to think about getting money, but at the same time it felt humiliating, I don't take donations for granted, I only ask when I feel like people have a legitimate reason to feel like they would want to donate some of their money, something big, something worth popping a champagne over, not a rote ritual to do over and over as if people giving me money is a matter of course.
Believe me, I do love cash, but everytime I ask for donations when I don't absolutely need it, as in starving in the streets with only a laptop and maybe $5 to my name, I feel like I'm becoming more and more of a sellout, as if I did this not for fun, or for love, but for money. It's the one thing I can't accept, it's a matter of pride for me to express that the love I have for what I do is genuine, maybe not for every single series under the sun, maybe not in Shakespeare quality, but if I do decide to do something, I put as much effort as I can into it, because I love it, not because of f*cking money. And I feel like this message gets cheaper and cheaper everytime I press Ctrl+V, I feel like I'm screwing over my readers, burning bridges, destroying goodwill, all to beg for money like some drug addict.
I know it sounds funny when I put it like this, but I value my works a lot, and your money just as much, if not more, and also that if you donate $1 or something similarly small, paypal actually take a good chunk off of it, and not a lot makes it to me, so if you can only afford $1 as a gesture of appreciation, please keep it, I don't want to feel guilty over making 30 cents of your precious dollar disappear into thin air, I appreciate it, I do, even if I don't, the implication that "someone is so broke they only got $1 disposable money, and instead of buying an arizona iced tea or something, they give it to me" sure will force me to, but really don't, keep it.
Maybe there is a way to cap this all off with a nice little bow or something, maybe about something about how your money isn't just numbers on a screen, but it actually really is, just number on a paypal dashboard, can't even spend it, the funny money number doesn't make it to my bank account, it's still there, all there, for me to stare at, until I find the time to get another bank account to deposit to. It's 2AM over here and I'm got way too much alcohol in me to think of anything more, the fact I got this far on my phone is a miracle of autocorrect.