Why Retire From Fansubbing?

[gumbaloom]

Tellu with all due respect I think in large part it was due to your choice of series that you chose to translate that you had such a negative experience.

If you continuously translate the "it" shows of the moment it's by and large the popular shows eg the Naruto's, Bleach's and FMA's that attract the morons and the fans that like to hurl abuse at you.

I've seen it myself with Initial D 4th Stage and Tsubasa when L-E releases those. Not a release will go by when we don't get some moronic leecher doing something or another.

However some of the less "cool" series which don't attract the high torrent downloads, you *do* get fans who appreciate the work you do on a show. You don't see them that often but more often than not it's just the odd occasion where someone comes in to the channel and goes like "Hey, thanks for subbing X" and they then leave. Apart from liking the shows that I work on thats the other main reason why I fansub.

Maybe if you tried helping some fansub groups with some of the less popular shows it might remind you of why we're all in this game Tellu.

-gumbaloom

[Schneizel]

Originally Posted by zalas

Can we also demand a fine from people if their karaoke is unreadable and totally doesn't mix in with the show? <_<

Of course. :0!

[Sairai_X]

Gumba, I don't think so. I've been here for 4 years and I estimate I've had my hand in something like 4-500 episodes. Every time I try to count I give up and stop. I've done the big to the small, everything from Naruto manga to obscure OVAs that got maybe 30 downloads. (Adeus Legend Final, anybody?)
And out of all these shows, do you know who had the worst, most abusive fans?

Detective Academy Q and Prince of Tennis.

[DaFool]

Tellu54, I don't know if it's too late to start sucking up to you, but I've always considered you as one of the 'Great Ones' who've pioneered excellent translations in the digital fansub era. Just like loae666 represented Elite-Fansubs, to me Tellu54 represented Rice-box, a true old guard digisub veteran. Best wishes on your later endeavors, and hopefully some people will step into your shoes and aspire to emulate your greatness. (Same with getfresh too, forgot sorry :P)

Re: DAQ and POT. ... very surprising indeed, those two shows are the equivalent of cable reruns on Animax.

I think you'd find the most courteous of fans in the more hardcore / mature shows, meaning mature idea-wise, not in blood / T&A.

[Draneor]

I have to agree with Gumbaloom. I have almost never seen the “ungrateful leechers” during my work with Froth-Bite whereas I had in previous groups. Certainly, we get questions asking us when a release will be out. We are Froth-Bite after all. I can only think of a handful of instances where a comment from a fan has been abusive or rude and all of them are connected to popular shows that we picked up for one reason or another but did not personally enjoy ourselves. There is a price for this, however, and that is that you can hear the crickets in our IRC channel.

Take the case of Black Jack, for example. Our “progress” with the show has encouraged several people, including fellow fansubbers, to encourage us to keep working on it at a reasonable pace. As all of these have been well-written and polite, we’ve seriously put a lot of thought into what we’re going to do with it. Part of this is I think we mostly attract an older and mature audience; part of it may be that we like to act polite ourselves. In any case, I honestly don’t experience the archetypical “ungrateful leechers,” although I do see them harass other groups (I had to challenge Murphy’s law, didn’t I?). Obviously, there is a diversity of experiences among us. But I do think the kind of shows a group subs and the manner in which they sub them affects the audience.

Maybe some fansubbers would be happier doing something else rather than retiring? Since I already admitted to not having the problem that forces so many into retirement I guess I invalidated my opinion on it. However, loss of interest is another matter entirely. I’m sure I’ll eventually grow tired of editing anime and seek out something more challenging. I’m sure many translators desire fresh and challenging material after a few years of translating anime as well. The truth is, at some point, all of us must grow and anime can only take us so far.

[movax]

I'm not gonna lie. I started encoding for teh leetz FTP access :P , but the fact that I was helping to release eps for people to watch and enjoy made it fun. Several FTPs later (MWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!) and plenty o encodes later, I still find it fun to encode for groups. Then again, I also have no life whatsoever, so meh. Just releasing anime for people to watch is enough for me A lot of the regulars I know well regularly poke me for more episodes, and keep me motivated that people are actually watching the stuff. Besides, the process of owning a source and making it look good is a fun challenge. Without anime encoding, I probably would have never started coding or anything.

[Ilpalazzo-sama]

Interesting thread, going into the subbers vs. leechers topic, hmm. Disclaimer: I'm a leecher. However, i do have plans to do fansubbing, when I'll have more free time and know japanese a little bit (read = much) more. Somewhere I can understand subbers who hates leechers because just go to pretty much every group's IRC / forum / website, you'll see a lot of ppl asking when will the next episode released, or your translation is wrong and such. As a leecher, I have to admit that I usually just can't wait to get the latest episodes of my favorite series out, but I understand that fansub groups has to take their time, hell, they have IRL life too, that's why I'm not complaining about releases. Too bad many ppl do. Also, as an outsider, it is not nice to see, that with certain series, groups go into a competition, which will result lower quality subs at the end. Bottom line is why retire? Because almost nothing lasts forever. Fansubbing carreer is one of them.

[LytHka]

Originally Posted by Ayanami9870

I'm going with Kiske on this one. What was a hit a long time ago can have as much, maybe even more impact than what's coming out now every season. Amazingly, people still talk about the "classics" like Cowboy Bebop, Evangelion, Slayers, Karekano, and other shows from the 80s and 90s like Samurai Pizza Cats and Saint Seiya. Quality stuff was what got most of the older subbers going at all, and they knew their dedication was going to entertain and enrich hundreds of students at anime clubs watching it at colleges across the country. It was much more personable. They have immense fun working together on these shows, and know many more fans will have fun viewing them.

This one time I will share the opinion with TheFluff, and DaFool.

Why people think most anime these days are not worth their time is because the western world is quite slow on keeping up with japanese anime trends. A few years back "kawaii" was teh thing and western people were engrossed by it, these days "moe" is something natural. Lolita characters found in all shows is something completely normal for people who can perceive things outside their cultural thinking system. I'm sad to see so much people against today's anime trends when I think anime promotion was all about the "Free Your Mind" concept back in the 90's.
New otaku will find new anime more acceptable, although it is not right to deny the quality of the classics (even though I haven't watched a single show you listed in your post ). So new people will more likely sub new anime because they actually like them and not because there's plently of them and because there are only those around.

[Catgirls]

.......................

[N-Bomb]

I only tought myself all the aspects of fansubbing to do one thing: sub GaoGaiGar. Now that that's almost done, I'm just kind of spinning my wheels, and honestly I'm only still subbing at all because I actually have a staff now. Sigh.

[CelesAurivern]

Originally Posted by Sairai_X

And out of all these shows, do you know who had the worst, most abusive fans?

Detective Academy Q and Prince of Tennis.

It's not the fault of the shows, really.
The real reasons are:
1. It's a certain group you used to work for.
2. It was sniped mid-way.

Great formula for a troll magnet


At the end of the day, it's what group you represent that gets you the flak.

Edit: Enragin, you're right. Names shouldn't be mentioned. Some people might mistake it as being political name calling.

[Enragin_Angel]

I have a feeling your post will be deleted, but it's so true. I'm quoting it just in case a mod forgets to delete my post >_>

[Gaia]

Many people seem to be depressed by doing their work nowdays. Actually, I can understand it... but it's not 100% that it is really caused by these times. People love stuff, they spend a lot of time with it and as time goes by... They think "How much time have I already spend with this materia?"... And then, many of them keep doing their work, since they did it all the time and "wasted" already a lot of it. In the end, it can become hate.
Quarkboy already said it... "To make people smile" and I share his opinion. Sometimes... I even cry while watching bittersweet series like AIR... Tears of joy. Well, the fansub team cant see it, but isnt if enough that they know, what kind of nice feeling their work is giving the publikum?
Then... There are other series like Bleach... Naruto... but groups still decide on their own if they want to do a series, which automatically makes them to a nerd-magnet, what doesnt mean, that Bleach/Naruto is a bad series.
Anyway, this topic is giving me stamina. I hope I'll be a decent (probably german) anime fansubber someday and make people smile on my own.

Aesir

[runpsicat]

I don't think it matters that much which group you "represent"--I forget who did, but someone already pointed out that statistically, you'll always have enough "assholes" to cover all groups/releases with their negative opinions about [insert some element here]*. Either you're too fast or too slow, don't do enough popular shows or don't do enough obscure shows, don't act nice enough or don't act "tough" enough... etc. Oh well, it's impossible to please everyone, so that's when you kind of start focusing on how well relations among staff are going as opposed to how well you're pleasing the population at large. As long as the people you work with are having a good time, you can ignore the negative aspects and keep going... or something like that

*Though it's true that if you work for a "bigger" group that attracts more leechers, there will probably be more assholes to contend with...

[Sairai_X]

It wasn't Shinsen. The PoT fans, who were by FAR the worst of the lot, I met when I was helping W-Dreamers with the early episodes of Trinity Blood. The crap I took was unbelievable. We eventually disbanded the group because of it.

It's true that Shinsen attracted a large amount of idiots, but when you consider that it's about 10 times the size of your average anime channel that doesn't mean altogether that much.

[Sun-Ku]

I´m only a leecher so sry for intruding, but
I think the current situation is due to the large amount of Fans and Fansubbers. The problem is: the "large" amount of fansub groups doing only the populares shows, so that most shows have 2 to 5 groups simultaneously doing the same show. And so the fans are splitting up, bash about favorit fansubber etc. Thats the problem, the fans of those shows with 5 groups working on it, move to the speedsubber or dont give a damn what fansub group they are watching and only enjoy the current ep. The technology for encoding subbing etc is very "easy to use" and available the raw provider is one click ahead, heck there are one-man fansubbing "groups" out there.
So the quality of fansubs is mostly not different among the fansubbers and most viewers dont know japanese to tell if fansub group a does better translations then fansubgroup b.
So the problem is? Fansubgroups dont get enough attention for their releases bcoz of the huge rivality among the fansub groups for the popular animes.

So who were the fansubgroups for Gundam Seed/D, Bleach, Naruto and the most Fanservice/moe animes etc?
But if you ask who was subbing Legend of galactic hero (digi); kyou kara maou, or School Rumble most of the watchers can tell you that, and those shows having had delays of weeks and months.

[Sairai_X]

Legend of Galactic Heroes had terribly whiny fans too. If it wasn't JUST like the Central-Anime subs, then it was wrong! Even when, you know, CA's subs were wrong. They were quite a lot of the time, but it was a waste of breath to tell the "fans" that.

BTW, I just got an angry message from Vincent demanding that I clarify that all the complaints and demands I recieved while working on Trinity Blood were while I was with #w-dreamers, not when I was translating it for Shinsen under the nick Maou_Zeta. Just in case anybody was misinterpreting that.

Anyway, to sum it up, leechers = whiny jerks.

[Yosaphina]

HAHAHA Nice one Kodachrome.

People retire when they feel like retiring. I fansub shows I want to watch. Since when you fansub you don't actually get to watch anything except what you fansub.

This is one reason why you have 5 different versions of a show. Despite the name, fansubbers in general actually watch a lot less anime than leechers. We often don't get to see final versions either, or by the 3rd time through we prefer to not watch it again.

I fansub what I want to archive and what I want to watch. I'll quit when I get tired of it. It's the reason internals are just as <3ed by me as things we release. Some people get tired of the constant work -- because it takes many many hours of work to do a quality release for that 30 minutes of watching pleasure. I find it a nice brainless pastime.

Forgot to add - don't forget the raw providers!

[getfresh]

you guys...

The reason for ppl quiting is simple. We're old farts. We don't have it in us anymore. This is a hobby, and when a hobby becomes a burden why continue. All the ppl saying "I retire" have 4+ years of time wasted looking at text files and ruining our vision. Not to mention getting carpal or losing friends from lack of socializing. Plainly put "It was fun, but we have moved on". That is the reason...

[mf_]

Originally Posted by getfresh

you guys...

The reason for ppl quiting is simple. We're old farts. We don't have it in us anymore. This is a hobby, and when a hobby becomes a burden why continue. All the ppl saying "I retire" have 4+ years of time wasted looking at text files and ruining our vision. Not to mention getting carpal or losing friends from lack of socializing. Plainly put "It was fun, but we have moved on". That is the reason...

I totally agree. I've been fansubbing for 4+ years as well, and begin 2005 I've started retiring (It's tempting to pick up new projects ), because I just don't have the time and dedication that I used to. It's starting to become a hassle to do things on time, and I really only still enjoy selecting the filters and making custom stuff for improving the video, not the rest of the encoding process. I keep myself to slow-moving (preferably DVDISO) projects, one at a time, just because I love fansubbing, and I can't really seem to shake it. But I will probably stop altogether sometime in 2006. It's been fun enough, and it eats time like no tomorrow. Also, delivering quality work isn't worth it like it was 3-4 years ago. Speed is all that matters, it seems. If you're a week late, you don't even get a tenth of the amount of leechers that the other groups get. And even though you mostly do it for the fun of working with a team and producing something good, the reward of being appreciated by an audience is a reason for doing it as well.