The user who submitted this article requested to remain anonymous, for reasons that should become clear. I should note that the images I've attached to this post are for illustrative purposes, and that they are not of the series that the author works on. - g
Guest posts are intended to encourage diversity of thought; the opinions represented within are not necessarily those of Anime Vice or its staff.
Hello, Anime Vice. I might be choosing to remain anonymous, but I'm a scanlator. I work on an unspecified series which, thanks to cultural and/or legal and/or fiscal issues, could never be legitimately brought to the United States manga market, and it eats me up inside with every page I edit. I wonder how I can dare to call myself a fan when I purchase the beautiful volumes of the original manga and selfishly gut them, ripping apart their innards, leaving a mess of pages where a book used to be. I scan as well as I can, so my work can be a replacement for the original for those who don't speak Japanese. Even so, I feel guilt with every page, knowing that for each volume I edit, the odds of people purchasing a legitimate edition (should pigs fly and hell freezes over and it were to be legitimately published in English) are plummeting like a Looney Toons anvil. I'm stealing from the author whose work I love so much and committing grand scale piracy, and I constantly question whether or not it's worth it. I considered including the Japanese ISBN for each volume and links to where you could purchase Japanese books online, but honestly, how many of even the most devoted fans would do that? I'm not optimistic enough to believe that more than one or two people would even consider importing a Japanese volume to show support for a series which they read in scanlation.
There are people who happily scanlate things which are licensed, which is a mindset I can't realize. At that point you aren't just stealing from a nebulous crowd of readers who might purchase the original Japanese volumes to puzzle through them; you're stealing away people who might otherwise buy a legitimate edition in their own language because it's so much easier to log onto a scanlation aggregator website and download away. This is the sort of mindset that I just can't understand.
Added to this is the guilt that I feel for reading scanlations of fantastic series that, like the one I work on, are not likely to ever be released in English. Ancient shoujo or shounen epics which would never sell due to the old art style. Quirky series whose cultural aspects would never be allowable in the United States, like Saint Young Men. Extremely niche market manga, such as mahjong manga. Experimental seinen even more unusual than the fantastic Sig Ikki line from VIZ. This is the sort of thing that I want to read, but if it isn't available in my language, what can I do?
At this point, when it comes to obscure series without much of a chance of release in English, I honestly find none of the options to be worthwhile. I don't speak enough Japanese to just buy the original edition and read them myself. Sometimes there are other foreign language editions, but often I can't read those languages either. And while manga is a privilege and not a right, I don't want to be limited to only the sort of thing which is financially feasible to publish in the United States. Scanlations, whether the ones I shamefully create or the ones I read on the internet, are the only regrettable option, and I wish this weren't the case.
I won't tell you what I work on, but if you somehow read any of my series, I hope you're enjoying them, and I hope you'll consider at some point if not buying the actual physical series, at least buying any merchandise or artbooks that come out that tickle your fancy. If your monetary support can help convince a publishing company to take a leap and license something unusual, I'd consider every scanlated page I've put out to be worth it.
Guest posts are intended to encourage diversity of thought; the opinions represented within are not necessarily those of Anime Vice or its staff.
Anonymous Confessions of a Scanlator
I've wanted to write this since I saw the scanlation guest article almost a month ago.
At this point, when it comes to obscure series without much of a chance of release in English, I honestly find none of the options to be worthwhile. I don't speak enough Japanese to just buy the original edition and read them myself. Sometimes there are other foreign language editions, but often I can't read those languages either. And while manga is a privilege and not a right, I don't want to be limited to only the sort of thing which is financially feasible to publish in the United States. Scanlations, whether the ones I shamefully create or the ones I read on the internet, are the only regrettable option, and I wish this weren't the case.
I won't tell you what I work on, but if you somehow read any of my series, I hope you're enjoying them, and I hope you'll consider at some point if not buying the actual physical series, at least buying any merchandise or artbooks that come out that tickle your fancy. If your monetary support can help convince a publishing company to take a leap and license something unusual, I'd consider every scanlated page I've put out to be worth it.
