It’s probably God’s way of punishing me for reading stupid shoujo manga, but I’ve found that the groups who translate these series often do retarded crap that impedes my ability to read these jpegs that they upload. Groups who scanlate shounen and seinen series don’t tend to do this crap, but if they do, there’s usually someone else who’s able to replace them when they piss people off. Not so with shoujo groups. My suspicion is that it’s because these groups are made up of the same type of undesirables that invented fanlistings and webrings and hang out on DeviantArt.

The thing that magnifies everything I hate about these groups is their policy of not allowing any of their scans on any online viewing sites. Normally, this would not be a problem. I happily grab stuff from ZSS whenever it shows up in my feedreader or whenever their bots get updated. But there’s really no reason to keep people from distributing the stuff. Well, there’s no good reason.

The justification tends to be that the group wants you to view it in the highest quality possible and there’s some sort of mythical compression that ruins their beautiful scans or something. This is retarded, because you’re trying to read a scan of a piece of paper. This isn’t something like digitally ripping a broadcast stream or Blu-ray. You’re scanning paper; it starts out with artifacts.

Of course, I suspect that there’s a lot more wankery and self-aggrandizing crap going on. I remember one group who forced people into their IRC channel to download their stuff so they’d have a huge number of people in the channel. Groups who whine about compression think that compression degrades their amazing work, since they ended up using fancy fonts that would have been unreadable in print and need to be viewed at 1080p.

But the part that is the worst about forcing people to go to their site is that their sites are often an awful Invisionfree board that’s been mangled and skinned for whatever stupid series they’re translating. They don’t have the decency to use WordPress or Blogger or something that has an RSS feed so I don’t need to visit their labyrinthine forums every day to see if they’ve stopped whining long enough to release something.

Yeah, fansubbers are stupid, but most of them don’t actively try to stop you from watching whatever awful shows they decide to translate poorly. Fansubbers have nothing on scanlators in terms of irritating crap they pull.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 12:17 am and is filed under Anime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.