The Liar Game Dramu
If any of you are Liar Game fans, and read the manga on the internet, perhaps you’ve heard about the “dispute” between Null and Project Liar Game.
“Dispute” is in quotes for a reason. Neither of the groups were in a fight. It was more like a war between leechers devoted to Null and leechers devoted to Project Liar Game. Oh, and the leechers who just wanted fast releases.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m a leecher too. I even leech for Liar Game.
But it seems that none of this drama would have happened if the “fans” hadn’t been waging this huge war.
It started with some devoted Null fans complaining to Project Liar Game (PLG), accusing them of “stealing” Null’s project. Then, some of the other fans started defending PLG, saying that PLG releases faster and that project-stealing isn’t that bad, after all, both groups are technically “stealing” from the manga-ka themselves.
While I’m sure that both groups of people started with good intentions, it eventually became a Null hate-fest and incurred discussions about why Null sucks and why PLG should continue Liar Game by themselves.
Of course, I’m not speaking about the entire population of people who commented on PLG’s website either.
Here’s my opinion: Some people have in their heads that scanlation groups are in it to please the readers, and that in order to “remain competitive”, they have to go faster.
In some groups, this is true. With at least 5 different groups on Shounen Jump mangas like Bleach and Naruto, if you’re not the first to release, your release probably will never get read, because online readers and fans will go for the fastest releases. Even I do. I don’t bother with HQ for SJ series simply cuz I don’t like them enough to want HQ scans. Not to say that some of those groups don’t do good jobs.
But for many high quality groups, such as Null and other “old-timer” groups, they don’t scanlate to appease peoples of the intarwebz. They scanlate because they like manga.
Scanlating manga is not a business, as many people would like to believe. It’s not a competition to see who can get the most downloads, the most views on your website, or the most traffic on your forum, although I won’t lie: as a scanlator myself, it is motivating to see people thank you for your work or see that people are actually looking at, or at least downloading what you’ve worked on.
Above all, the world of scanlation is a community. The origins of scanlating came from people who said, “Hey, I’ve got this manga in Japanese, do you want help me translate it so that we can read it?”
Some other people think that “without us fans, you wouldn’t be scanlating”, as if they were the whole reason for it. In some groups, this is true. But for the most part, scanlators would keep doing the thing they do, even if the only people who read the scans are themselves.
In the aftermath of it all, the translator for PLG has joined Null so that they can work together on Liar Game and that translator may work on another manga by the same author called “One outs”, which I’m quite excited for.
Anyway, that’s my rambling. Feel free to disagree with me, that’s just my opinion. But no flames about any of the groups, spam or just general messages of hate with no good reason. This is not for anyone to hate on any of the groups, but rather a discussion about the scanlation community in general. I just used the Liar Game issue as an example.
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