So I suppose I'm not the most neutral party saying something, but at the same time I feel about as neutral as it gets. The reason I say this is that I have my beginnings working on /u/ without association with major scanlation teams, but I am now a member of Dynasty Scans and an active participant at Wings of Yuri, but am willing to help out with freelance projects even still. I guess what I'm saying is: I have my feet in both waters, so am probably as neutral as they come.
So this is a short post complaining about /u/ and their infantile reactions toward Dynasty Scans. I feel scanlation groups and freelance jobs have two different places: groups for regular releases of specific genres and/or collections; freelance for one-shots that fit into neither category. I feel this system works under the idea that groups are expected to release with consistency. That is to say, if I am waiting for the release of a certain chapter of a manga, then I should not expect many one-shot side projects to be released before that, this being something that slows down the process on the release I am waiting for.
With /u/ deciding it wants to take on Sasame Koto, it does not contribute to the total number of manga released, so is only helpful to those with the patience of a three-year-old (it's been said before: a twice-monthly release of a monthly manga is not slow). The accusations made by /u/ against Dynasty Scans are usually unfounded — I may be accused of holding bias for that statement, but let those who disagree provide credible, substantive evidence and let that be the judge — and this short-lived tiff on /u/'s side will only end poorly on how gracious Dynasty is— and let's face it, Dynasty provides a free service that many others would be happy to charge for.
I remember a time when /u/ got into a tiff with Lililicious about the speed of release of Strawberry Shake Sweet; however, Lililicious was doing exactly what they should do: make SSS a priority, but don't focus on only one thing just because it's popular.
tl;dr: /u/, stop bitching (even though you never do); Dynasty/Lililicious/whoever is attacked in the future, don't mind the penut gallary; freelancers, translate things that wouldn't be translated by the groups (I recall a doujin flow through /u/ once which had an editor waiting for a translation, but no-one met their call).
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Thanks for your post. I just wanted to clarify a few things for anyone who may be reading:
ReplyDelete1)It's not always a simple matter of "Time spent on project X is time not spent on project Y." There can be more complex factors involved (personal motivation level, people with different skill levels, people with different amounts of free time, the difficulty of a given project, and so on). Timing isn't always exact, and if a lot of one-shots happen to be finished at the same time, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're being prioritized over serials. I send a lot of low-priority projects out into editing knowing that only some of them will come back.
2)Working in a group can give you more control over quality. With freelance work, you never know what you're going to get--the work might be brilliant or it might be terrible, and you have no say in the matter unless you're doing all of it yourself. With some groups, you need to pass a test in order to join, and there is a quality control process that ensures things aren't released until they're at the quality the group wants.