Oh boy, I thought I wouldn't involve myself in this mess any further, but it seems like curiosity got the best of me and I ended up going down deeper into the rabbit hole. With that said, I think that for most of us, this drama came completely out of nowhere. In an effort for me to try and understand the situation, I've thoroughly checked the thread, analyzed logs of discord servers and also interviewed the key players that were involved.

This story will mostly focus about the thread that appeared on June 13th 2019 and 2 of the biggest scanlators that are involved: Meraki and JB. The goal of this little investigation is to find out as to what really happened and what eventually led to the decision for the scanlators to leave en masse.

Let me remind everyone that I am not a journalist. As such, do not expect this article to be unopiniated. However, for any claim I make, I will try and make sure that they are properly supported by facts and evidence. My hope with this article is it will be able to clear most of the questions people currently have, especially with all the fakenews floating around. More importantly, I hope nobody gets offended by this and I hope that this serves for the community to strive for improvements.

##First conflict - Jaimini Box

Way before all of this happened, an incident occurred in March 2018 in which a member by the name of "das" has uploaded JB chapters without their permissions. His ambition was to become a MD staff member and saw an opportunity by uploading work that were done by others. Obviously, members of JB aren't amused by it as shown here: https://i.imgur.com/puceNn4.png and Holo contacted them afterwards, clearly stating that "das" is not part of their staff: https://i.imgur.com/iML5dDs.png

A month has passed. Jackladd, who was a member of JB at the time, was sent to delete all those chapters that were uploaded on MD without their permission. The community wasn't exactly happy that their content were being removed from MD, but what infuriated them even more is that the representative of JB actually suggested them to go use kissmanga instead, as shown here: http://prntscr.com/o04j61. Jackladd obviously didn't survive this unscathed as most people thought he did it and also thought that he was an admin of JB, resulting him receiving things ranging from insults to death threats. The JB scanlations obviously aren't amused by this attack on one of their own and made double effort of preventing any JB work from appearing in MD.

##What exactly happened?

What people apparently didn't know (or apparently, they know, but they don't care), is that the original message was this: http://prntscr.com/o04h30. Lymus, a MD staff member quickly pointed out in the same channel that day that the message was in fact tampered by another staff member http://prntscr.com/o04jfh https://i.imgur.com/lv4NSgC.png. Although the logs did not say who it was, they know for a fact that it was a staff who did it https://i.imgur.com/vwvbwT3.png . Holo chimed in during this moment, but he did not help improve the situation as he encourages people to attack the JB admins instead. https://i.imgur.com/TOBaIO1.png

##Who were at fault?

Let us begin by stating all the obvious, the community's behaviour is completely crap. The moment the community went "muh manga", they mercilessly executed someone who at the end of the day was just a messenger. An MD staff was seen abusing their powers and although a few valiantly tried to stop people from ganging up on Jack, everything was moot in the end due to the mob mentality. Then Holo came along and made the situation even worse, by encouraging to vent their anger against the admins from JB. Lets just say that if your goal was to get JB to release their mangas on MD, all these actions are detrimental to that and would deter people from wanting to go to your site.

##Intermezzo

Some time passes and for some weird reason, Holo actually managed to convince the JB group to upload their stuff at MD. I don't know exactly what was discussed, but a delay of 2 weeks for all the new uploads was apparently one of the demands. We all know how readers are at this point and obviously, having to wait for 2 weeks doesn't sit well with some of the community members. Thus, the harassment of the JB members continues. Although Yuno provided his explanations as to why the delay is 2 weeks https://imgur.com/4cs4bQ0 , I can completely understand why people would get angry about it. Does JB deserve the shit treatment for this decision? I leave this up to you people to decide.

##Second conflict - Meraki

On 01-06-2019, the Hatigarm scans were minding their business when a series they have been working on has been sniped by "Facepalm scans". The series in question is "Yancha Gal no Anjou-san". While rather innocent at first, later credit page chapters of Anjou shows them openly mocking all scanlators who asks for donations, going as far as calling them scammers. Anonx, the group behind Meraki scans, took an exception to that and called them out on their provocations in the comment section. As the MD did not think that "Facepalm scans" broke any rules, Anonx got warned for trying to stir up drama (https://imgur.com/jQ7uBeT). Anonx insisted that the credit page was the cause due to inflammatory comments, but the rules at the time didn't conder the credit page as part of the chapter. Again, they did not consider that "Facepalm scans" broke any rules. The situation escalated as tension rose, and Anonx eventually made the decision to pull all the mangas from the website (https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/588381556561936385/588390350746288137/unknown.png).

##What exactly happened?

With the MD Staff's mentality to follow all the rules to the exact last detail, you're basically begging for someone to loophole the rule at some point and cause damage at your expense. A quote from Anonx based on what happened behind the scenes: "After that conversation, we went to sleep as we were pretty sleep deprived. We woke up to find out that we were removed from group leader chat and that Zephyrus was giving his own version of events in there to other group leaders. When I asked Lymus about it, he told me he can give me the access to defend myself but I plainly told him if that's the practice they do with every group that leaves, then there is no need however if we are exception then by all means give me the access. To which he told me that that's the practice. But, I did call Zephyrus out on our public chat for spreading half truths and I linked screenshots from celes' DM with him as well as the ones from group leader chat which were sent to me".

I cannot confirm whether Anonx's statement is true, but that is completely irrelevant. Zephyrus apparently even admitted that there was a nice working relationship (https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/501436435673645066/588191066524483584/unknown.png), why was this situation allowed to happen anyway?

##Who were at fault?

Some argue that Anonx was too thin-skinned over some little provocation. I, on the other hand, want to point out that rules should always be guidelines and never bibles that should be followed to the last detail. Why are scanlators even allowed to add inflammatory comments on a credit page of a manga anyway?

##Sayonara Mangadex

On 11-06-2019, an Anonymous user representing a numerous amount of big scanlators, has made the declaration to leave Mangadex behind with the following reasons:

- They feel like Mangadex has become a breeding ground for hating on scanlators who fail to meet the demands of MD staffs and their allies. Any teams that decided to leave or not support MD, has allegedly been head hunted by the community.

- Holo has spoken about his idea of making MD legal in the future. This does not set well with the scanlators, because they know well what happened to Fakku. Their fear is that they are being exploited until MD has reached their goals, in which they will proceed to remove all the scanlators in favor of licensed works.

##Was it really greed all along?

The initial accusations thrown at the scanlators was that they were greedy. Honestly, I initially considered it to be pretty plausible, but the more I dug into the matters, the more unlikely it became. I would've believed if it were a few groups that were involved, but no way in hell I believe that to be the case if there are more than 6 scanlators involved in this (https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/588336704939753472/588389164366430209/unknown.png), we're not dealing with groups here that have the spending powers of an epic games store here.

##So, what was the cause?

Ahh, the community. Why am I not surprised that they want to feel self-entitled about things on the internet? It's always funny how everyone tries to make the scanlators the bad guys, but consider the following:

1. You probably live in a place where its hard to buy manga.

2. You probably can't read a lick of a Japanese.

3. Guess what, the people you call bad guys allowed you to read them translated "for free".

4. Realize that scanlators are people too and they won't hesitate to screw you over for acting like a self-entitled ass while abusing their goodwill.

##Wait, and the going legit thing?