It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything for this blog. Mostly because it would have been a pain to type up a cynical essay for every chapter I did.

Anyway, the topic today is, though it may be late, this is a bit of a goodbye to Nisekoi.

If you’re somehow not familiar already, we no longer do Nisekoi, or scanlation altogether for that matter. It was pretty sudden, and to be honest I’m still annoyed. But nothing can really be done about what’s happened, so for now I guess I’ll be thankful that I worked on Nisekoi for as long as I did.

I joined Red Hawk Scanlations in winter of 2011-2012, at the insistence of the Head TL there who told me to apply when he saw me complaining about having never having anything to do in the forum shoutbox. I passed (obviously), and since then I’ve worked on a variety of series, some of them garbage and some of them worse. A few were even good. I’d say that, despite the rage that caused me to make this blog in the first place, Nisekoi was one of the good ones. It’s really just typical that it all ended just as the series was starting to get interesting.

Nisekoi is a series that’s just another shit harem romance series that’s completely thrown away the initial premise by the time the end’s rolled around, but I liked it. Might’ve been because I felt a sense of pride in working on a series that was that popular, but mostly I’m pretty sure it’s because I have awful taste. I’ll still follow it most likely, or at least catch up on it all at once when it’s finished like I usually do. But the thing is, it’s no longer my series, which is a lot more annoying to me than I expected. I decided that I’d write this, just so I could put my own sentiments on the series, and scanlation in general, out there so someone could read it. I don’t quite care if anyone does, but perhaps there’s someone out there wondering what a translator is thinking when they pick a series and continue to do it for a long time.

According to Irru, we’ve been doing Nisekoi since chapter 85, the start of 2013. I’ve apparently been translating Nisekoi for almost three years now, waking up early or coming home from classes early once almost every week to type up a script and pass it on to Irru. We’d discuss the chapter, talk about where the series is going, send screenshots of good Chitoge scenes to each other, like a couple of complete nerds. Nisekoi made me angry pretty often, and occasionally I’d look at a new chapter and decide that I really didn’t want to deal with the word count and put it off until later. It was fun though, and I felt a not-small amount of pride in the work that I did. I guess it isn’t surprising that the series left a bit of a void in me when it all ended.

There’s something about being the person that is directly responsible for people being able to enjoy the same thing you do that’s really rewarding in and of itself. Being the translator doesn’t mean you’re automatically the most important part of the process, but it definitely means you’re indispensable. And when you pair that kind of ability with the drive that comes from thoroughly enjoying what you do, I think that’s when you get the core belief underlying the whole manga translation thing in general. You experience something, and you want others to experience it in the same way, even though there may be barriers that prevent them from doing so. We all want to do justice to the things we like, as anything less than the best possible quality would cheapen the experience.

I wanted to touch on the topic of the /r/Nisekoi speedscans that’re now a thing. I can’t say I don’t really care about the quality of those releases after typing up the above paragraph, but I understand that there’s definitely a demand for the earliest content possible. I have a bunch of my own opinions about the whole quality thing, as well as the placing of notes and opinions of the translator into the chapter. I’m not going to discuss those opinions, because no one is really going to want to read them, and in the end those people are doing what I no longer can. However, I hope that another quality scanlation team will pick up Nisekoi, or perhaps even that Reddit speedscan group starts grooming themselves toward excellent quality. Not even because I want to continue reading Nisekoi, but more because I want the series to be available in a quality that allows someone who doesn’t speak Japanese to enjoy it to the same extent that a native speaker like me can. In the end, it just goes back to my point about bringing justice to something you like.

That’s all I really wanted to put up. It’s a bit of a ramble, but hopefully there’s a point or two in there that I could get across. We all do the things we do for a reason, and the reasons that we have for doing difficult or time-consuming things for long periods of times should be and often are proportionally more important. Thank you to all those who read RHS’s releases and appreciated the quality, to everyone else I’ve worked with, and to the critics on places like 4chan and various manga forums that ridiculed the mistakes in my work and forced me to be more and more conscious of all that I do.

I hope that Nisekoi does well, in both plot and scanlation (I really don’t like the diction in Viz’s translation), and I hope that there are a few people out there that kept my translations in mind when evaluating their personal standards for reading translated material. I would end this post with a carriage return and a “goodbye,” but in reality I won’t be disappearing from the scanlation world or anything, so that would just be melodramatic. I will continue working on things I like with the resources I have available to me. If you’re into romance series, check out the cute little 4-koma series I do with Irru, Tsurezure Children, by Toshiya Wakabayashi.

For the final statement, this post takes somewhat of a businesslike turn. If there are any quality scanlation groups that are seriously considering picking up Nisekoi, we (Triplicate and Irru) are definitely available. Feel free to contact us.

See you around.