Hi everyone.

Feels like it’s been forever since I got to TL, even though it’s only been… a week? Whatever. My school’s winter break is far too long, and everything seems to just drag and drag and drag. Fortunately, classes start up again this week, so I’ll get to have more stuff to keep me entertained and busy. A slight bit of nervousness as I wait to hear about how the next stage of my life’ll play out, but other than that things are fine. A new album by a Japanese band I started listening to recently, so that’s pretty good as well.

Now that the completely vague and unnecessary personal updates are out of the way, let’s talk about Nisekoi chapter 201. I think I might’ve mentioned at some point in the past that Irru and I both like Haru a lot, and so we’re understandably pretty excited for this upcoming Haru arc. Gotta love the classic tsundere trope: the slow transformation from tsun to dere, rather than the flanderized version that’s rampant nowadays that’s just anime shorthand for “violent bitch.”

This chapter was super easy to TL. Not much content, just a setup for the sweetsmaking contest arc. I think the wordcount was below 1500, which is definitely easy. Maybe a thirty- or forty-minute TL.

It’s nice seeing Raku take a decidedly proactive approach to trying to figure out what he wants to do with the situation he’s been presented with. He’s definitely trying his best to figure out what exactly his feelings toward Onodera are, whether it’s actual romantic interest or perhaps something else. Nice going; +10 romance protag points.

I’m looking forward to the arc. The whole Japanese sweets thing has more or less always been a Raku and Haru thing, so even with Onodera being present in the arc it’ll most likely be a lot of Haru. As you can see, immediately after praising Raku for him taking action to sort out whom he likes between Chitoge and Onodera, I’m going to go full hypocrite and go, “yaaay incoming Haru blushes.” I’m pretty ready.

A note for the chapter: Nerikiri is very much a representative Japanese sweet, made from gyuhi, which is kind of a softer form of mochi, and a sweet white bean paste. The main allure comes from it being molded into intricate and lovely shapes after being prepared. It’s just so typical for the Japanese to meld beauty of form with beauty of function, in this case the function being taste. I personally find it difficult to bring myself to eat things that’re prepared so carefully, but at its core I realize that it’s food first and foremost, and thus true enjoyment comes from consumption.

Now that we’re done talking about the chapter, I want to address a few things that’ve happened recently on the Nisekoi subreddit. I’m not an active member of that community, but I certainly keep tabs on it. In a nutshell, what happened was Irru wanted to exercise his authority as a mod of the subreddit to swiftly remove all low quality [read: awful quality] Nisekoi fastscans, in order to prevent manga hosting sites from taking the low quality chapters as opposed to the high quality ones.

I said before in my overly melodramatic “Goodbye to Nisekoi” post that while I do have opinions about the whole fastscans versus quality scans debacle, I wouldn’t say much about it, as I expect people wouldn’t want to read it. I expect this is still the case. I’m not someone that overly cares about the things that others do, so normally this wouldn’t be much of a problem. I consider my work on Nise to be just as much a personal satiation and progression as I do a service for others who are fans of the series. But this means that I definitely wish for readers of the series to be able to experience it in the best way possible, short of reading the original Japanese, and I unabashedly believe that the best way possible is reading our scanlation, at least out of the options available. Who knows, perhaps someone better’ll come around, but for now I think we’re top dog.

My personal opinion on the subreddit drama is slightly complex. I wholeheartedly agree with Irru that a new reader may be jarred by the sudden less-than-good quality of the scans as they read on a mangahosting site. The situation is a little more annoying than usual, as our HQ scans are only available via downloads and image dumps, which makes the prospect of assembling a collection of high quality chapters, like the reader we had on the RHS site, difficult.

Though I support Irru whenever I can, I think that his methods were, though not unnecessary, a bit too direct. I’m all for trying to solve that problem, but I know that it’s difficult, nigh-impossible, even, to force those fastscans to stop. But I wouldn’t and don’t condemn Irru for what he tried to do. Hell, I might’ve tried to do it myself if I were as invested in the community as he is. I definitely agree with Irru, but unfortunately a heavy-handed approach is never really the way to go when it comes to internet community management. Also those of you saying he did it for his own self-aggrandizement should reconsider what you’re saying and see if it makes sense within the scope of the argument. Even if it were that he has ulterior motives, which I don’t believe he does, it’s still an undeniable problem that those low quality scans are most likely the ones that the most casual of readers, the great majority of readers, will read and base their opinions of the series off of.

I’ve written up all this text, but I can’t say I really have an ideal solution to the situation. The mangahosting sites are always in constant competition,so they’re most likely not going to listen to us. And it’s understandable, as well as unfortunate, but judging by the feedback from the subreddit it seems that at least the vocal majority would much rather prefer speed to quality. There doesn’t seem to be a concrete solution as long as our HQ scans are limited to being so much slower than stuff like the Korean scans.

For closing, I’m just going to say that I definitely believe that the quality of medium through which you experience something is extremely important. It’s something I run into a lot when watching subpar anime subs or visual novel translations. In fact, the English patch for the visual novel I’m reading right now has numerous errors that completely invert the meanings of the lines in the script. The visual novel itself is excellent, but I can’t help but grind my teeth and continue fostering a slowly growing blackness in the pit of my stomach. My example might be something specific to native speakers, but in the end there’s a definite annoyance in experiencing something and knowing for sure that it could be better. I’m sure you would all agree. Even setting visual quality aside, there are often translation details left out in fastscans that taint the experience of those who read it, subtly colouring the reader’s impression of the series in general. A new reader would likely not know that the HQ scans even exist. As someone who enjoys the series and wants others to enjoy it as well, it’s saddening to think about.

Done for now. Wordcount of this post is probably equal to that of the chapter at this point. Keep my comments in mind as you experience “secondhand” media such as manga. I welcome any discussion in the comments.