Jojolion | Hi Wa Mata Noboru

Ok, so this month apparently they started doing same-day digital raws for Ultra Jump. So for now here’s a lower-resolution version using the digital raws. We may do a higher quality version later if we’re able. I worked really hard to 3:30AM to get this done in one day so some other group wouldn’t snipe it, but they did anyhow. Since now there’ll be publicly available raws as soon as the magazine goes on sale this is going to be something we’ll have to contend with every month from now on. I’m not sure if I want to continue working on this project anymore now. I’ve spoken on this before but sniping and trying to beat groups by like a couple hours HURTS the groups working hard to do it in high quality every chapter. People tend to read whatever comes out first and it demotivates the whole group working hard to do it well and quickly every time. Especially when they’ve been working years to do it to try to get it done with the best quality possible. A lot of sites only archive whatever comes FIRST even if it’s completely awful and it’s hard to maintain motivating for most groups in the best of times. Then all you end up with is the group that does a crappy job and then often they give up and no one works on the project. Please discourage people from doing this and explain to them why it’s damaging to the community. It’s not just my group, it’s other ones, too. I’ve seen many great groups fall apart because of this. I’m going to make an effort to keep going with this series for now but if our group is having to compete to finish before groups doing it in a few hours, probably not for much longer. I have other things in my life I’d like to spend my time on rather than trying to do several days of work in a few hours once a month.

Me and one other translator wrote more about it here a while back here.

I’d also like to mention that it’s happened to me TWICE THIS WEEK after I’ve been pushing myself super-hard doing this every day on one project or another. And it’s one of many MANY times it’s happened to me in the last few years. It must’ve been at least a dozen times at this point, all for projects I’d worked on for over a year. Recently I’ve been trying to get the rest of 3-Gatsu no Lion done, which has several hundred or more words I’ve been translating every single day because I need to free up time from translating to do other jobs or the series (and others) won’t get released. Sometimes I ended up having to give up projects I’d spent months or years on. Sometimes many hours a day every day for a very long time to overcome every obstacle despite lack of help, people making promises they don’t keep and trying to find people to fill in, or wanting to do a good job and just having to push other things out of the way. And then because I worked that hard the project didn’t fall apart and it was able to keep going, albeit taking a lot longer than originally planned. Almost every time it’s a day I want to sleep or relax, but I can’t because I know if I do then everything will fall behind and everything will fall apart. Either because staff loses motivation or isn’t willing to do the extra worth to catch up. And on top of that, I get people insulting me and telling me it doesn’t matter despite barely understanding the problem or understanding all the time and and passion I put into this sort of thing. Translating and organizing fan projects is a huge amount of work and a huge amount of stress a lot of the time, too. It takes tons of time and dedication purely out of the desire for recognition and wanting to do a good job so fans can enjoy something you enjoy so that they can as well. It requires dealing with people dropping out or any sort of logistical setback sometimes under very strict deadlines or else your project falls apart. And this can happen after you’ve set out to do something and worked on it consistently no matter what setback ended up in your way even if it means lack of sleep or having to divert time from other activities to fill in for jobs that people promised a hundred times they were going to do and never actually did. Largely for fans that don’t care about you at all and only want what you can give them. And it’s something I genuinely enjoy doing and it makes other people happy, and I know lots of fans do care, but it’s problems like these that make it very hard to continue.

I’ve had some of the worst luck I can imagine in that regard. I can’t count how many times somebody I trusted decided to screw the whole group over or lie or break promise after promise. But sometimes I’ve had good luck. I’ve had people who apologize when they can’t work and try to help me out when I’ve had problems. And people who’ve tried to push themselves to do better when they knew they were holding the group back. I’ve even had a few people that worked hard to help lead and I became a better leader or a better translator for it. And a lot of projects I’ve done have gotten finished all the way to the end point.

Though the problem is the stress that comes with this kind of thing makes you have to consider “is it worth it anymore”. Even if you’ve invested years into something you want so badly to see through to its end. And if that happens because people are sniping projects or because you don’t have the time to be making up for lack of help, then it just ends. There’s nothing more to it. Sometimes you drive yourself half-insane trying to fix it alone when it’s something that would realistically take 5 people working together to fix. So I’ll keep going the best I can with this and my other projects, all the ones I’ve got left now I’ve been doing for 4 or more years. But its days like today that make me very frustrated and feel like quitting. And for a lot of fan projects of all sorts, that usually ends up hurting the fans. So please, I know nobody can fix it, but please try to be aware of this sort of thing.

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