For some inexplicable reason, I managed to find myself rereading old answers I posted on ask.fm, and I got to thinking about my time fansubbing yet again. I’ve more or less explicitly stated somewhere (probably on Twitter) that fansubbing was a pretty positive thing for me; I got to know a bunch of great people, make some good friends, and learn some skills that I hadn’t picked up before (including social skills that are fairly broadly applicable, I think). And yet, something about the whole thing feels incomplete, and I think this incompleteness is what brings me back to thinking about fansubbing so much. I want to walk through how I thought about fansubbing and how those ideas were reflected in my actions, a story I will tell in three parts.
Disclaimer: If you read part of the post, but decide to stop reading before the end, please at least read the “Afterthought” section at the very end.
I can’t for the life of me remember why I started fansubbing in the first place, but I don’t think it matters. I joined the group DameDesuYo (DDY) on (probably) a whim and became fascinated by this new ecosystem that I could be a part of by simply learning how to watch anime carefully (my introductory role was quality control (QC)). I also certainly enjoyed the responsibility associated with working on something that other people consumed. I sought out ways to get more responsibility and moved into positions for which I was undeniably unqualified (i.e. QC recruitment). At the heart of my ambitions within DDY was a desire to be more visible in the scene.
What I believed at the time was probably something like if I were to “move up” within DDY and DDY grew to be a large, productive group, I would be visible through my status in DDY and DDY’s status in the greater fansubbing scene. That belief turned out to be complete unfounded. The ambition for DDY to become a big, influential group was something that a lot of people in the group shared, I think. However, I learned that DDY had made a bad impression in the early days of the group, and that first impression turned out to be very difficult to shake off. Additionally, the ambition of the immature group caused it to recruit more and more immature (first-time) fansubbers and put them on more and more projects, leading to a couple very low-quality releases, like DDY’s Hanamonogatari. Bringing DDY into the status of respected and generally well-liked turned out to be an exercise in futility.
Additionally, internal movement in fansubbing groups (not just DDY) didn’t actually work the way I had imagined. Fansubbing groups have at most a 3-tiered system: a leader, some small group of trusted administrators, and the rest were general staff. For some smaller groups, this turned into basically “leader & friends” (2 tiers), while Commie somehow managed to have an essentially flat structure, with the two figures of authority (RHExcelion and herkz) basically existing on their own islands. The important thing here is that movement into the second tier of any group is essentially impossible. That status is really only given to people present at the inception of a group or those who have been with the group for years and were able to gain the trust and friendship of the people in charge.
In my attempt to qualify myself for “upwards movement” and increased responsibility, I tried to pick up other roles: editing, timing, typesetting, and even encoding. At the time, I did all of those things terribly, but I thought I needed to be able to do everything to be able to be in a position to be responsible for entire projects. I wasn’t strictly speaking wrong about this, but just knowing those things would never have been enough. At some point, I realized I wasn’t progressing, so I sought out other opportunities, and through this I also specialized in one role: typesetting.
The decision to specialize was not (I think) made out of an awareness that being mediocre at everything means you aren’t good at anything. Rather it was probably a pragmatic decision that followed this logic: I wanted to join another group, but to get into a group without somebody to vouch for your ability meant you had to test into a specific role. This test effectively forced you to declare a specialization, and passing the test required me to practice that role specifically in order to reach the minimum level of quality in my work.
The group I was seeking to join, Kaylith, was at the time working on a very typesetting intensive show, Zankyou no Terror, and I was also learning typesetting from a fairly decent typesetter at DDY, aVF. Although I was certainly not good enough at that point to ever typeset a show on my own, I was accepted into the typesetting collaboration for Zankyou no Terror, probably because anybody that could help in any way was welcome. Additionally, the leader of Kaylith, Fyurie, was pretty meticulous and personally ensured the quality of every episode that was released. There was probably some degree to which the group believed inexperienced newcomers could be grown into high-quality staff with the safety net of such a rigorous QC on every release.
With that I had specialized, and my time as a bad/mediocre jack-of-all-trades at DDY was swiftly waning. Over the course of a season of airing anime, I immersed myself in the details of typesetting in Aegisub, and by the end I was a knowledgable (albeit slow) typesetter with a good eye for detail. And with that ability I sought to move into groups where I believed my skills would be put to use. What that meant in practice was that I would join groups via the help of people I knew to meet other people that might be able to propel me into more exclusive, “elite” groups.
After letting my positions in DDY and Saizen (a different group where I did QC) fade, I got into Commie through the help of Jing, who worked on Zankyou no Terror. I then joined scibbles on a project that failed to work out at Commie, joined caffeine (half of the remnants of Kaylith) after Kaylith imploded, joined Hiryuu through some connections with Kaylith, and joined FFF off another recommendation from Jing. After this, I had spent a few seasons doing projects in well-regarded groups (Commie and FFF were both large groups that subbed relatively speaking a lot of shows), and I had in some sense gained the visibility within fansubbing that I had wished for, even if I didn’t realize it. I was approached by the leaders of Underwater, Vivid, and Asenshi, which are all relatively small groups with only seasoned veterans on their staff, to work on projects there. But, in my mind, this wasn’t quite what I wanted.
I don’t think Asenshi was on par with Vivid and Underwater in terms of quality, but the essential point is that all three groups were very exclusive and only possible to get into via personal recruitment.
There are some things about my role, typesetting, that are important to understand. The demand-to-availability ratio for typesetters at this time was higher than it was for any other role besides translators. Typesetting anime is often a non-trivial task that varies in the amount of work from episode to episode. Being able to manage 30-50 sign episodes alone is not easy, and I am still proud when I think of my ability to do this, even as I let my other responsibilities in life slip. Additionally, the bar for “good enough” for typesetting is fairly high, given the tools that people have to work with and the results they are expected to achieve in terms of visual fidelity. As a result, typesetters were fairly rare to begin with, and they burned out fast because they were so in demand.
To put it simply, it is possible, and I still believe that this was actually the case, that I was approached because I was one of maybe two or three people that could realistically have fulfilled the expectations of those groups. The fact that I reached the level of quality that I was a candidate for recruitment is an accomplishment. However, there lingers a hint of doubt whether I was actually good enough or simply the next best option.
Another thing about typesetting is that it doesn’t have the same outward visibility and notoriety that some other roles have. Editors, translators, group leaders, and even skiddiks all have their aliases hailed and cursed on forums, blogs, imageboards, IRC, and Twitter, but typesetters live in obscurity, even when considering the informed fansub consumer. Typesetters are basically only known by other fansubbers and really only hailed and cursed by other typesetters. (Note: this is also probably true for encoders, but I might be wrong.) When I learned typesetting, I learned from the work of a generation of typesetters that had for the most part retreated into some corner of the fansubbing world (ar, unanimated, Eien) or completely retired (Hydra, trichinas). The big exception is KmE, who manages to somehow never fully quit and continues to do good work to this day.
My desire for visibility somehow transformed in to a desire to be etched into the stone wall memorial of great typesetters that existed only in my mind. And realistically, I could only achieve this by having one of the greats declare it, the (non-existant) next generation of typesetters declare it, or declaring it myself. The first never happened explicitly; my work was always good (meeting some standard), but I can’t think of a time somebody told me my typesetting was truly excellent.
Recognition by a new generation of typesetters never could happen because in my time, the amount of people active in the fansubbing scene dwindled substantially. Even if there are new typesetters coming into the scene, they aren’t in the spaces as I am, so they don’t see me and I don’t see them. My generation of typesetters is the last one I know.
And finally, I can’t confidently declare that I am a great, because I still doubt my own ability. I think it is very realistic that I was only as in demand as I was (for a very short period of time) because there were simply so few typesetters active. With nowhere else to go and no compelling new projects to work on, I grew bitter towards my responsibilities and lazy in my work. A gradual realization that I should prioritize things outside of fansubbing in my life (school, research, etc.) brought me to give it up completely and refocus.
With that ends the story of the ambitious, productive typesetter who never managed to shed the mantle of obscurity. A combination of scene-wide trends (the slow decline of fansubbing) and personal decisions (choosing typesetting instead of editing) prevented me, for better or for worse, from ever being seen as larger than life by anybody. The desire that initially drove my motivation to do fansubbing was never realized and brings my thoughts back to fansubbing even today.
This post probably reads like I am extremely negative about my time fansubbing. It also probably conveys the idea that I was a clout digger in the scene, and I worked with people as a way to further my own interests. I still look back on my time fansubbing fondly: I made many excellent friends, and typesetting turned out to be a great creative outlet for me. There is simply something about my time fansubbing that still feels and will always incomplete, and that haunts me when I think back on that time. With respect to “using others,” I want to say that, while I was ambitious, I still generally enjoyed the people I worked with much more than the projects themselves. If I worked with somebody more than once, that means I liked working with them. I would choose to do it again now, if I had time, even if there was nothing for me to gain from it personally. I could count the number of people I worked with that I didn’t like (after leaving DDY) on one hand.