Economies of Anime Fansubbing as Neoliberal Transnationalism

>Rather than straightforwardly enacting ‘anti-mainstream’ difference, this imagined space is potentially one of competitive entrepreneurial practice and fan-branding, suggesting that aspects of fansubbing can be aligned with neoliberalism.

>Testifying to translation’s ‘transformative’ cultifying capacities, anime fansubbers in the West operate in an imagined space between Japan and the United States. A third space of imagination rather than transnational flow per se becomes vital here.

>I will expand on this by considering how anime fansubbers’ labour can be conceptualized as liminal, intersecting ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ economies whilst at the same time performing transnational cult as a neoliberal supplement to industry practices.

>The implication is that we need to consider transnational cult status more significantly in relation to niche and fan distribution, where both can be commercialized and/or linked to ‘mainstream’ values of branding and entrepreneurialism.

tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20403526.2016.1245921?journalCode=rtrc20

Somebody got access to that paper?

Use sci-hub.

Has somebody here read that paper and can translate what he means into English that does not use terms from that field of study.

here.

>Liminal

So he says that fansubbing is removed from it's own culture moving towards the other one. Thereby forming a space of culture between the wo?

Fansubbing has been dead for years anyway.

Hibernating or downsized might be the better term since usually someone will still come out and pick up something that slips though the cracks of the CR/Funi empire/withheld for months by Netflix. Same goes with movie releases.

Wouldn't be an issue if Netflix didn't live in an alternative universe where all their anime was made by them.

Besides that the only thing I can think of that would reliably slip past Crunchymation is Macross.

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>neoliberal
> transnational cult status
>operate in an imagined space
your greentext makes no sense op

He's quoting the abstract.

Dumping paper.

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Unfortunately Netlix is unlikely to change their policy anytime soon since it lines up with their binge watch strategy. So Fansubbing won't completely die until that changes.

Is basically a bunch of technobabble that you usually find within research papers. Unless it is part of your area of study the whole thing kinda ends up looking pretentious gibberish.

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Some interesting quotes

>But anime has also come to possess multiple cult status in the West, falling into different categories of ‘mystical anime’ and mecha
>The first category is often regarded as the least cultist, because it falls outside narrow understandings of cult audiences.
>Mecha has a more edgy cultist reputation, especially because its fandom demographic invites comparisons with that of other cults, such as horror and science fiction.
>There is a danger here of implicitly gendering ‘edgy’ transnational cult anime as supposedly more authentic (for this, read ‘masculinised’ cult film), and dismissing ‘mystical anime’ as ‘the least cultist’ (and for this, of course, read ‘feminized’ and ‘inauthentic’ cult film).
>But such awkward critical moves demonstrate that gendered value systems can remain highly significant in relation to cult cinema that crosses national borders, appearing to discount ‘pink globalization’ (Yano 2013) as insecurely cult, whilst affirming the ‘blue globalization’ of conventionally masculinized cult genres, for example, horror/SF.

>I will consider how anime fansubbing is linked to practices of legitimating and imagining transnational cult, for example, as part of a ‘gift economy’ created by fans for fans, yet also part of a non-resistant fan practice that has historically respected niche, cult-oriented distributors/brands for the work they do in disseminating anime across national borders and cultures. Within these legitimating discourses of transnational cult, fandom is somewhat contradictorily positioned both as outside market forces, and as supporting the specialist, commercial market of cult brands.

>(...) to focus on how these tensions have been intensified in an age of neoliberal cultural reproduction. Here, I will suggest that fansubbing and related downloading activities are becoming increasingly individualized and competitive.

>Developed by other writers tackling anime’s transnational circulations (Napier 2007, 11; Annett 2014, 115, 116), Appadurai’s approach stresses how ‘the work of the imagination … through which local subjectivity is produced and nurtured is a bewildering palimpsest of highly local and highly translocal considerations’ (1996, 198).

>Fan practices linked to cult-cinema-as-transnational are likely to be imagined in specific ways, not just because appreciating anime outside Japan means moving in and out of a distinctive ‘fantasyscape’ (Napier 2007, 11), but also because fans will necessarily hybridize their knowledge of anime as Japanese with their sense of transcultural fan community/identity, and their own ‘national capital’ premised on articulations of ‘Western’ national identities.

>I have previously argued that what the figure of the Japanese otaku radically presents to both fan and academic audiences in the US/UK … is a transcultural homology, and one which … may relate to forces and tensions of late capitalism … [I]t is possible here that US/UK fan cultures may recognise their own cultural devaluation in the figure of the otaku, provoking a transcultural identification. (Hills 2002a, 4)

>This suggests that stereotyped fan/otaku cultures in the West and the East, displaying different nation-based histories of ‘labelling’ (Kam 2015, 192), might nevertheless project commonalities across their cultural differences. This can make transnational cult cinema a positive badge of belonging for fans, cutting across national borders, if not displacing national identity.

>mystical anime
Of course people can't watch anime because it's fun. It has to be mystical or cultist or some edgelord shit like that.

>However, a community of imagination such as that linked to anime fansubbing does not only represent the possibility of transcultural homology.

>As Ian Condry has argued, ‘fansubbers operate in an imagined space between Japan and the United States, where they desire to be a bridge between languages and cultures’ (2010, 207).

>This ‘in-between tension’ can be generative as well as identificatory, producing what Cathy Sell has termed an ‘interculture’ (2011, 106) with its own distinctions and identities, rather than merely exoticizing Japan or learning about Japanese culture and history.

>Relatedly, Anne Allison also refers to US fans of anime as exhibiting ‘a new kind of global imagination’ (2006, 275) where ‘Japanese cool’ connotes an ‘utter sense of difference’ (2006) from US popular culture and yet codes a ‘sense of displacement enjoined by the postindustrial condition of travel, nomadicism, and flux – generated and signified here by somewhere … within the orbit of the globally familiar’.

>The legitimation of anime fansubbing proceeds in several ways: as a form of fannish ‘textual productivity’ (Fiske 1992, 37) it is typically legitimated via discourses of the ‘gift economy’.

>This imagines transnational cult – in the guise of fan communities – as operating outside market forces, and even as opposed to capitalist systems of exchange value. After all, gift economies are networks of obligation and reciprocity rather than commodity-based social systems (Booth 2010, 24).

>Fansubbing is thus said to serve fans as a not-for-profit activity, i.e. creating a social good which can be shared within the community: The gifts that fans exchange … require skill and effort to make … But the items exchanged have no value outside their fannish context. … The gifts have value within the fannish economy in that they are designed to create and cement a social structure, but … are not meaningful outside their context. (Hellekson 2009, 114, 115)

>The kinds of subtitling carried out by anime fans have differed, historically and generally, from what Abé Mark Nornes calls the ‘mainstream translation industry’ (2007, 182).

>Nornes argues that ‘mainstream’ translation aims for mass-market appeal in the target culture by minimizing cultural difference and using as many localizing idioms as possible.

>By contrast, anime fansubbing frequently preserves a sense of Japanese culture and language use, often including notes and explanations of material that may be difficult to translate.

>For Nornes, this positions fansubbing as an ‘abusive’ mode of subtitling (2007, 182) – highlighting the way that such subtitling disrupts any frictionless consumption of the text.

>Official subtitles for transnationally released films can form part of cultifying responses when they are unintentionally amusing via incompetence (Dwyer 2014, 59); such subtitling practices form part of the ‘badfilm’ phenomenon.

>But fansubbing participates in the scalar concept of cult cinema not in a ‘strong’ sense of exhibiting trashy tendencies (Hunter 2013, 27), but rather as part of the cultist’s ‘explosive’ interest in paratextuality (Mathijs and Sexton 2011, 23).

>Fansubbing can also be legitimated via the subbing/dubbing binary.

>Dubbing has frequently been viewed as a more mass-market-oriented and less cerebral practice; it is supposedly aimed at dematerializing cultural difference and smoothly repositioning a text within the target culture (Cubbison 2005, 46), though it too can form part of a cultifying reception when it is viewed as absurdist, incompetently ‘bad’ or trashy.

>As Tessa Dwyer points out, in ‘the Anglo-American context, dubbing and subtitling carry specific lowbrow/ highbrow associations that are regularly exploited in order to … shape patterns of reception’ (2014, 48), and fansubbing – even or especially when it is ‘abusive’ and self-reflexive – participates agentively in the ‘highbrow’ or aesthetically elevating status of subtitles.

>In this sense, fansubs are more than just a way of making anime accessible to English-reading fans, and more than just a transcultural conduit. They also participate in the paratextual aestheticization of anime which has been present since the earliest moments of anime’s cultification in the UK and US.

>At the same time, fansubbers who include explanations of Japanese terms and cultural meanings are also able to display their particular expertise, legitimating such fansubbing – and related fan status – through performative displays of educational, cultural or even ‘national’ capital.

>taking over 100h and costing around $4000 to fansub a video in 1986
You would have to be a true anime fan to put up that kind of money and time just for a single video.

>Although anime fansubbing works as part of the legitimating, anti-mainstreaming discourses surrounding these versions of transnational cult cinema, it does not entirely exceed or evade market forces.

>In Cult Cinema, Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton argue that the cross-cultural exchange of Asian cult cannot be measured simply in terms of … degrees of misrepresentation [of Asian cultures]. On the contrary, any surplus generated in its receptions (through fetishism, curiosity …) falls well outside the scales of measurement for traditional cultural … exchanges. (2011, 121)

>This divorces cult cinema, in its transnational circulations, from conventional cultural trades, making it not about the formal economy, or capitalist enumerations of sales/market size, and instead rendering cult as pure ‘surplus’. Cult is romanticized as that which transcends capital, just as cultifying anime fansubbers are said to be creating gifts for fandom rather than engaging in capitalist exchange.

so what the fuck is the point of this paper

something about fansubbing being anti-communist or something?

>Ian Condry theorizes the international success of Japanese popular culture as a matter of ‘dark energy’, i.e. the ‘flows that precede and follow moments of commodification … Dark energy evokes the larger, flowing system, not just the element that can be packaged and sold’ (2013, 164).

>Dark energy will not be perceived if industrial activities alone are treated as the source of brand value; Condry argues that fans have contributed vital ‘collaborative creativity’ to anime’s transnational meanings and commercial success stories.

>For Condry, far from anime’s transnational cult fandom being securely divorced from capitalist economics and cultural trades, it ultimately ‘makes more sense to speak of this hybrid market as the market’ (2013, 183): dark energy may precede and follow commodification, but it remains part of the overall system, and is not necessarily anti-mainstream or anti-commercial.

>Fandom and industry interact in an ongoing dialectic, making it difficult to imagine and legitimate cult status as something marked by ‘subcultural ideology’ if this is taken to meaningfully set it apart from neoliberalism’s culturally mainstreamed ‘common sense’.

>Indeed, Condry remarks that ‘I was initially drawn to fansubs because they seemed to challenge the principles of neoliberalism, that is, ideology and institutions aimed at supporting free markets … but they are not as antimarket as I had originally thought’ (2010, 198, 199).

>Specifically, Condry notes the core contradiction in the politics of fansubbing: fansubbing is piracy that defers to market principles. … [A]lthough fans feel little compunction about breaking copyright law, they … tend to maintain a deference to ideas of promoting markets, at least up to a point … But there is no way to compare the market as it stands now with an imagined market … without fansubs. (2010, 195)

Holy fucking shit I want to find and murder whoever wrote this paper. How do you even write a paper on so simple a topic in such a purposefully cryptic and pretentious way.

Is this the work of a liberal arts major?

No one knows since it's not written in common language and terms are never defined.

>This market ‘deference’ involves the ‘rule’ that fansubbers should discontinue their work when an official release occurs, therefore avoiding direct competition with the industry.

>And as Virginia Crisp has argued, this ‘impetus to see a separation’ between fan and industrial practices ‘is linked to a neoliberal doctrine that requires that individuals be marked as authors for marketing purposes and publishers/distributors … [be] designated as owners for intellectual property reasons’ (2015, 179).

>Although authorship may in fact be linked to a range of ideologies (including radical activism), Crisp argues that it is its discursive and legal policing, in line with marketing and intellectual property rights, which demarcates neoliberal author-isation.

>Imagining anime fansubbers, via this fan/industry separation, as detached from commercialization in turn enables them to be legitimated as anti-mainstream knowledge communities that close ‘the access gap’ created by market failure – i.e. when commercial decisions are taken not to translate materials if the market is deemed too small and costs are presumed to be prohibitive (Lee 2011, 1136, 1137).

>But such a cleavage of fan/industry also maintains the neoliberal ‘common sense’ that the interests of corporate capital should be respected, and that the market should be granted a naturalized primacy. This is a far cry from scholarly views of ‘transgressive’ cult practice, and is closer in character to what Mette Hjort terms ‘opportunistic transnationalism’ which ‘involves giving priority to economic issues’ (2010, 19).

>By contrast, anime fansubbing frequently preserves a sense of Japanese culture and language use, often including notes and explanations of material that may be difficult to translate.
Has the guy seen translations within the past 5+ years? TL notes are mostly dead and the Commie/gg narrative or being quite liberal is much more prevalent.

>in the next section I will consider how fansubbing’s ‘core contradiction’ has become increasingly visible via the monetization of fansubbing groups and the rise in ‘informal brands’ of fansubbers.

>Intensifications of this contradictory position have been linked to generational differences between fansubbers as well as to the emergence of ‘speedsubs’, with fansubbing becoming a competitive, individualized and entrepreneurially marketized practice in some quarters.

>This development hinges not only on the ‘common sense’, transnational circulation of neoliberalism, but also on the fact that cult status is not essentially opposed to commercialism, instead dividing this into ‘bad’ corporate capitalism and ‘good’ niche-cult capitalism which draws on and incorporates fan cultural capital.

>I will thus suggest that transnational cult, in the form of anime fansubbing, is best understood as a series of engagements between formal and informal economies (Lobato and Thomas 2015).

Manga translations still overwhemingly follow that formula.

That was talking about anime fansubbing though.

Knowing this guy he could literally be using 60s movies as his source

>Denison’s reading of developments in anime fansubbing similarly emphasizes how sectors of fandom can now choose between groups of fansubbers who have effectively begun to brand their practices (2011b, 456).

>Fansubbers have adopted group monikers, and fans impressed by their quality of work (or speed of release) follow specific fansubbing groups. Fansubs have thus become ‘organized around the notion of collective authorship as a means of garnering subcultural brand-like capital’, where ‘fansubbing groups fulfil a branding function not unlike corporate brands’ (2011b).

>Denison goes on to argue that fan subtitling groups act as brands of fandom in which personal tastes and engagements with the text are foregrounded through the choices fan viewers make, and the discussions they have about which group produces the ‘best’ fansubs. … [I]n addition to effectively branding their work, fansubbing groups are now increasingly operating in a competitive, rather than mutually supportive or educative environment. (2011b, 456, 457)

>Denison discusses multiple brands of fandom such as Rumbel and Dattebayo, arguing that such practices are not merely ‘brand-like’: in effect, they become a version of transnational cult branding, albeit one generated by prosumer-fans and consumed by fellow fans.

>Pirates and fansubbers alike can develop these situated neoliberal brand identities. This emergent phenomenon ‘involving informal regulation of an informal brand … gives us a sense of the mise-en-abyme quality of contemporary brand relations’ (Lobato and Thomas 2015, 154).

holy shit something written in english

>Pirates and fansubbers alike can develop these situated neoliberal brand identities.

nevermind

>Writing of fansubbing in a slightly different context – focusing on Chinese fansubbers subjected to governmental restrictions – Kelly Hu (2012, 2014) similarly observes how ‘neoliberal work ethics’ can operate within and between fansubbing groups.

>Such interaction between formal/informal economies means that cult fan activities voluntarily come to resemble commercial enterprises: donations may be sought, for example, as informal fan-brands begin to self-commodify fannish value systems.

>Although requesting donations certainly does not characterize formal economies, this nevertheless transgresses fannish authenticity by recognizing the potential monetization of fans’ relationships to fansubbing groups.

>Sandra Annett identifies an instance of this formal-informal intersection in her analysis of anime fandom, discussing how specific amateur fan-producers’ work had ‘been at least partly professionalized and “monetized” and thus more prone to form “communities of consumers” than “communities of imagination”’ (2014, 162).

>Annett’s study pinpoints how social media and informal distribution have reconfigured US/European fans’ experiences of anime. She quotes a 28-year-old American fan: ‘I did feel a strong sense of community back when anime was hard to get ... Now, ... you can steal just about anything on the internet ... [and] I feel a bit alienated’ (2014, 170).

>Additionally drawing on statements from other fan respondents, this suggests for Annett ‘a sensation of digital disconnect, born from changes in the ways fans form (or fail to form) interpersonal relations and access (or “steal”) animation on the Internet’ (2014, 170).

>The neoliberal framing of such fan practices, it is argued, corrodes fans’ sense of community – i.e. sections of fandom simply take what they want from fansubbing ‘informal brands’ rather than contributing to community-building, resulting in a centre-periphery model of online fan communities (Denison 2015a, 64).

Some are like the neoliberalism thing is here though it is defined in the stiff way research papers usually do.

That's why they used Amigas in the stone age era of anime fansubbing. All you need is a genlock, and the Amiga video hardware was designed to support it.

You can't use liberal arts major as an insult when the topic is language.

>These forces also imply that in the transcultural world of anime fandom the boundaries between official culture and the anime subculture are perhaps more permeable than those erected by other subcultures.

>In the case of anime fan subbing, the linguistic and technical skills displayed potentially have wider applicability, and fans who consume these texts see them as an entrance into a world larger than that of the anime community. … Dattebayo, for example, used the knowledge honed via fan subbing to enter the professional world. (Schules 2014, 4.14)

>Douglas Schules argues that the subcultural capital performed within anime fansubbing hinges not only on fan knowledge of anime, but also on cultural/linguistic expertise in relation to Japanese (Napier 2000, 254) and technical expertise in relation to subtitling software.

>As this transcultural form of subcultural capital can be ‘disaggregated’ (Bennett et al. 2010, 28) into fractions of technical, cultural and national capitals, ‘the reality is that few people possess proficiency with all aspects of the process, making it more efficient to mimic the group workflow of industry’ within contemporary fansubbing practices (Schules 2014, 2.5), especially when speed is of the essence.

>Such permeability of subcultural and cultural capital – mediated here via transcultural issues of language translation – can hence be aligned with liminality between formal and informal economies (Lobato and Thomas 2015, 23). The discursive separation of ‘gift’ and ‘capitalist’ economy becomes far more difficult to sustain in this case.

>In recognition of the fact that fan groups may well now auto-commodify their practices, behaving as neoliberal entrepreneurs, Karen Hellekson has recently suggested that ‘[a]ttempts to monetize fan labor must grow organically from within the community to be legitimate’.

>fansubbing may be inadvertently anti-capitalist therefore everything having to do with it can be described as "neoliberal"

this guy definitely graduated from berkeley

tl;dr

>In line with this, fansubs are discussed as an emblematic intersection of formal and informal economies by Lobato and Thomas: The practice of fansubbing … has grown exponentially in recent years, as open-source subtitle formats like SubRip … proliferate.

>Networks of multilingual volunteers, motivated by the cultural capital that comes with being a successful fansubber, spend hours translating … [material] from one language into another … [D]evelopments in fansub media show an ever more complex integration between the formal and the informal. (2015, 24, 25)

>Such ‘integration’ means that anime’s neoliberal fan entrepreneurs aim not merely to supplement the transnational marketplace by fansubbing anime lacking an official release, but instead enter a cult marketplace already occupied by niche distributors.

>Mapping an emergent body of work on fansubbing, I then argued that liminal discourses of transnational cult cinema have more adequately captured neoliberal intensifications whereby fansubbers have created fan-cultural brands, worked competitively and moved across formal and informal economies.

>Rather than transnational cult representing an exoticization or celebration of cultural difference, in this case cult cinema crossing national/ linguistic borders has become enmeshed in neoliberalism as a transnational value system.

>And instead of displaying a clear ‘subcultural ideology’, anime fansubbing has facilitated a pronounced permeability between subcultural and cultural capital, precisely due to the transcultural competencies required for fans to co-create subtitles.

>To conclude, I have argued for the need to complicate assumptions surrounding cult cinema fandom that position it as anti-commercial (following the lead of work such as Mathijs and Sexton 2011; Crisp 2015), considering how cult fans can align themselves with niche, formal distributors.

>I have also suggested that aspects of transnational cult fandom can be analysed as participating in a neoliberal ‘structure of feeling’, aligning fans with this mainstreamed ‘common sense’, even as they may seek to distance themselves from other discourses of ‘the (national) mainstream’. Anime fansubbing has been imagined by fans and scholars as forming part of an anti-commercial ‘gift economy’, yet this legitimating discourse has co-existed with an ethic of ‘no fansubbing after official release’, which rather than discursively cleaving fandom and the formal economy, positions fans as deferring to the marketplace.

>enmeshed in neoliberalism as a transnational value system.

is this his way of saying "consumers of fansubbed material enjoy the medium"

god damn I hope every liberal arts school burns to the fucking ground

In short, are about how the fansubbing cartel are an example of neoliberalism.

tl;dr someone had an assignment for college and they wrote about anime and manga

>all that jargon and deliberately obtuse language wrapped in needlessly evasive sentence structure.
>long tangents totally unrelated to the thesis that provide nothing other than an excuse to namedrop and pad the reference list.
Yep, it's an american academic paper alright.

For the record, in case this is anyone's first time seeing a liberal arts paper firsthand, the author doesn't really have a point to make and most of what they're saying is self-evident at best and downright stupid bullshit at worst.
They're hiding their point behind convoluted syntax and throwing around fancy-looking words in an attempt to be deliberately misleading --that part is obvious, but the reason they're doing it because their point is simple and uninteresting and would be easy to argue against if you could actually sift through all the bullshit to find it. It's an academic paper with nothing to say that exists for the sole purpose of being an academic paper.

This kind of writing is generally frowned upon, but depending on how lax the institution they're tied to is, things like this can slip by without anyone caring enough to tell them to fuck off.

>in a neoliberal ‘structure of feeling’,
what did he mean by this
>aligning fans with this mainstreamed ‘common sense’,
what did he mean by this
>even as they may seek to distance themselves from other discourses of ‘the (national) mainstream’.
"fansubbers are hipsters"

This shit is what passes exams at liberal arts schools
source: my cousin went to a liberal arts school and every single paper ended up looking like this

technically mathematics and natural sciences are "liberal arts" too.

Isn't it better to say that fansubbing is a failure of capitalism? Since people are doing shit for free and distributing it for free because the free market is doing it wrong/not meeting the needs of the people.

The original "liberal arts" as defined by renaissance thinkers were just humanities, such as philosophy

The paper says that as well, but it also says that within the fansubbing community there are elements of capitalism at work.

and just like real-life capitalism, the market is being played (by Daiz).

There's like 5 remaining groups/organisations still alive in that graph, 6 if we count hiryuu being on life support.

his definition of neoliberalism is retarded and doesn't make any sense nor line up with any dictionary definitions of the word

Daiz is irrelevant, he ran one small group and was a part of a somewhat bigger group that died. The majority of those groups are dead now also.

Of those groups remaining most just take the CR subs and do a quick TLC and then some edits.

And they can barely do that timely.

>and just like real-life capitalism, the market is being played (by Daiz).

daiz wasn't playing anything we just like to blame him for everything crunchyroll has done because he shows up and defends shitty subs

Well yeah, the expectations for undergrad students are very different than they are for actual academics. In undergrad you'll write well over a hundred academic papers, and unless you're some kind of exceptional prodigy, not one of them will ever be published or even come close to being considered for publishing. It's easy to slip by with a 3.0GPA if you just write a thesis, fill the word count and credit your references properly. TAs never, ever actually read your papers, even though they're paid to. They just read the thesis and check your references, then assign you a grade between 60 and 85% based on how closely your opinion of The Great Gatsby aligned to their socio-political views of contemporary gender and race in america

But this right here is different. This is a published paper. It wasn't written for grades; this is a work some publication thought was worthy of being spread to the masses. That'd be genuinely appalling if it wasn't so common.

And for the record, if you submitted this for grades in an undergrad class and your TA actually bothered reading past the introduction, they'd probably have flunked it for failing to prove their thesis.

>But this right here is different. This is a published paper. It wasn't written for grades; this is a work some publication thought was worthy of being spread to the masses. That'd be genuinely appalling if it wasn't so common.

publishing something online where (basically) nobody will see it is a little different than say putting it in the newspaper

Oh fuck. I just went and looked at the last page, and not only was this not a published paper, it was written by a professor.

oh my sweet summer child

liberal arts professors are the most worthless parasites on planet earth

>weeb professor half-assing his tenure requirements by talking about fansub drama
Is he one of us?

Fan sub groups are pretty loosely defined. There's like one permanent member leading each group and the rest are kinda like free agents that "join" 1+ groups. It's not like they have any obligation to the groups they're just doing it for fun or maybe to get hired by CR/Funi

Wait, is it a published paper?

>Matt Hills is a professor of Media and Journalism at the University of Huddersfield, and co-director of Center for Participatory Culture

wtf man was this some shit he threw together for a laugh? He has to know it's incredibly out of date now that the Funiroll duopoly has crushed most of fansubbing out of existence.

No as he still thinks fansubs have TL notes and help describe terms that aren't translatable rather than the current method of to placing in a meme or made up joke.

There's a good mix of groups where basically a bunch of friends do it together for fun, often networking through college interest groups or internet social platforms (MMOs, IRC channels, etc.) and just recruit whatever part of the process they're lacking, and groups where individuals do it as a hobby and basically free-float wherever their help is needed

While translating itself is a pretty solitary activity, the whole process of putting a subtitled release together is pretty social, especially TL checking, QC and editing. It's almost like a social platform all in itself, and there's typically friendship, or at least a good working relationship between people contributing to a project.

Part of the reason that there's so many free-floaters is because groups that begin as a friends thing tend to break up over time as people move on, lose interest or simply don't have the time anymore. The leftovers, after having developed and strengthened their skills from months or even years of weekly releases, just wander around looking for new peergroups and new friends to work with and before long it becomes a whole community where the boundaries between groups basically don't exist.

He seems to specialize in media fandom in general.

Amusingly, he mentions that one of his students' PhD project was "focused on King Arthur as a cultural icon," who wants to bet that it was a Saberfag?

>co-director of Center for Participatory Culture
>Participatory Culture
>deliberately uses exclusionary language
What a guy

It seems to me like he didn't really do much research of his own, given all of the references to other sources. (Incidentally I'm fucking astounded that there are so many prior published academic papers on fansubbing.)

As somebody who's working toward hopefully becoming a professor, half of me is excited to see this shit because if this guy can be a professor then I'm a damn shoe-in, but the other half just realized I'm going to have to read mountains of drivel like this.

There is that rule that 90% of everything is shit. You're probably just looking at that in practice.

>Incidentally I'm fucking astounded that there are so many prior published academic papers on fansubbing
Everything's fair game for academic culture analysts. There's so many of them that pretty much every topic is covered in depths, but to the same degree as this paper right here: which is to say they get most of their facts wrong and don't really have any point to make.

Stuff like this just sifts to the bottom of the academic barrel and is never looked at again except by those in the same circlejerk collecting references for their own paper. It's amazing what scum you find growing under the rock of academia when you go looking.

>it's a leftist episode

Not everything has to be about left and right.

>Fansubs are Dark Energy supporting / creating a market for Anime.
I like that notion.

(Kill off at your own peril.)

I couldn't read that part without thinking it sounded super-chuuni, even if I get what they're trying to say.

I thought fansub anime would be something like anarcho-capitalism.

It's more "here is a physics term I don't actually understand but will pretend is an appropriate analogy". Hardly unusual.

Yeah, I know what it is, but I still can't help but picture some eyepatched loli yelling about "daaaaku enerugi" every time I read it.

You do know about Dark Matter?

>Although dark matter has not been directly observed, its existence and properties are inferred from its gravitational effects such as the motions of visible matter,[3] gravitational lensing, its influence on the universe's large-scale structure, on galaxies, and its effects in the cosmic microwave background.

So basically there is an influence but it is generally not observed in public industry numbers.

>enerugi
I know this is the normal way of saying it, could swear I've heard enaaji used at least somewhere.

You do know that dark energy is not dark matter, and that it's an absolutely terrible analogy either way? Also using technical terms out of context in order to sound cool or smart is pretty chuuni.

>enaaji firutaa

We should all just go out and work construction for half a year instead of writing this self masturbatory horseshit.

BUILD THE WALL N SHIIET