we're accepted now, part of the mainstream, or at least a recognizable fringe market.

but still, fansubbing has been, and is still, one of the most profound labors an otaku can undertake for his fellows. the costs to do it properly are astounding, and the expected return on the investment nothing.

and now we become just a part of the mainstream, just another fringe market. consider that, even as trigun and cowboy bebop see release on dvd, so does pokemon —and pokemon is far better known. the steamroller of american culture can overtake even otaku.

and they ruin it sometimes. such things are as frail as butterflies. a touch and they fall to pieces in your hands and you feel soiled, to quote.

i think our position has to be clarified. companies that license anime and distribute it legally should be supported, the argument goes. to an extent, this cannot be denied. however, these same companies should be held to certain minimum standards of translation, image quality, release scheduling. . . there is no point to doing what was done with card captor sakura, stopping distribution of fansubs with release of a (dubbed!) version over a year away.

if a company has a license but does not announce a release date, then let fansubs continue. this is reasonable.

more difficult is the idea of judging a commercial translation. here many otaku face the difficulty of supporting a company that doesn't care (witness ADV's comment on having consistently misspelled sakura's last name in sakura wars.)

to me our goals seem misplaced. i, for one, am tired of trying to make the mainstream notice us, accept us, become us. fansubs have held the community togther as such, united against the misunderstandings of the larger society. no amount of commercial translations is worth losing that.