Alright, so I keep a lot of tags on this group as it entails (wait: entailed) some old team mates I knew back when I scanlated in MangaCult, which merged (a couple of times) until it kind of settled down as Sleeping Forest some time ago. When SF started doing fansubbing as well, I was surprised but thought that hey, it was their decision if they wanted to start branching out that much.
Now I’m led to find out how unhappy some members were. A large majority (the whole Air Gear staff I believe) just up and left, forming Kuu scans. I remember back when I was in the scanlation business for Air Gear. Back then, it was either someone in the group did a chapter or we all lost out which just wasn’t a way to work; leading me to get out of the game just before group merges. Sad to see a group fall back that way and hope that Kuu will enjoy a better time at it.
Explanatory post from their site comes here.
Well, anyone that would like to know why we split, this is the post. The joke post I made before somewhat hit on a few points, but this will state them outright.
First, there had been a long history of rabblerousing by one of the Sleeping-Forest leaders periodically. I’m sure many of you guys noticed us claiming we would pick up many projects, and then dropping them soon after? Well, this was done b/c one of the leaders would constantly clamor for more projects, even when his previous ones were not done. Then, he would work on a few chapters here and there, but be gone and MIA for long periods of time. Many times these projects were already being done by other groups (even if it was done slowly), which built up a lot of infamy for Sleeping-Forest, and got a lot of complaints. The leader who would start the problems would not actually ever directly deal with those who complained… that task fell to me or someone else.
We eventually jumped this hurdle, only to run into another. There was a lot of “honorary status” power positions being distributed in IRC channels, which most of the staff did not agree with. One person even did very limited amounts of work, and retained maximum power, allowing him to do what he wished despite not actually participating very much or very effectively with group projects.
After this the group noticed that there was a large surplus of highly inactive members, who would just idle and chat, but never do anything, which would promote other people to become lazy or at least give them the ability to think “Oh well, I can’t finish this, someone else can get it,” when most of the people weren’t able to. B/c of this we changed channels in order to remove many of the inactive members and the leader who did not really participate. This however did not work as expected b/c the same person who clamored for many projects allowed a couple of the people who didn’t do much work (including the leader that was trying to be removed) back in, with full “honorary status” reinstated.
The last straw was when Sleeping-Forest took up Fansubbing. The two leaders response to many complaints against doing fansubbing (most of the group was against this) was “we own sleeping-forest.” We met sometime later that day as a group (about 10 of our 18 person staff) and decided to break off, and do things our way.
That is how Kuu Scans came to be. We are the same people, just a little less burdened.
Good luck to them and may their Air Gear scanlations keep strong. This reminds me, I’m a little behind in Air Gear actually. D:
