The Reasons for Graduations

Every time a H!P graduation is announced, I suddenly find myself surrounded by the same cynicism as the previous umpteen times. What really brought the issue home recently was Ogawa Saki's sudden graduation, and with the recent departure of Takahashi Ai from Morning Musume it has managed to remain somewhat topical. What exactly is the issue? Graduations, and the motives behind them. When Sakichi's graduation was first announced, within moments the fanbase was up in arms. It's moments of huge news like this when I love to check member threads on Hello! Online. To see an otherwise sleepy thread suddenly propelled to having two or three dozen people viewing the page at any given moment. News like this has even broken H!O in the past....

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The Difficulties of Fansubbing: Of Politics and Collaborations

This is something which I never understood before becoming a fansubber and, even as I type this, I'm not sure if you guys will understand it either. That said, it has been an integral part of my experience in this, and I want to write about it. I think I may have already touched on my personal experiences of it in my previous two-part series on fansubbing, so I'll try not to repeat myself. Inter-group Politics I'm going to ignore internal politics as, for the most part, it isn't something I have come across. And what I could tell you of it I already did in the previous entry in this series. But politics between different groups seems to be more rife than one might initially believe. It's something which is very common in anime...

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The Difficulties of Fansubbing: The Process

The simple act of fansubbing can be a long, drawn out process. I've been involved in this hobby since the second half of 2009. I had dabbled a little in it before then, but only a small bit as I subbed performances under the name Berryz Kyuuden Fansubs, and then when I joined Hello!Fansubs' trainee program. But it was from joining ICU-Subs in August 2009 that I really start counting myself as a fansubber. And in this time, I've come to further appreciate just how complex the whole thing is, from the simple task of getting those translations to appear correctly on screen, to the difficulties in working with people you don't know, this is to be a short three or four part series on some of the complexities of the trade, as it were. But,...

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