al|together 2006: Hooray doujin visual novels! Hooray for angry Koreans! Hooray for pretentious Brits! Hooray hypocrisy!

Most of the title is not meant to be taken seriously.

Actually, I almost forgot about this, until someone reminded me about it. Well, I am a placeholder name! Yay!

Anyways, back to the topic.

From the site:

al|together is back for 2006, with a very simple mission:

Love translation. Love stories. Spend a month sharing them together.

So basically, some people take a free doujin visual novel from Japan/Korea/Taiwan (with the full blessings of the creator), translate, localize, debug, and release it to the public in one month in English, if they can. Well, they’ve done a pretty bang-up job so far, though.

For those of you in the fanlocalization visual novel scene, this is a very big event, assuming you hang out at Haeleth’s forums and are ‘friendly’ with the people there. I know about this because I was privy to the birth of the first one. Although you all know of the DORAMA preceeding the event… … …

There’s the whole Wind debacle, and preceeding even the first al|together, the whole insani vs the bloody pirates due to Planetarian. Which pretty much means: What is this new and relatively unknown breed of people trying to prove? That they want to positively contribute to the visual novel scene to the English-speaking community, or are they no better than fansubbers, because of their haughty attitudes?

Seriously, I don’t know. I’ve had more than my fair share of bad brushes with the bad side of insani, and by bloody hell, it isn’t very nice. It’s not that they can’t produce high-quality goods, but… … …from what I’ve heard and experiebced, maybe Haeleth and his band of brothers aren’t all that nice after all.

I really have nothing against Haeleth, gp32, insani, and the crew of al|together and its participants, but… … … as a former member of this community, for their sake, I hope they do improve their attitudes. I’ve had some really nice times with them, but the bad memories left a sour taste in my mouth. I won’t go into details, for I don’t want to open up a whole new can of worms.

If anyone from the Haeleth forums are reading this, well, I really like you guys. Problem is, you act just like fansubebrs do, if not worse. Sure, doing this is a lot longer than your average fansub, and while you may want people to respect youfor what you’ve done, thing is, no one likes being flamed for revealing spoilers (known or otherwise), or acting like you own the place if you are taking part in a community project. In the end, if you do keep up your current attitudes, you’re gonna end up in a worse situation than fansubbers. I wish I really were flaming you, but I’m not. I’m just asking for a little common sense to be applied here. And probably a positive change in attitudes. As a creator myself (not in the game sense, though), I do know the pain of your own work not being recognized and plagarized. It hurts like fucking hell, but that’s the nature of human beings. You can’t change them, so just live with it.

Simply put, if you stop acting like fucking assholes, maybe we’d take notice of you for reasons other than the fucking dorama. Seriously, if you want to generate positive news, you gotta act like you deserve it.

I apologize for being blunt back there. But these people have to learn that not everyone will put up with their elitist attitudes, even if the people are willing to help them. Or maybe gp32 should just read DDD.