#and whose books i would love to buy! but it's cost-prohibitive on both our ends

[monsterhugger]

if you shame or berate people for pirating things. please consider that being able to buy/watch/read/listen to/play things legitimately is a privilege

not even necessarily a "having the money" privilege but sometimes a "living in the right place" privilege or even a "speaking the language said thing happened to be released in" privilege

#getting into arcade rhythm games and fkmt's manga has convinced me piracy is not only okay but morally correct #i would LOVE to play chunithm or read akagi in the legitimate creator-approved way. unfortunately i live in the US and can't read Japanese #thinking abt that old woman yuri mangaka lamenting that english-speaking readers wouldn't be able to read her manga legitimately #to be clear she was 100% not the asshole she was nice abt it #just tragic all around #not to mention fan translators do awesome work for free but you usually don't get fan translations without what is technically reposting #i collect doujin and like so many american doujin collectors i discovered doujin through pirate sites #and i honestly have mixed feelings about it bc it's all art that was reposted without permission #but i've been able to read fanworks i otherwise just couldn't and i've found artists whose work is incredible #and whose books i would love to buy! but it's cost-prohibitive on both our ends #for an artist to get more than an extremely limited run of books printed and for me to pay for international shipping #a book that sells for under five dollars at a convention can be upwards of 20 dollars to buy and have shipped internationally #in a perfect world artists don't die without money and everyone is more normal about piracy