#not that piracy of cnovels in Chinese-language spaces isn't a problem either

[hunxi-after-hours]

Hi Hunxi, so with the latest danmei discourse going on, lots of fan translators are locking their translations and won’t provide people additional chapters unless fans prove they bought the book. What’s your opinion of this move?

every day people inform me of new danmei discourse and I sigh and shake my head and mutter 天下本无事，庸人自扰之, but actually, this is a topic that is becoming nearer and dearer to my heart day by day because it has ramifications for art/creative industries as a whole

so here's the thing I've been noticing about media, whether it's novels or webnovels, TV series or music albums, and it's that we want the content for free without paying the creators for their work. this is not an unusual sentiment--and if I'm being honest, it's my default setting--but I think in the explosion of free, accessible media and content on the internet, we forget that the stories and media we come to love still cost their creators time, energy, labor, and money

so let's come at this question sideways from a comparable lens: (US) book publishing, and online piracy of ebooks:

this whole discussion reminds me of this article, and more directly, this piracy stunt that Maggie Stiefvater and her brother pulled for the publication of the fourth book in The Raven Cycle series (which is, incidentally, an absolutely gorgeous quartet, I highly recommend). tl;dr, to prove that ebook piracy had a direct and negative effect on book sales, she and her brother made a dummy copy of the fourth and final book and posted it on all the piracy sites they could find on midnight of the publication day

the effects were immediate and undeniable. when people who had intended on pirating the electronic copy of the book could only find the dummy copy, they caved and bought the print copy. meanwhile, the print run for the book had been halved prior to publication because the sales for the third book in the series had suffered so much from--you guessed it--online ebook piracy. the publisher couldn't justify printing so many copies if the sales numbers didn't support it. you want to guess what happened?

the book sold out.

the book sold out of physical copies, and the publishing house frantically ordered another print run, and sales numbers for the series crept back up, enough for the publishing house to buy her second series (incidentally, the second book came out just a month ago), and all of this goes to show that

pirating an artist's work directly hurts the artist

of course, there is nuance here. there are exceptions, industry-specific concerns, region-specific differences. pirating, say, the latest Star Wars movie isn't going to have the same effect on John Boyega as pirating Maggie Stiefvater's book is going to have on Maggie Stiefvater. but I think this case study is important because 1) self-serving bias would have us believe that it's okay if I nab a free copy of something because I'm just one person, and no one's going to miss one person in something as big and abstract as sales numbers, and 2) we feel entitled to the work of creators, plain and simple as that

the relationship between creator and audience is a complicated one--on one hand, the creator cannot thrive (or indeed, economically benefit) without a robust audience; as a result, creators quite literally depend on their audience. On the other hand, the audience, knowing the power of their consumer/viewership, now feels entitled to make demands upon the creator. write faster. publish sooner. cater the storyline to our preferences. give us what we want.

and this relationship is a dynamic one, a constantly shifting balance, all navigated around the trickiness of creative work

but before I go off on a Pat Rothfuss tangent, I'm getting distracted. let's bring this back to danmei, and the unique situation danmei authors + fan translators face

first of all, let's get this straight: many, if not most fan translations are made without express permission of the author

are we getting that? the authors, the original creators of these danmei works, do not authorize fan translations

(I'm fairly confident that there are some legal shenanigans at play here because of the contracts these authors sign with jjwxc, but let's not get into that at the moment)

so when Anglophone readers read fan translations, functionally, they are reading pirated copies of these novels. there. I said it.

but fan translations give danmei authors access to a greater audience! one might argue. if there were no fan translations, these authors wouldn't get exposure to Anglophone audiences at all!

(using the Anglophone sphere as an example here, not necessarily calling it out specifically; replace it with whatever language you’d like)

and how, pray tell, are Anglophone audiences benefiting the original authors? they don't offer comments or compliments to the author below each new update, they don't upvote their stories in the cutthroat competition of rankings on JJWXC, and I doubt that many people are actually braving the frankly quite terrible UI of the JJWXC website to pay for these books that they read and profess to adore. so like. why should danmei authors care about Anglophone fans, if Anglophone fans barely do anything to support them

why, in the name of sanity, should these authors feel grateful for people reading pirated copies of their work

for the record--I am not trying to condemn or criminalize fan translators. I respect fan translators a great deal, for the absolutely astounding amount of work they do, for their role increasing the accessibility of these texts to international audiences, for their willingness to promote and celebrate works that have yet to reach publishing houses in the international/non-Sinophone sphere. which is why I absolutely support fan translators choosing to lock their translations and hold the ground against online book piracy, and thereby protect their authors as best as they can

and proof of purchase is not an unreasonable ask. there are guides for making accounts and navigating jjwxc even if you don't know a lick of Chinese, and these webnovels are abominably cheap (I think I purchased four titles for $17 USD? which, compared to your average hardcover or trade paperback novel... yeah. quite reasonable)

tl;dr I personally don't think we can or should fault fan translators for locking their translations and asking that readers display proof of purchase. honestly I think we should applaud them? but that's just my take on the latest Danmei Discourse (TM) I suppose

#as someone who does not read fan translations of danmei novels I literally have no horse in the race #but I also think that it's profoundly hypocritical for people to throw a tantrum about... #being asked to do the same thing readers in the original language do? #not that piracy of cnovels in Chinese-language spaces isn't a problem either #but I truly think it's as simple as 'if you like this author then you support them so they can keep writing things you like' #are you the scum of the earth if you choose not to monetarily support the author? also no #but you're definitely not entitled to any moral high ground for demanding that other people accommodate your choices #this is only tangentially-related to this topic but look #if we want better translations in subtitles or in print #we have to prove to these industries that the COST of hiring a professional translator is WORTH the increased quality of the work #I am in fact glaring at Tencent for continuing to exploit fan labor to generate their English subtitles