Postmortem

For the past 2 or so months, there have been only one submission that passed, so it's safe to say that this project has collapsed. I had a feeling that this was inevitable, whether we released 0 volumes or 20 volumes.

Here's an analysis from my point of view on this. It's only from my point of view as the organizer, so it's incomplete.

1. Attrition: Most team members got gradually slower and stopped as the project progressed, leaving without so much as a word. I guess they just felt bored. In the final stages of the project, I was getting more applications than actually submissions. These applicants left after getting rejected a few times, which is understandable.
   
   
2. Difficulty: Pokemon Special is a fairly difficult series to typeset, and typesetting manga itself already has some difficulty.
   
   
3. Raws: The goal of this project was to produce a better quality release than the CY cam releases, so I might have jumped the gun by starting a project on raws that aren't decent by scanlation standards in these past few years.
   
   
4. Management: I had a few problems as well. In hindsight, this project shouldn't be based on a blog. If this was a forum, I could control applications and submissions much more easily. Furthermore, I should have assigned all chapters ahead of time to prevent excessive lag. Lastly, that e-mail submission thing might have been the final nail in the coffin, because submitters couldn't see progress in the project.
   

To be honest, a side goal of this project for me was to see if a reasonably discipline group could take over Pokemon Special, instead of one guy who is now apparently in charge of scanlating Pokemon Special in pretty much every scanlation scene around, even the Chinese. I'll need to reconsider my eventual retirement plan a few years down the line.

Well, I hope that you guys see that being a Puella Mag-er, scanlator is a hard job. I apologize for my own management oversights.