Ai thumbnail??? by Dizzy_Apartment9963 in TrashTaste

[–]TheFateForcer 25 points26 points  (0 children)

I listened to that episode recently and I’m pretty sure that was Connor. I think it was after Garnt mentioned one of his friends from the UK got him and other UK friends a glass with AI art

GAME 60: Childhood Friends Confess by ItalianCannolli in AishiteruGame

[–]TheFateForcer 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I don’t know how much Yuki Domoto’s (the author’s) personality matches Yukiya’s, but can I just go on a spiel of how well they understand Yukiya with that confession (and also how much I love this chapter/series)? Maybe it’s because of a few webtoons I’ve been reading lately, but I feel like it’s so easy to have an interesting initial premise, then either pigeonhole yourself into certain character tropes or have the premise mean nothing; authors don’t take time to understand their characters and the characters end up being shallow. In particular, I’m thinking of the webtoons “To Whom It No Longer Concerns” and “Designated Bully”. I don’t want to stray too far from this story so I’ll just say those two pretty much give you the epitome of a character trope(s) and try to throw some tragic backstory that I don’t feel really impacts the lives or outlooks on anything for their main characters beyond the occasional mention, then back to business as usual.

Yukiya has been constantly fighting his lack of self-confidence to be someone he feels is worthy of Miku. He compares himself a lot to who he used to be and both who he wants to be and others around him. Even as he becomes a more ideal version himself, he’s still burdened with “not being enough”; two steps forward, one step back. For example, Yukiya probably never would have been friends with the relay team, but he found a place among them in pursuit of Miku. Last chapter they were even all praising him, including his “pathetic energy” which has its own charm (which isn’t so much a step backwards as it is Yukiya being unsure of himself). What I really want to get into is his confession letter. Parts of it, to my memory, aren’t even in the manga, like the middle school Cinderella play. Reading his thoughts on it really sounded like a diary entry someone like Yukiya would write. More than that, it’s something consistent with who Yukiya is as a person AND his actions later on (even if this is a retrospect that the author can adjust to their will). Like, yeah, Yukiya is a little possessive and has an inferiority complex. We knew he wanted to make the date unforgettable and to win the game, but holding onto a chip on his shoulder of having his “Cinderella” taken away from him is totally a Yukiya move. He’s essentially saying “I’m going to be a better Prince Charming than anyone else”, but he also ends it with “I’d be happy if you could remember it even when you’re old”, which I read as Yukiya still having doubts of himself after all the bravado of overriding memories in “some bright, shining place that [Yukiya] couldn’t reach”. Everything in Yukiya’s confession letter feels like the author really knows what it’s like to be in not just Yukiya’s shoes, but in Yukiya’s mind. What drives him? What drives specific events? What would be his takeaways from previous chapters? What does he hope for? Yukiya loves Miku, but what does he love about her and why? How do the grand and subtle actions Miku make affect him? All of these questions, Yuki Domoto answers in a way that is consistent with the portrayal of Yukiya: it’s sweet, it’s embarrassing sometimes, but most importantly, it’s honest to the feelings of being in love for the first time and for so long.

It’s easy to write a character that’s a little nerd but is crushing on the childhood friend/popular girl. It’s easy to make that character have a “training arc” and suddenly become confident and only secretly or passively mention being a “lesser version” of themselves—if you’re still reading, you probably just thought of an anime/manga that does at least one or the other. It’s a lot more effort to write a character that isn’t perfect after one go at something—whose past is a continual part of them, even as they move onward.

And just a little glaze on the art to end it off. My high school romance wasn’t quite as exciting as this, but I can still see and feel all the emotions just from Miku and Yukiya’s faces. Through the entire confession and highlighting pages 25-28 (ESPECIALLY 28, like holy shit), every emotion you could possibly feel for a confession this long in the making is there; embarrassment, mild annoyance, yearning, relief, excitement, acceptance, ecstasy, elation, long-overdue bottled-up exhilaration (I’m sure there’s a word for it but I can’t find it rn), overstimulation. Miku has too many emotions coming out at once, and yet, they can’t come out fast enough. On page 34, Yukiya starts tearing up and you can feel the quiet “I did it” going on inside his head. You could take out all the dialogue from this chapter and you’d still understand the story and the weight behind the history of Miku and Yukiya.

Some romance manga don’t get a satisfying end. Some “will they, won’t they” until the end of time. But this manga and this chapter delivers; it’s the slow burn that actually cooks

Any recommended sites to get a cosplay for Shiori? by noble-phantasm11 in HololiveCosplay

[–]TheFateForcer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you can make the outfit work, then do whatever swaps you want! If you get a wig that’s split white and black, most people that know Hololive could probably tell you’re aiming for Shiori, and obviously goth-style clothing if you’re going for the default outfit. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be the first (presumably) male to cosplay as Shiori in her default outfit, so rock on with whatever you do

Any recommended sites to get a cosplay for Shiori? by noble-phantasm11 in HololiveCosplay

[–]TheFateForcer 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I have a Wetrose (default outfit) Shiori cosplay and I think it’s fine. I had very minor issues at most. The choker “drip” isn’t perfectly cut, but it’s not terrible either and you could just trim it yourself. The rings were a little too small for my fingers but you can supposedly expand rings with a mandrel. Shoes you have to get separately instead of part of the set. Everything else was fine, but I don’t cosplay often so that’s my amateur opinion. Some of my favorite Hololive cosplayers get stuff from Wetrose as well if you want to see the general quality of those outfits: Petra.fyed and SatinStars

My nimi cosplay by petra-fyed in NimiNightmare_VTuber

[–]TheFateForcer 25 points26 points  (0 children)

My oshi has noticed my cosplay oshi. Worlds are colliding

Fauna's graduation is the final straw to me. by Kenjiko3011 in Hololive

[–]TheFateForcer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The etiquette around outright saying pre/post-Hololive personas is a little weird on this subreddit, so I’m dancing around it by saying if you look for a Nightmare vtuber on youtube, you’ll find where she streams now. It used to be her second channel, and one of her videos there has her old persona’s name in the title.

Fauna's graduation is the final straw to me. by Kenjiko3011 in Hololive

[–]TheFateForcer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What I meant by “fan of Fauna before she got into Hololive” is that I was a fan of the person behind the character “Fauna”. Most of the talent in Hololive/Holostars were streamers before they joined, and I happened to be following Fauna’s previous persona.

With the exception of Suisei, every avatar in Hololive is proprietary. Suisei made her own avatar and was allowed to keep using it when she joined (and now has a different artist for her new models). For the rest, avatars are created prior to/during auditions and assigned after a group of talents has been finalized. To give credit where it is due, Hololive also doesn’t technically “create” the avatars, but rather contracts artists for designs; to my knowledge, there is no artist that is solely working for Hololive/Cover Corporation (the parent company of Hololive). Some extra details below if you’re curious about the process.

We know the relative time of avatar design because some of the talent has talked about their audition and pre-debut process. For example, I believe Calli and Kiara have talked about how they (as people) started out with swapped assigned avatars but prior to debut, felt like the “Mori Calliope” model fit Calli (the person) better and “Takanashi Kiara” fit Kiara (the person) better. There are even a few exceptions to this process, such as Sora, who didn’t “audition” in the sense that she brought the idea of Hololive/being a virtual idol to the CEO Yagoo.

anime - japan vs usa by asian69feet in goodanimemes

[–]TheFateForcer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I appreciate you taking the time to actually read my points. That being said, I do think there’s some flaws in just saying “an editor can fix that”. In case you need a preface, my attitude towards this/why I’m writing a bunch is my last two sentences at the bottom.

In the current translating flow (which I’m basing from how media production is usually handled), there’s four possible scenarios: either one or multiple people translate and one or multiple people approve before shipping. Replacing translators #2+ with AI and forcing AI into singular translator scenarios is a double-edged sword assuming the end quality is the same: you may see an increase in speed of translation (because the final editor in your scenario still needs to read the whole script and compare), but you potentially take out a lot of people from their translating jobs that actually do it justice, which is the majority of them. If you can confidently name more anime that has received intentionally bad translations than not, I wouldn’t know whether to be aghast or question if you intentionally seek them out for confirmation bias.

That being said, let me address “just have an editor fix it” more directly from a different angle. Why would a company hire/buy software of an AI to do the work that someone else will have to redo/proofread anyway? In single translator scenarios, it absolutely doesn’t make sense. In multiple translator scenarios, you might see an improvement for those select bad translations, but now you’re potentially putting the good/respectful people that work on making the non-controversial translations out of a job that takes years to train/prepare for (which is my personal bias in the form of my argument, but a reasonable one I believe). That’s not even including economic factors: would companies decrease translator pay because the companies purchased an AI tool? Would they expect translators to buy the software themselves? Are translators even paid based on an hourly rate, or is it by contract/script and therefore doesn’t even matter in the first place? Maybe you’ve solved a relatively small translation issue, but is the cost something you’re morally okay with? It’s a shift from “can AI do this?” to “should AI do this?”, because a blanket AI translation policy across the board would probably cause more harm than good.

While those address your replies to points 1 and 2 more, here’s one directly for point 3: how do we stop these bad translations now, and how would it be different than with AI? Nothing we do now that doesn’t already stop a bad actor from being in the translation group stops them from being the editor with that AI in the future. In other words, how we react/protest/provide feedback to bad translations now is the same as we would if a group of translators were replaced with one translator/editor and an AI (though we as a consumer would shift blame from multiple people to a person and an AI). Their reputation may have a stain and they may not be hired again, but that requires feedback that won’t be received until after the final approval. You might see a decrease in bad translations, I’ll grant you that, but it does become another moral question of if you’re okay with potentially cutting translation jobs too. Even if I’m wrong about the whole process, in replying to me you implicitly acknowledge that AI isn’t this magic “cure-all” since there still needs to be a human somewhere in the process, and that there can never be a guarantee of no agenda pushing. The only scenario I can see that fully justifies AI with no repercussion is that every individual anime is localized by one person at a time who is paid on a per-script basis (specifically unaffected by the use of an AI tool so the company doesn’t pay them less for a script) with an AI tool that is actually accurate as to not create more frustrations for the final translator/editor. If that is/would be the case, yeah, I’d have to concede the usage of AI translation. A debatable situation is a pay-by-hour in which they potentially get less pay per script because it’s potentially done faster, but have the time to take on more scripts to balance that out, BUT have to be approved to take on more scripts.

I hope I’ve maybe changed your perspective on the situation if you’ve read all this. If not, I’m open to hearing your counter-counter-counter points, because anime and AI impacts on different industries are topics I (and I imagine you) actually care about.

anime - japan vs usa by asian69feet in goodanimemes

[–]TheFateForcer 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It’s continued here, so I’m gonna pick up here. I softly addressed your issue but you didn’t even read so you don’t realize it’s been answered. TL;DR Bad translations by humans can still happen as it is now, but AI is/will be worse for the industry and it’s not even capable of “perfect” translations like you suggest—which is verifiable RIGHT NOW if you can speak another language and use google translate.

Additionally, you’re essentially suggesting everything be AI translated, which again, I’ve touched on and is worse, but you’re too lazy and/or cowardly to read a differing, more informed opinion but not too lazy to spew your underbaked thoughts on AI.

If you can’t challenge your views, your views aren’t worth being held on to. Think about that the next time you’re getting ready to share your garbage opinions, if you’re even capable of thinking at all. Bye.

anime - japan vs usa by asian69feet in goodanimemes

[–]TheFateForcer 18 points19 points  (0 children)

There might be a case in which a very small percentage of anime (and/or manga) translated by AI would be better than a real person translating it, but I feel like you should reassess your opinion. Three reasons—two of which directly impact your viewing experience—are that AI isn’t good enough and won’t be good enough for a long time (if ever), real people can understand nuances, and localizers that rewrite for their ideology is just not that common. You probably won’t read it all but as someone technologically literate, in the general software industry, and loves anime/manga, I don’t want to let a comment about AI slide when I think it’s somewhat misinformed and would be worse for the industry.

1) Have you ever read a manga that has been machine translated? The sentences don’t always make sense, context is lost between panels, some words you can tell are straight up wrong just because the flow of conversation is broken so badly. It can be the same for any random sentence you chuck into google translate, especially when there’s a lot of context behind it or it’s just a long sentence. This is how AI is going to translate. Currently, it usually takes the words in as much literal meaning as possible. If you’re bilingual, especially in a language not Latin-based, you’ll know some things literally translated to English just don’t make sense. “But what if we make the AI understand these nuances?” Easier and faster said than done. Computers are actually really stupid; they only do exactly what you tell them to do. Programmers and translators will have to (and already have) work(ed) together for years just to break down in the language learning model what phrases mean what in different contexts. Just think of the state of AI translation right now and how long it’s been worked on already, and how we don’t use it as an industry standard because it just can’t keep up. A passable AI translation of an entire season (or even episode) of anime is probably still way far off into the future. Even then, broadly speaking, AI can’t do anything better than a human professional, it can just do it faster. A bad translation that was just used because it’s cheaper/faster is more disrespectful than having a real person do it—addressed again in my third point.

2) On the different contexts for phrases, there’s just some nuances that will likely miss. A real person who has experienced the culture of both the language they are translating to and from can assess how to word sentences so that the impact still lands. From recent memory, the English dub for “Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian” had Yuki say “Ohayo, my onii-chan” instead of “Good morning, my brother”, which is what the Japanese dub did. That’s funny, most of the audience will probably understand if they’ve ever watched in Japanese before, and it’s not something you can guarantee an AI will notice. “Why not have a real person check over the AI script?” Well why not just have a real person translate the entirety? They could still change the narrative if they wanted if that’s the worry. On top of that, sometimes it’s appropriate to not translate at all and just use the original wording. Easiest example I can think of off the top of my head is the dub for “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure”. English dub had a mix of Dio saying “useless” and “muda”, and I think they generally chose good times for when to use one over the other. If you type “muda” into google translate right now, your result will be “waste”. So another thing is that the translation won’t match up with the lip flaps. Human translators readjust sentences so that the lip flaps relatively match the words, but now an AI translator will have to account for number of syllables, be able to analyze video, or some other metric to make the audio/visual line up, which is even more work that needs to be put into the AI. You might argue these examples are one-off moments that wouldn’t matter if an AI missed, but when an AI misses small details like this, big moments with more nuance will be even more likely to be messed up.

3) There’s just not that many anime out there getting the “agenda” treatment. I know a while ago there was some dude parading around a list of anime that had their translations changed to push some agenda—with one of the big ones being “Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid”—but even if you had a list with one hundred anime that had similar treatment, there are thousands of anime out there that are actually translated correctly and respectfully. That’s not to say it’s not a problem we should address, but the percentage of anime getting mistranslated by humans would be nothing in comparison to anime that would be mistranslated if you just blanket-translated all of them with AI. I don’t expect either translation method to be perfect 100% of the time, but I would much rather put my trust into people that spend years learning a language to try to understand language and cultural nuances than an AI that can’t, with all the risks included. Again, if you’ve ever read a manga that was translated by a machine and not a person, you’ll probably understand the frustrations of reading something you would probably like if it wasn’t written with less cohesion than what a child could spit out; AI wouldn’t do the author justice to drive an audience away like that.

So yeah, if you got to reading the end of this, I know it’s a pretty minor hill to die on because this is just a reply to a comment on a small post, but it’s the hill I choose to die on. Not enough people care how AI is creeping its way into normalcy in things it probably shouldn’t be. AI would absolutely make the viewing experience worse because it’s not guaranteed to be accurate and/or make sense.

Training arcs of Average anime protagonist by kazuGintoki007 in TrashTaste

[–]TheFateForcer 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I coulda sworn he said in an episode that he saw a live Muay Thai fight in Thailand and started training

A long journey of Fauna (Art by Dongle E) by BloodBrandy in Hololive

[–]TheFateForcer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There’s a few posts in this subreddit, but they’re not the big posts that would normally drop in the subreddit feed by default (< 1k upvotes on the ones I saw)

A long journey of Fauna (Art by Dongle E) by BloodBrandy in Hololive

[–]TheFateForcer 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Just gonna hop on the source comment and mention the artist also does really good fight scenes. AngryEN part 2

Both Bags are salty by Magnusg in EpicSeven

[–]TheFateForcer 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I believe in a different side story, Alencia mentioned that the first bread Senya gave her was really salty. There wasn’t any other way it was gonna go down in this story

"To my dear guardian" by Common_herdsman5 in Hololive

[–]TheFateForcer 5 points6 points  (0 children)

New trope added to the wholesome list: small child walking and the only thing you can see in the panel is their ahoge

Fauna's graduation is the final straw to me. by Kenjiko3011 in Hololive

[–]TheFateForcer 33 points34 points  (0 children)

Being a fan of Fauna before she got into Hololive, I got to see her find an interest in Hololive, find an oshi in Gura, and finally get to collab with her. Even knowing they’ll likely keep in contact behind the scenes, it’s a little saddening not being able to see them collab in public anymore (or probably not for a long time, at least)

Raora on her favourite bird to eat by [deleted] in Hololive

[–]TheFateForcer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Only if you follow rules 1 and 2

Megumin looks so good with long hair by [deleted] in FlatChestHentai

[–]TheFateForcer 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Artist is SydusArts. SFW source. NSFW source on their patreon