Update: the Manga Alliance website has been updated and is now somewhat less offensive to other producers of UK manga and people with an appreciation of the beauty of the English language. Let us all be grateful. However, the mascot remains, and so does the link to Anime League as the forums for the venture. The benefits to members also remain unclear. I believe most of the points I make below remain valid, and my opinion on the venture has not changed with these cosmetic changes to the site.
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I have heard people’s opinions; I have done my research and talked to Manga Alliance about what they’re doing. These are my conclusions.
- I will not join the Manga Alliance and advise anyone else against joining.
- The Manga Alliance will not achieve its stated goals of uniting the community or saving manga from the credit crunch.
- Manga Alliance is not about uniting the community or the credit crunch at all. It is about self-aggrandisement and marketing.
I’ll explain how I came to these conclusions below. I apologise this post is quite long, but I want to cover the evidence I have found and explain my reasoning rather than ask you to take my word for it.
Goals
Manga Alliance states its goals on the website:
1 Get beyond the credit crunch.
2 Unite all industries together, from fans to industry alike.
3 Help one another through combined resources and expertise.
4 Expand what we have and build a better future for everybody in and outside of the industry..If one side of the industry grows, so does the collective, it is in this kind of thinking that competition does not exist and unification should continue all the hard work you have all put in from the past..
All quotes will be from the Manga Alliance website unless otherwise stated. Idiosyncratic punctuation theirs. What “unite all industries together, from fans to industry alike” means, I will leave for you to ponder, but the basic point is clear: we should all work together to expand the manga industry in the UK. Sounds good, and actually, I’d be up for that. But how is the Alliance going to achieve this? [click to continue…]
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