Waar Posts

I've visited ExHentai on a regular basis for several years now, and during my times there's I've discovered and held an interest in hundreds of artists. The recent happenings between Jacob and Exhentai has affected, at most, a mere 1% of all my stuff; so for the most part, what's happened has mostly done nothing to me. And I don't personally care either way. In fact, I save just about everything I really like, so even those that got taken down, I still have.

Be that as it may, you have to be able to look at this from the other side to understand why the majority of the community is in a complete uproar. While there is admittedly a large chunk that are just upset because it means they won't get their free doujins in such an easily accessible way anymore, let's set that group aside and look at the other factors involved that are upsetting people.

First: The markup. Fakku is, for all intents and purposes, a business. The goal of a business, is profit. People get that. What people don't get is why Jacob and co. has the prices of whatever it is they're trying to sell marked up so significantly that it's like you're trying to gouge their wallets. For a large majority of doujinshi that one could buy at an event such as Comiket, the cost for a single work is usually around ¥500-¥750 (that's about $4.90-$7.30 at current exchange rates). Take that same book, and grab it from Fakku's Store and the cost is, on average, around $30 (or about ¥3050). That's practically a 500% markup! Well, it's understandable that some works may be part of an anthology (such as, for example, Wanimagazine, so they would get royalties on applicable titles), and that of course, being a business, Fakku would need to somehow profit off each sale as well, since they're the middleman between the consumer and the artist, but really now. Nearly five-hundred percent? Why so much?


Second: It's redundant. This is the internet; try as hard as you might, you cannot erase things as easily as you may think. Every single work that was taken down, and every single work that has yet to even be released that is on Fakku's hit list, is not going anywhere. They will be available in some form, somewhere, at all times, for free, and it just simply is not something that Fakku can do something about. You've removed series A from website B? Well that's okay, because now there's websites C and D! Oh, you banned series X from website Y? Guess we'll go try out that new website Z that just started up. You get the idea. So the question then becomes why bother? All you do by pursuing this is piss off the masses who in turn, as you've seen, lash back.


Third: Jacob's apparent attitude on the whole issue. In light of recent events he's given off this image that he just doesn't give a flying fuck about the world outside of Fakku. He knows that doing this creates a burden and great inconvenience upon hundreds of thousands of people who were using the Exhentai website. Instead of being empathetic and humble, and saying that he's sorry for the inconveniences that he's causing, but that business is business, he instead does really stupid shit like going to 4chan and purposefully trying to pick fights with people. What did that accomplish? The answer is nothing, unless your goal was to intentionally piss people off, which if it was, then congrats, you definitely succeeded there. If I'm wrong though, then by all means explain it.



There's more that could be done like Jacob and Tenboro both clarifying their sides of the story with proof of involvement or non-involvement (Jacob can claim to not be involved in this, but I can also claim that I've discovered the cure to cancer; doesn't necessarily make it true). Both parties involved need to be more open with the public on what the series of events has been, or shit like this is just going to continue to fester and build up, and it will eventually reach a tipping point where something bad might happen.

Like I said before, this change barely affects me, but it does affect a lot of other people, and if people remain ignorant to both sides of the argument, nothing is going to be solved.