There's an absolutely devastating amount of content being lost or left unfinished. Some series have some fan translations available (though in some of cases, Bilibili's translations were superior). However, around half of these series have never even been attempted by fan translation groups, even before Bilibili started on working them.
China has over 10x the population of Japan, and even if there's much less GL per person written there, there's also very few English fan translation groups working on Chinese content compared to Japanese. It's nobody fault that so much slips through the cracks in comparison, but the reality does suck. It's heartbreaking to see all of this lost content/lost potential content. Even if people preserve what's there (which unfortunately will be probably be subject to takedowns if hosted here or MD, so it can only be on aggregators), I doubt many of these series will ever be finished.
My personal favorite manhua is Baili Jin Among Mortals. Outside Bilibili, there was an old Mangadex translation that went to like... chapter 35 that was decent. These days, it has a really, really mediocre MTL-translation-quality, MS-Paint-paneling-quality fan translation available on aggregators only. I'd guess it was probably being posted to Facebook only (and to be fair to whoever is doing it, Dynasty and Mangadex comments would probably be vicious to the quality of this fan translation).
This is the type of situation a lot of fans are going to be in. The alternatives of nothing and MTL.
Anyway, I'm up to date on all of them, so I'll make a post later with a rough summary of what the situation for every series is (i.e. "is it done? are there any fan translation efforts? where? any official alternatives? where?").
most of these manhua are frankly incomprehensible despite the relatively high quality translations due to very, VERY poor paneling/understanding of sequential art anyway
I'd be more interested in finding out how many of these were adapted from webnovels and getting those licensed
No, most of them are fine, decent even. I have a particularly hard time with bad panel attribution, and I only had any issue with about 2 of their older works. As you noted, the translation quality is typically exceptional. There were a few weird chapters in a couple of the series that had a drastically lower quality. It happened around this time last year (the last time they contemplated a shutdown).
I truly wish I could summarize this shutdown as "oh well, everything was shit anyway; nothing was lost". Unfortunately, even if you think that's true, the alternatives of literally nothing or 'translations' like the Baili Jin one are both awful.
last edited at Jan 30, 2024 4:33PM