Kengan Asura chapter 236 (Manga)
January 8th, 2019
2661-HIT COMBO!
Well, at least one main character got the happy ending he deserved. As for the other, good night sweet prince, and as for all the other characters, we’ll see you in the sequel. And… that… is… a… WRAP! Four months of daily releases are finally over in this huge milestone for HnG! Now, if you’ll indulge me for a minute, I’d like to give my closing thoughts.
I’m sure that there are a lot of people who were brought to this page by Kengan, and a lot of you who have been fans for a while, but to all reading here, I’d like to talk about translating and what it means to me. To me, translating is all about sharing. I’ve always been someone who loves to share things. If I read a good book, I have the urge to get others to read it. If I watch a good movie, I want to watch it with my friends. I send my friends and family links to funny videos and memes that make me laugh. The more meaningful something is to me, or the more emotions I feel from it, the more I want other people to experience the same thing for themselves. These shared experiences have always been one of the ways I connect with people. So when I got into anime, and started watching series that didn’t have fansubs, I wanted to share them with my friends. The problem was that the friends I most wanted to share them with couldn’t understand Japanese. Language became a barrier to me sharing my experience with them. With that in mind, the way to break down that barrier was translation. So starting with sharing anime with my friends, then eventually joining this group and growing it to where it is today, translation has always been a means to share the experiences of things I love with people who couldn’t otherwise. This is why I don’t translate popular (read: readily available) series, and why I don’t make any profit off of scanlating or fansubbing. To me, sharing manga with people who couldn’t otherwise read it is its own reward.
Fast forward to the spring of 2015. I was browsing Tsutaya, as I do, when I see a bunch of covers with interesting artwork of different colorful characters. I tried to make out the title, memorized it, and then as soon as I got home I searched the internet for this manga titled “Kengan Asura”. To my surprise, not only was it not scanlated, barely anybody was even talking about it. And when I opened up the first volume I got (volume 10), I was floored by an amazing fight between a sumo wrestler and a pro wrestler that just kept taking twists and turns, never once toning down the excitement, and with amazing writing to boot. While I usually stick to older series, I knew I just had to share this series. So I hit up Kazuhiko1412, whom I’d worked with for a long time and who had similar tastes to me, and we started translating it. And it didn’t take long for it to become the most popular series we translated. While I’m used to and content with translating the obscure that’s only enjoyed by a niche audience, one of my greatest joys over the past nearly four years has been looking up various parts of the Internet for people’s reactions to this manga. While I of course appreciated the thanks for the translations, what mattered to me more is that through my translations, I was able to share something I love with you, and connect with you, even if it’s in the most parasocial and superficial manner. And seeing all the reactions especially to yesterday’s chapter just blew me away.
Now this ride is over, and our work is done, so I’d like to thank the people that brought us here. First off, there’s Kazuhiko1412, who helped me start this and fought through health issues and family problems for half of the series. Next, our first redrawers, Aiolia, Dingo07897, and Akromata, whose help was essential in bringing this from a monthly-or-so release to a weekly release, and TA, whom Kazu commissioned to draw that kickass art piece we’ve used as the credits page ever since. Then there’s Jackladd, who approached me midway to check my translations and whom I’ve relied on as a second set of eyes on my scripts ever since. And finally, the group we formed to pull off the absolutely insane daily release schedule for the past four months, unofficially called the Kengan Strike Force: Stray and Tambur on typesetting, the former of which has balanced this with herding cats on the Kengan Discord (which is open again!), and to handle the hair-pullingly difficult task of redrawing, Jackladd brought in Fog, who in turn brought in a team including Toretto, TheShittyWiz, Dixchat, Alisson, and Banana. The simple fact is that I couldn’t have shared this manga with you without the help of all of these fine people, and we’re only here because of them, so be sure to give them a hand!
And lastly, I’d like to have a word to good friend of the site, Ichido Reichan from the Wild Fang Project. Normally this would be where I would do my posturing and my gloating with that Otokojuku screencap of Tazawa giving the finger, and when you made your declaration that you’d snipe the series from us and finish it by the end of the year, a younger and more foolish me might have tried to rally the forces of the Hokuto army to stop you. But seeing how things have gone over the past few months, with how you’ve conducted yourself online with nary a public mention from me on this site until now, while we not only accomplished what you said you would do, but did so without sacrificing quality, without stopping our regular projects until this past week, without asking for money or even checking the state of our donations, there’s honestly nothing that I could’ve done to you that you haven’t already done to yourself. And so, I leave you only with the words of T.S. Eliot, slightly arranged by me:
This is the way the Wild Fang ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper
Now, for the rest of you, thank you so much for all your support and being one of the best fandoms I’ve had the pleasure of being a part of and contributing to. I look forward to seeing you in the sequel, which we do plan to translate (we will not be subbing the anime though), and I hope that you’ll stick around for more anime and manga that I want to share with all of you. But for now, enjoy the epilogue!
______________________________________
Read our About & FAQ tab before the thought of commenting even crosses your mind!
25 Comments | 
Releases | 
Permalink
Posted by SystematicChaos
