#first two episodes got uploaded to youtube with english subtitles a week ago making me believe in a better world again

[curejunereblogs]

*stands on one knee* would you commit acts of thievery with me

[shameforskam]

exactly a year ago today (oct 30th) was the day i first found skam

im kinda surprised i remember it, i was scrolling through tumblr and saw a gifset with four couples in it all from different shows, all of which i recognized except one, it was a gif from hjernen er alene (of course) and the op had tagged skam so i immediately googled it which at this point in the fandom… didn’t get me very far, i found the skam page and nrk tv which had the shittiest google translate ever and really nothing else, i don’t think the wikipedia article even exist yet (at least on the english wiki), but it gave me the basics: skam was norwegian, in its third season, and it had no official english subtitles yay!

while randomly searching for a translated version of the episodes (i’d found the srt files but i wasn’t sure how to use them yet) i found a youtube channel that was uploading only the isak and even storyline (so also missing a lot from s3) with english subs. i remember avoiding it for a bit because i wanted to start from s1 if i was gonna start at all but upon finding no other translated videos i wound up back there and figured i’d see if it was worth going to the trouble of figuring out how to watch the rest. i watched all the videos in one go and i knew i’d found something i was going to fall in love with, i remember particularly loving bånder and the call your girlfriend scene and not having any idea who the girl with the suitcase was. i needed the backstory on these characters asap. i went back to tumblr and found a post suggesting an extension i could use to overlay the srt files on the episodes, so that's what i did for the next week. that was super fun because anytime i had to pause the show i had to pause both the program playing the subs and the video and keeping them synced up was such a joy lmao. but it was worth it. i loved this strange niche show with such beautiful characters and such rich storylines and dialogue and i felt so excited by what i’d found 

as i was catching up on s1 and s2 i was figuring out how to follow along with s3, the format of skam has always been the thing that intrigued me the most and there’s no way to describe exactly what following the story in real time feels like, but you all know that. i watched the next two clips uploaded on the youtube channel but it got taken down on nov 1st. i consider pause to be the first clip i watched in real time. that was when i’d started getting the translated clips from shametv and getting the texts and everything as well on tumblr. that was the first clip i remember seeing had dropped and known i’d need to wait a few hours for subs. i remember i’d just got settled into how the process was working when the show went on hiatus

i’d been all over the skam tag and stalking the fandom every day, loving everyone talking and all the theories (some just hilariously wrong). i have the first post i ever reblogged about skam [x] (a great one) and the first reaction post i ever made [x] i remember being so sad just trying to process the incredible relationship and show i’d just found out about ending in a heartbreaking moment and then leaving me while trump won the election, it was too much devastation for one week! during all this i was in my first semester of college, living with 3 roommates who are now my best friends. i don’t remember talking about skam to them too much to begin with (they’ll probably say different) but one of my roommates also found out about it on tumblr and i showed her how i watched the first seasons. skam came back and on nov 15th we were all out to eat when ingen lever lykkelig alle sine dager dropped. it was exciting every time a clipped dropped but this one was special because we were at dinner and i told my one roommate there was a new clip and we translated the title word for word on a napkin while our other roommates were like ‘what is happening??’ and the title was sad! and i didn’t want sad! and i spent the next few hours trying to avoid thinking about what it could mean and running around the city with my friends and hoping the translation would be up when i got home 

that was the night i created this blog. it started simply as a place to put all the posts i wanted to save and to write down my thoughts so i wouldn’t talk my roommates’ ears off. that was the night i committed to actually being involved in the fandom, something i hadn’t done in a few years and not close to the same extent. but skam was special, still is special, it’s the reason i’ve talked to so many people from all around the world now. i never thought that this blog would get followers or that i’d make posts that people would find interesting or that i’d learn to make gifs or that i’d have any influence on the fandom at all. it’s the weirdest thing stumbling on my posts linked to on twitter or used in discussions on reddit when i’m looking through the parts of the fandom i don’t regularly interact with. there’s a lot of aspects about being heavily involved in and up to date with a fandom that i’m still grappling with, and there’re the aspects i hope i never get use to, but i’ve found so much more joy in this show and with this fandom that i would always choose to be a part of it. i don’t know how long i’ll stay, i don’t know if i’ll eventually archive this blog but i’ll be here until my interest with skam fades, until there are no remakes to critique, until i lose track of the cast, until there’s no one left translating and nothing to talk about but i don’t see any of that happening soon

i’ve loved this show for the last year. even with it’s flaws at the root of it all i still love it. i love what i’ve learned from the show and from the fans, i love that the show made me believe in where i want to go. i’m in college studying film and watching skam during that first semester made me 100% sure this was what i wanted to be doing with my life, making media people could believe in, something that touched their soul and made them think, something new and inventive, something people could find themselves in and fall in love with, something beautiful, and that’s really why i’ll always be grateful for this little show, i’ll always be grateful for the people that translated it and the people that continue to translate, to everyone that made me realize something i never would have and think about something in a brand new way, to anyone that’s sent me questions and enjoyed hearing my thoughts, to everyone that made me laugh with some ridiculous post, to everyone that sent me comforting words when i asked, and to everyone that created content that made me love skam even more, it’s been a great year 💙💙💙

[yeonchi]

Sea Princesses: A Cartoon Dying From Copyright (500th Post Special)

There have been a lot of cartoons over the years. Out of all of them, I favour a select few that are dear to me - Fifi and the Flowertots, Roary the Racing Car, Rupert Bear: Follow the Magic - but considering what’s been going on recently, Sea Princesses is a cartoon that deserves to be protected at all costs. So for my 500th post, I’m going to be talking about this very cartoon.

Firstly, what is Sea Princesses, I hear you ask? Well, Sea Princesses is a Spanish-Brazilian-Australian animated series based on the Princesas do Mar books by Brazilian author, Fábio Yabu. It was broadcast in various countries, including Brazil, Latin America and Australia, but not in the US or Japan, so anything you see about Sea Princesses being broadcast on TV Tokyo is fake news.

These are some of the characters in Sea Princesses. As you can see, the characters are princes or princesses who represent the kingdom of a particular sea creature. For example, Polvina in the top-left is the Octopus Princess, Ester second from the bottom-left is the Starfish Princess and Tubarina next to her is the Shark Princess. All the characters have families and they come together to make the Kingdom of Salacia.

Why do I like this cartoon? Well, I like the idea of a royal family guarding over a particular sea creature. While they sometimes come up to Dryland (for various reasons), the first rule of their kingdom is to not be seen by human beings, or as the Salacians call them, “Drylanders”. This is because they fear an inevitable conflict with the Drylanders and understandably, they want to delay it for as long as possible.

Now, while there are some encounters between Salacians and Drylanders in the series, there are no (direct) conflicts between the two groups shown in any of the episodes. In fact, I have a headcanon/fanon storyline where this conflict happens and it may or may not involve elements from certain Kamen Rider series, including Ryuki, Hibiki, Kabuto, Kiva, Amazons and Decade...

For some reason, while the animated series came to Australia, the books were never translated into English. Now, the English dubbed episodes were available on one of the TV catchup services, but by the time I found a way to download the episodes, I was only able to download two of them. I also have two more episodes which I managed to salvage in the past before they got deleted, meaning that I have a total of four dubbed episodes.

Finding dubbed episodes on YouTube was very hard, as there were no DVD releases of the series in English. The closest thing I got to an English version was a Hungarian dub that used the English titles, but that wasn’t good enough. About 2 years ago, I managed to find some raws in the form of a Spanish dub that was broadcast on the Disney Channel in Spain, but I didn’t think I’d need them at the time.

However, earlier this year, a 4chan user began subtitling the episodes into English using the Spanish raws. I was relieved since I could at least watch the series again.

Now, since last year, I have contributed to the Sea Princesses Wikia since it was only a basic shell (vague details about characters) and I thought it could do with a lot of improvements. I watched the episodes on my TV catchup service (before I knew how to download them) and expanded some character pages with some relevant information on their involvement in the episodes. In fact, I made a little list of important episodes to watch so that I could expand a few important articles, but the TV station stopped broadcasting right near the end of the second series, so I haven’t got to do a lot since then. Now that I don’t have a lot of episodes available either online or on my computer, I’m starting to think that my work could go unsubstantiated.

Remember the guy who uploaded the subbed episodes? He only got up to the fourth episode of the first series (he updated weekly) before Endemol Shine Australia (one of the production companies) copyrighted the episodes on YouTube. I think he stopped updating his channel around that time as well, since I wasn’t seeing any new episodes after the fourth week.

As a result of the copyright strikes, nearly all videos related to Sea Princesses (even the ones on Fabio Yabu’s channel) were blocked. I managed to download all the Spanish raws before YouTube could get to them, but a few Season 1 episodes were blocked.

I didn’t lose hope, though. After waiting about without any newly subbed episodes or dubbed episode reuploads, I’m now thinking of starting a one-time sub group for the purpose of subbing the series. I’ll go into more detail about it on another post, but I will need to recruit a fansub team (like translators, timers and the like) and negotiate some protocols for the distribution for the subbed episodes. With that being said, if any of you out there would be interested in helping me with such a project, please feel free to contact me.

Sea Princesses is a one-of-a-kind series that cannot be allowed to go unnoticed. I hope that one day, the series can be preserved so that people can watch it again for years to come.

UPDATE - 12 June 2018: Exactly one year on (ironically), Sea Princesses has been saved. More information in this post.

UPDATE - 12 June 2019: Exactly two years on (ironically), all Sea Princesses episodes are now available. More information in this post.