How To Be A Criminal At Thirteen by Anonymous

At thirteen, I had a peculiar and, in hindsight, illicit underground job. I was a scanlator. Which is probably the most boring crime ever. If you create comics, especially online, chances are you hate people like me. If you read comics on a sketchy, ad-filled site, chances are you love people like me. My “job” was to take these online comics (normally they would be in Korean or Japanese) and help translate, type over, and publish them onto pirating websites. I obviously don’t condone these actions anymore, hoping to one day become the people I have wronged, but at thirteen it can be hard to care about a person behind the screen. 

When the pandemic hit and I was stuck at home all day, flicking my mouse and chasing the next Zoom link, these comics became a crutch. I’d pull up another window next to my homework and scroll to the moon and back, through which I found a strong admiration towards the slice-of-life genre where plots would follow the average life and glorify the mundane. Maybe I was mourning the normal school life I couldn’t have? Maybe these comics were the only escape from what felt like a blue-screened hell? Or maybe I just enjoy the simplicity of everyday life. Even so, when I found out they were pay-walled, it only took a Google search, and I was quickly opened up to a world of people who dedicated themselves to creating fan-translated, free versions of work on a million shady sites. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intrigued. Since I was Korean on my Mom’s side, most of my knowledge was casual conversational vocabulary, and thus, my passion for slice-of-life and my identity seemed to intersect perfectly on this crime.

At that point not only did I have an essay on the Boston Massacre and a poetry analysis due, but I had also taken on what would be considered multiple jobs in the field. I was a ripper, which meant I brutally snipped pages from the original source and forced them into raws (PNG files). I was a translator, a title that gave me a lot more credit than it should. And finally, I was a cleaner and a typesetter, whiting out text in MS Paint as a blank slate to retype the translated text in a suitable font.

So, by using my intricate, beautiful, and unique knowledge of the Korean language, I was able to post what was pretty much illegal cartoon drawings. Looking back, the pirating isn’t so much what scares me, it was just how easy it was. Uploading the work took a mighty effort of clicking two buttons and like that, I was done. My work was on the website, and my lord. The joy I felt when piracy perpetrators on the internet thanked me for uploading a new chapter makes me ashamed to think about it today. However, at that moment, I took pride in dusting off my amateur Korean skills, which otherwise would have been forgotten.

I had to stop during that summer after having a good hour of piracy research. It’s a lot harder to enjoy reading comics now after that past experience, and it’s been a long while since I’ve even thought about this little journey of my life. My actions still haunt me to this day. The number of Whitman students I have seen reading these comics on the same site I used makes me worry that my peers have read the products of my dark history. I guess that’s just the weight I’ll have to bear from being an ultimate lawbreaking delinquent in middle school.