MMD Passwords are harder to solve, why?

I’ve posted several articles and tutorials on the subject of resolving Japanese passwords and in each case there is a notice stating:

DO NOT POST REQUESTS FOR PASSWORD ASSISTANCE

Or words to that effect and very often, despite these notices employing bold, large fonts, they get ignored. Not only that, random strangers have even had the presumption to send password resolution requests to my mailbox.

Well, my usual response is usually a good dose of my flavor of sarcasm; but being a “nice guy”, I sometimes make a cursory attempt to solve the password. But I’ve learnt something in this process: Japanese password hints are getting increasingly harder to resolve.

So, the question that begs to be asked, 10 years after MMD was launched, is how we have all arrived in this situation? After all, when MMD first started, passwords were almost unheard of and there was a true spirit of goodwill and sharing. Nowadays, however, almost all Japanese sourced MMD resources are password protected. What caused this to evolve?

In a nutshell, the answer is that it is: largely our fault.

By us, it means most of us in the non-Japanese speaking MMD community. Where in both the Japanese and the “Overseas” MMDC have almost the same access to the tools needed to create resources for MMD, the bulk of original content is created by the Japanese MMDC. However, instead of developing and cultivating the skill sets needed to create original content, many in the Overseas MMDC has outright “stolen” resources from our associates in the Japanese MMDC. This has not gone unnoticed and we are now all paying the consequences for the actions of the few in our community who behaved badly.

Many content creators in the Japanese MMDC are adults and well trained in technology which may explain the huge discrepancies in the production of new original content. However, that hasn’t prevented individuals on our side of the equation from producing quality original content. For example, there are a lot of excellent motion makers who are non-Japanese and most are in their teens; no small testimony to the actual resourcefulness and capabilities of our younger generations.

The biggest problem is with model editing. Non-Japanese model editors have produced some good model edits; overall, in terms of polished results; less so, perhaps, in terms of functionality. Still, there are many non-Japanese model editors who do play by the rules and have produced some outstanding works. By the same token, we have probably hundreds more who have basically stolen intellectual property, and to compound the problem, claim rights over their products over which, legally, they have zero rights.

Original anthropomorphic MMD models represent a huge investment in time and creative energies. Often times, and I’ve seen this happen on numerous occasions, someone in the Japanese MMDC creates a new anthropomorphic MMD model of a popular anime character and releases it. What do we do over here? Instead of just appreciating the new work in its original release state, model editors almost immediately edit the new work or, even worse, cannibalize it for parts.

How would you feel if you were the original modeler and you see this sort of behaviour towards your work?

This sort of behaviour is almost unknown in the Japanese MMDC. If a Japanese model editor creates a version of an original model in a new dress, for example, they most likely created the new dress from scratch. It’s not that hard to create a new dress, seriously, it is not. This process adds “value” to the original model. It also “honors” the original work.

Instead, what do we do over here?

Chances are that we will “steal” that new dress and put that on another model because we are too lazy to develop the skill to create a new dress. So if you are a Japanese content creator and you see this sort of thing going on, what are you going to do? The answer that they seemed to have found is to create barriers to acquisition of their resources. In other words the implementation of passwords.

Originally, passwords were really simple. Most often it required that the person wishing to download a resource visit another location, most often a demo video page on Nico Nico, watch the video and grab the password embedded in the text description.  This was a nice practice, you get to see the resource in action, help drive up the pageview for the resource and this helps draw more attention to the new resource being offered.

Only problem is this, wherein in the past, the password was generally embedded in the text or just required simple common sense to resolve, nowadays the password is hidden behind riddles that are in a foreign language and usually requires knowledge of that language and culture to resolve. Not to mention, that for most of us, we cannot even type Japanese on our keyboards.

Which leads to one conclusion: those content creators don’t want non-Japanese users to have access to those resources. Honestly, based solely on our past behaviours, I can’t blame them.

I have a big problem with “weeaboos”. Occasionally, I get posts from weeaboos on my pages.They drive me nuts. Usually, weeaboos cannot form coherent sentences and worse, they appropriate terms like “sempai” without fully understanding the meaning behind, and context of use, for those terms.

If you don’t know me and I don’t know you, addressing me as a “sempai”, is totally facetious. When we watch Japanese anime, we do so through the eyes of foreigners. If you are really paying attention to the cultural context behind the behaviours of anime characters you will understand what I am saying here. For example, say in your typical high school anime, first year student characters, do address their senior, fellow students, as sempais; but have you ever noticed that the term is almost never used to address adults such as teachers or shopkeepers and especially, strangers?

My point here being that when we acquire Japanese sourced resources, we need to be paying more attention to their cultural norms and especially the “rules” governing the use of those resources. Wherein their cultural norms may be an unknown for us, their rules are almost always outlined clearly in the included documentation. ie. The readme.txt.

Granted most likely, these are in the Japanese language which in this day and age, is no major hurdle since on most web browsers, GOOGLE Translate or similar is only a click away. Then again, based on my own experiences, many people don’t even bother to read the readme.txt even if they are written in English.

There are also two unwritten "rules" behind any resource freely provided for use with MMD that everyone should be aware of:

Rule 1:
Just because it is free to download and free to use does not make that resource free to do whatever you want to do with it. The Japanese culture is full of nuances and customs which evolve around respect for individual rights and properties, however, despite the cultural differences, which some of us may or may not be aware of, the underlying principles are universal. Specifically, since I probably need to spell it out: Use these resources, respectfully.

Rule 2:
Respect the rights of the content creators. Partly, because they generally have legal rights over their works and partly, because we show true appreciation of their efforts and goodwill by respecting their rights. This also means that you should properly give credit for resources that you do use. Merely stating that the rights to the content you used belongs to others isn’t sufficient. You really do need to acknowledge properly the resources that you’ve used.

It may take 200 plus hours to create an MMD model from scratch, it really doesn’t take that amount of time to add a proper credit line. That credit line, honors the person who made your own work possible, but also help others who may want to use the same resource correctly identify the resource. It is thus, in keeping with the true spirit behind MMD: the free sharing of creations, ideas, concepts and resources across cultures.

As for the current situation with these increasingly hard to resolve Japanese password hints, the bottomline is that there is a lot of anger on that side of the equation with the past behaviours of the Overseas MMDC, so they’re not going to be changing that practice anytime soon. They seem to have become an embedded part of the MMD scene these days. Which is very sad, but understandable. Bad behaviours do have their consequences which unfortunately, even affects those of us who are innocent of those behaviours.

Kind of sad really, but “deal with it”.