This is the 12th episode of Ai Yori Aoshi. Here, we learn about Mayu's past, and how she came to know Kaoru. Aoi has now learned about "the kiss" in episode 11. Will Kaoru's and Aoi's relationship end up in turmoil?

After the abomination of AYA 11, it was time to move on. Tyreal gave us the AYA 12 raw. We were determined to beat the competition by a larger timeframe and improve our quality in the process. Yes, we were trying to do the impossible.

We made sure that the problems from the past episode were corrected, such as the styles and editors' notes. The final edit of the script was done in only four, count'em, four days! Another Super Smash Bros. Melee fest was the order of the day.

Tyreal had experimented with a new beta codec at the time called XviD and decided to use that. After numerous problems and several webcam shots of Tyreal's computer, it was done! madgat, a user in #animeforce that appreciated the "fine" work of AYA 11, released this in the newsgroups on behalf of us. From that day forward, he became part of the team and would end up being the dedicated newsgroup poster and raw provider for most of our future releases.

This episode, and 'almost' everything about it, kicked serious ass (at the time). It came out blazingly fast. It blew the competition away due to the careful TLC we applied (although mundane compared to our standards now), and the lasting legacy of this episode proved itself when it was reposted in the newsgroups four months later. Of course, due to the lack of a fat line distro and the reputation factor, the other versions still ended up being the popular pick.

AnimeForce's chatroom grew by about 10-15 people after this release, a good sign that we were being a bit known. We were all happy. Tyreal handed us the AYA 13 raw, and once again, we set out to release our version first and take all of the stupid glory. We started on the 26th of July, and the initial translation and timing was done by August 1st. It looked like yet another release was in the books...

Then it hit us.

Just what the hell were we doing? This wasn't real fansubbing. We were becoming pompous, subbing AYA just to beat out the competition. Ai Yori Aoshi was licensed and we had absolutely no right to continue it just because of public demand. In short, we had become idiotic egosubbers.

We stopped and thought about what we were doing. In fact, we thought about this for a week. We would decide that we would change our policy to do nothing but non-licensed material. We also decided not to compete against other fansub groups because it only causes anger and grief in the end. Eventually we would settle on fansubbing bishoujo game clips because no other group had touched them before. Besides, we all enjoyed the world of bishoujo games. We were going to try to be "true" fansubbers or something.

But back to this story. I had to tell Tyreal up front that we simply couldn't continue doing AYA. After reading loae666's article on egosubbing (no longer available), he decided that he couldn't continue it either. I told the rest of my friends that we needed a break, and they agreed. Two weeks of thinking it over and doing nothing would clean the slate for us.

NNL would have a new beginning...

This encode doesn't work with ANY build of ffdshow because the XviD build was still experimental. If you want to play this, make sure ffdshow is disabled and that it plays with the native XviD codec.

Even though we did a better job, this simply doesn't compare to most of our later releases. Giving it a 4 was generous. Here are some of the minor problems in this episode:

• For the subtitles, people thoughts were italicized, which is a nice thing to do. Unfortunately, we missed italicizing two lines.
  Spelling typo, and it wasn't even English. We put down "Tadiama" instead of "Tadaima".
• One of Kaoru's lines reads, "No, I should apologize". Actually, Kaoru was confirming his previous thought, so it should have read "Yes, I should apologize".
• One of Taeko's key lines reads, "If, by chance, two lovers kissed as a greeting, I wouldn't be able to stand it.". This confused some people, even with the editor's note explaining it. We should have just went the 'dumb' way and put down "If someone kissed me as a greeting, I wouldn't be able to stand it." It would have made much more sense.
• Reikoku's explanation of what a Tanabata and a Tanabota is ended up being completely wrong. Oh well, it's not as if anybody noticed ... ~_^
  We didn't bother to put in Japanese characters for the karaoke.
• In the original end-product that was designated for the IRC release, the audio became out-of-sync with the video. I had to re-encode the prouct with the corrected audio for the newsgroups (CBR 192), while Tyreal re-encoded the audio a different way for the IRC release (VBR). This meant that there were two versions going around. The file-size and CRC listed above is for the newsgroup version, since I have never seen the IRC version propagate outside of #animeforce. Besides, I dont have the IRC version any more.

Some of the typesetting effects that were used in AYA 11 were also used in AYA 12, but for the most part, Tyreal didnt do any addtional typesetting in this episode.