How did you join Team ONIBE and is it possible that I can join in?

I have to confess, I was half-considering answering this with something that a Team ONIBE member suggested:

“Spaghetti, shoukan!” joke aside, I do want to make an effort to address this seriously. I’m always happy to see people who want to contribute to the fandom!

I’m actually one of the original ONIBE members, so I didn’t really have to “join” the team - I was already a part of it when ONIBE was formed. In fact, I used to be the only QCer on the team until we recruited Mega. Other “original” members include @saitou-shuka (Shukamod), Eli Ayase of YouTube (also known as KKEHarasho), @kuuxkat (KuuRin), and Eter (our awesome typesetter who toiled for hours to make our AX2017 call guide a masterpiece). Datenshuu of YouTube, on the other hand, was someone we recruited after we saw the entire January 2016 niconama uploaded with subs and went “HOLY SHIT, HOW DID THEY DO THAT? WHO IS THIS???”, lol.

If you check the About page of the ONIBE website, you can see that we describe ourselves as having “roots in the reddit Love Live community,” originating from “a group of Love Live content translators in the second half of 2016.” I’ll reveal a bit of ONIBE history here: for those of you who are veterans of the /r/LoveLive Discord server, you probably know that about a year ago, there used to be a channel called #translation on the server. That’s pretty much where a lot of the OG members of Team ONIBE come from.

Back when Aqours was starting to get big, there were a few scattered translations here and there, but nothing was really connected. You had translators on Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, Wikia, and so on who just kinda did their own thing. What really brought them together was Discord, specifically the /r/LoveLive server, where everyone could chat on #translation. Then, in the latter half of 2016, there was a certain incident that led to the birth of “ONIBE”.

(By the way, that’s something that I will probably never reveal: the true origin and meaning behind the term “ONIBE”. That’s what really inspired the creation of the team. :3c)

After that, #translation was closed down in favor of creating an actual group. Initially, most of the messages involved creating a to-do list of what hadn’t been translated yet (as there wasn’t too much material back then) and marking down TL claims so that people wouldn’t needlessly waste time working on something that was already being translated. As we started taking on larger projects, like the Aqours Christmas Mini Live and longer seiyuu interviews from magazines, we started working together using specific roles like TL, timing, typesetting, encoding, and QC. ONIBE is still made up of a loose confederation of independent translators for the most part, but we’ve also bonded a lot over collaboration projects like the callbooks and µ’s Final Live.

As for how to join - to be quite honest, there’s no formal application process, because as I mentioned, unlike typical translation groups out there (e.g. manga and fansub groups) we’re more like a network of people with a common goal: to provide high-quality translations to the fandom. When it comes down to it, there are really two ways to join the team, and I can illustrate with the two non-OG members I’ve mentioned above.

(1) Be a content creator who does well enough to get noticed and invited onto the team. Datenshuu is the shining example here, as we saw someone who was pushing out all of these fantastic subbed videos and thought that there would be enormous potential there. It certainly paid off - after we reached out, we were later able to work together to do speedy releases of full-length niconamas.

(2) Ask an ONIBE member. Seriously, that’s it. In the early days of ONIBE, we were actively trying to spread our name around and seeing if we could recruit people for the team. On one of these occasions, Mega asked to join and help out, and ended up as an awesome QCer.

It looks like you’re already doing #2 on the list! :D If you’re serious about joining, feel free to send me a PM and I’ll be happy to respond~