It is with great sadness that we bring you this news.

On Thursday, April 29, 2010, Animeigo, the licensor of the Yawara! anime series, announced via twitter that they are unable to license episodes 41+ of the show.

As you may be aware, Live-eviL began the painstaking task of subtitling this 124 episode classic series back in 2003. We managed to get through 57 episodes before Animeigo announced they had licensed the show in 2006. We were delighted to see it licensed.

In 2008, they (using our fansub scripts as the basis of their translation) released the excellent DVD box set of episodes 1-40. We were very supportive of this release and delighted to be able to purchase a legal version of Yawara.

Then sadly, in late April 2010, they announced they will not be able to bring us episodes 41+ of the show. We appreciate Animeigo’s efforts and we encourage any R1 companies to try and do a license rescue. We would even be delighted to share our work with you.

Live-eviL has always been a group that respects and supports legal English releases of shows we subtitle. At times this has annoyed fans when we are unable to complete shows due to licensing (Condor Hero, Death Note, YUA!, NANA, countless others), but that’s not what fansubbing is all about.

Though we lost four years of subtitling time where we very likely would have completed the entire series, we harbor no ill feelings towards Animeigo. They tried the best they could and even managed to bring us a third of the series in the most reference-quality form one could ever ask for.

We said this back when we started and we’ll say it again. If you do not buy anime, there will be no anime to buy. Please support the industry.

In the meantime, stay tuned to Live-eviL and Frostii as we pick up the Yawara! fansubbing project where we left off. Keep in mind we work at our own pace and it may be a few years before it is completed. Those who stuck with us for 5.5 years for Creamy Mami can attest that we do finish our projects in due time πŸ˜‰

Get the DVD set for 1-40 here ($89.98 USD). You may download the torrent for episodes 41-58 here. 58 has never before been released to the public.

I also just noticed we had a typo in the 2nd OP subtitles! Silly how no one ever noticed that (daiisukiki). We’ll make sure that gets fixed going forward.