Announcement: Patreon to be closed, pls read below for details.

EDIT: ALL PAYMENTS FROM THE PAST 90 DAYS HAVE BEEN REFUNDED. For additional questions, pls dm us, otherwise, please read through this announcement!

Hello everyone! K here!

So I've got some more news to share and it's about the patreon itself. After much deliberation and after some personal conversations I've had with close contacts about it, I have decided that the best thing to do right now is to discontinue the patreon until further notice. We have already begun the process of unpublishing the tiers and this patreon will be completely unpublished on January 31st, 2025 by 12PM PST.

The reasons behind this are that the crackdown I heard from a while back, is in fact, more widespread than I was initially informed. I have been talking with respectable contacts about the issue and they told me to hold off until they received further notice, but now they've informed me that it's better to shut it down. I got news that to be safe, I should discontinue the crowdfund for the time being and until I hear back that we are in the clear to reinstate the Patreon, however, I believe we are finally at a stage where we can self-fund the project, so a reinstatement will be unlikely.

REFUNDS OF THE PAST 90 DAYS' PAYMENTS HAVE ALREADY BEGUN TO BE PROCESSED. Please wait 5-7 business days to see the money reflected back into your preferred methods of payment.

Promised rewards will be posted on our social media as well as the community discord which will open to those of you who signed up for this Patreon server. Free members will be given access to the discord as well, but once the patreon goes down, the server will be a closed server to former Patrons only.

Even if you didn't want a refund, to be safe, we have already started the process and we truly appreciate your desires to support us. But we really do want to be safe and eliminate any potential legal issues. (I did hear that IP holders have no issue with donations being given to individual artists, but to keep things simple we'd rather just self-fund the project moving forward.)

If you are concerned about any news you're hearing about alleged legal escalation, I have been informed and I'm checking with a reliable source who has direct connections to people in power to determine how legitimate these claims are. As I currently understand and have discussed with my source, these claims are most likely unfounded as "companies don't do "legal ongoing issues" or openly discuss any of this to the public about these types of things. They send DMCAs pretty straightforwardly or they don't. It's the protocol and if a DMCA (C&D's) are ignored by the offenders or never get acknowledged, then they proceed with legal action." - according to my source.

I can confirm right here and now, as of today, No DMCAs or C&Ds have been sent to us by any official holder of KODANSHA or any of their subsidiaries, to the official account of AOTNR, our email, or even Studio Eclypse and the work they've done for episode of AOTNR. 

Kodansha and their subsidiaries have had ample time to send us a take down notice over the past 3 years, and it's been over a year since we began the Patreon. Additionally, the episode made by Studio Eclypse has not had a single strike-down, DMCA, or C&D notice and, if this were a legitimate claim, they would've done this first by now if something serious was, in fact, happening. We also keep our DMs open and have a means for people to contact us through our website. It is incredibly unlikely that a legitimate threat against the project would go through unknown sources before we hear about it. That's just not how the protocol that's followed works.

However, to make sure our noses remain clean and from what I've heard about the Patreon crackdown over there (since that is an actual issue we have been informed about), I will adhere to whatever is necessary to keep this project alive. And if push comes to shove and we do receive some kind of official Cease and Desist or DMCA, then we will adhere to those demands as well.

There is no need to panic right now. Legal disputes are not given to the public like this precisely because of the amount complexities that surround these sort of things concerning derivative fan works. I hope this helps you all understand what's going on and I am open to answering questions however I can.

Thanks for understanding! You will still get the rewards but they will be free now and offered in the discord! so hopefully that makes things work out a little easier until I hear word from my sources about the future.