Maomao When Every Important Figure In The Empire Keeps Asking For Her Help

bawling my eyes out

SHINRAN & SOUKOKU PARALLELS

i'm sorry. the first time i rewatched the first episode of dcmk after reading bsd (more than 2 years ago) i came to the realization of why i like skk so much (maybe) and i really need to share my thoughts.

FIRST: the super intelligent character and the martial artist

both shinichi and dazai are characters that are incredibly smart and chuuya with ran are recognized because of their fight abilities.

but let's not forget that ran and chuuya both are smart as well, they can definitely solve things on their own when they need to, but are often mischaracterized as dumb

SECOND: love at first sight vs. hate at first sight (i'm crying)

THIRD: the one that goes away

extra: womanizer guy

extra hc: just like shinichi fell in love first sight and ran noticed she was in love with him in the ny trip, i hc skk with dazai falling in love first and chuuya realising his feelings when dazai defects lol

"I like it. The look on people's faces when they decide to stop holding back"

In case you don't remember that iconic line from Tsukasa, allow me to make sure you never forget it.

The way that both Tsukasa and Amane love people and each other is such a beautiful and intriguing concept and I need to yap about it: Tsukasa loves people no matter what, no ifs or buts; he embraces the ugliness within them and cherishes it like it’s something precious. What he hates about Amane is also what he loves because he wouldn’t be Amane without all his flaws (honestly, that's surprisingly mature coming from Tsukasa)

Tsukasa is basically saying that he likes seeing people at their worst, and he likes knowing that someone would feel comfortable enough to be that vulnerable around him. He personally saw Amane at his rock bottom, overcome by rage and insanity, but he still loves his big brother more than anyone else in the whole world. It is such a sincere and powerful kind of love which you can only give to a few people in your life and it would break you if it went away.

Understanding this makes you see how alike the twins really are, because Hanako does the same. Hanako is a lot more careful when it comes to love; he has been hurt and lost people in the past and doesn't want to experience that kind of anguish ever again, so he tries to keep it under control. We saw how he tried (and failed) to keep his distance with Nene only to end up caring about her even more than he previously did. The nail in the coffin for him was when he tried to move on to the afterlife and take her best friend with him, only for her to find a way to reach him and stop his plan completely. Oh, furious and confused didn't even begin to cover how he was feeling then, but this was the face he was making as he told Nene that she was childish and too idealistic for her own good

He embraces and looks at her like all her flaws are something precious he needs to protect. Barely 30 minutes before this, he told Aoi that he loved everything about Nene, and now here he is, seeing her at her worst; desperate, naïve, stubborn and reckless, but he couldn't be more smitten if he tried. He knows her better than anyone, better than he knows himself and his own feelings; what a vulnerable thing it is to be perceived, to be seen and loved for who you are.

Circling back to the twins, here's another thing I've noticed. Hanako, throughout the story, gradually got more comfortable around Tsukasa (mainly because the initial shock of learning that his brother was close to him this whole time wore off but there's more to it). Encounters with him didn't leave him in a near catatonic state anymore, they even fight together in perfect sync whenever they need to team up; a very low bar, I admit, but it's a start. Hanako's relationship with Nene actually greatly improved his relationship with Tsukasa, in the sense that he could understand where his brother was coming from better. Obviously, Hanako's relationship with Nene is different from the one he has with his brother; what I meant was that Hanako was able to feel what it was like to love someone so intensely again which brought him closer to his brother for better or worse. He loves Tsukasa so much, but recently, he was forced to confront the source of tension between them that drove him to murder, making their relationship do a full 180 and end up right back where they started. Can't wait to see more of how their relationship will progress after this hellish arc is over. And on that note, I'll see you all on the 18th, toodles

Japanese Linguistic Observations in Spy x Family - part 5

Part 5 - Translating humor and wordplay

Translating jokes from one language to another can be difficult, especially when the humor revolves around wordplay that's only apparent in the original language. Luckily for a comedy series like SxF, most of the humor relies on concepts that are universal to all languages, but there are the occasional jokes that require creative translation in order to get the same effect in English. What I think is the most well-known example of this kind of joke in SxF is from chapter 26, where Yuri tells Anya that "knowledge is power" during their tutoring session.

The Japanese phrase for this is 知は力 ("chi wa chikara"). Anya mishears this as ちわわぢから ("chiwawa jikara"), which means "chihuahua power," which is why we see the image of a muscular chihuahua in her thoughts. This results in Yuri calling her チワワ娘 ("chihuahua girl") from then on. Obviously this joke would be lost if translated directly, so Casey Loe, the official English translator for the SxF manga, got creative with making it work in English. He cleverly utilizes the English expression, "the whole enchilada," which sounds enough like "swole chihuahua" for Anya to believably mistake the two. This translation also makes it so that Yuri calling Anya "chihuahua girl" later on makes sense.

But unfortunately, because a series can have different companies working on the localization of its anime versus its manga, inconsistencies between the two often come up. In this case, the anime team translated this joke completely differently, and less effectively in my opinion. You can see from the below screenshots that they had Yuri use the word "unleash," which then led to Anya associating a (muscular) dog without a leash as powerful (?) Again, this translation was a stretch in my opinion and not as good as the manga version. This also makes it so that translating Yuri's nickname for Anya as "chihuahua girl" won't make sense.

But what's interesting is that, many months and episodes later in season 2, they stayed consistent with that translation and had Yuri call Anya "stupid leash girl" in episode 28.

Despite my dislike for this translation, I have to give them kudos for remembering it all that time later and not just directly translating it as "chihuahua girl." Though it makes me wonder if they'll stay consistent in season 3 where Yuri will be referring to Anya as "chihuahua girl" once again.

A further complication is that, not only do these kinds of inconsistencies exist between the anime and manga translations, but they also exist between the different streaming services that stream SxF with English subtitles throughout the world. I only have access to the subtitled version from Hulu, which is where my screenshots are from, and I think other streaming services in the US like Crunchyroll, Amazon, Netflix, etc, use the exact same subtitles. So when I refer to "the Hulu subtitles" throughout this post, I mean other major US streaming services too. However, I'm not totally sure if they all do share the same subtitle script, so if anyone who has these services could confirm, that would be great! However, @tare-anime informed me that Muse Asia's English subtitles for SxF are completely different! For example, they translated the above joke more closely to the original, by using the phrase "puppy power" and keeping Yuri's nickname for Anya as "chihuahua girl."

There are further differences with Muse Asia's translation as well, for example, they directly translate Anya's names for Loid and Yor, "chichi" and "haha," as "Father" and "Mother" instead of "Papa" and "Mama."

(thanks again to Tare for the Muse Asia screenshots!) This is different, not only compared to the Hulu subtitles, but also the official English manga as well, both of which have Anya consistently use "Papa" and "Mama."

Tare also let me know that Disney Plus in Asia, another service that streams SxF, has yet another version of the English subtitles! And these are only the subtitled versions for the US and Asia - if SxF is streamed with English subtitles in other countries, I wonder if those are different as well. That means there's at least 3-4 different English subtitle scripts for SxF, with different ways of translating certain things, like what I described above. This could make things confusing for someone without any knowledge of Japanese who reads the English version of the manga and watches the subtitled version of the anime on one or more streaming services...if they read the first few volumes of the manga with the "swole chihuahua" translation, then watch season 2 of the anime, they're gonna be confused about why Yuri calls Anya "stupid leash girl." There's other more minor inconsistencies too, like how the Hulu subtitles have Yor call Anya "Miss Anya" all the time, but the manga doesn't.

I'm sure there's some licensing reasons why there isn't one official English subtitle script that all the streaming services can use, and why they don't consult the manga translations, especially for the more difficult-to-translate parts. It seems like wasted effort for so many official English translations to exist for the same thing.

But anyway, back to the translations of jokes in SxF, another one that stood out to me occurred in chapter 23. During the scene where Loid is asking Anya about a name for Bond, he explains how dogs have trouble discerning the sounds of consonants. The phrase he uses for this is 子音の聞き分け("shiin no kiki wake"), which means "distinguishing consonants," with "shiin" meaning "consonant." However, there's another word "shiin" with the kanji 死因 that means "cause of death." This is what Yor thinks he means - 死因の聞き分け ("shiin no kiki wake"), which means "determining the cause of death." So in her thoughts, she imagines asking Bond if he prefers death by blood loss (失血死) or by being crushed (圧死), and when he shakes his head at both, she says "you're not good at these distinctions, are you?"

This is a difficult joke to translate, so Casey got a bit loose by having Loid use the word "plosives" instead of "consonants," and then having Yor mishear it as "explosives." He then changed up Yor's dialogue by having her say that Bond prefers C-4 explosions over other methods of death.

While I don't think the translation of this joke worked as well as the previous one (I feel like Yor wouldn't know about C-4 explosions?) I couldn't come up with anything better myself, lol. It just goes to show how translating things as closely to the original as possible isn't always the best choice…but oddly, that's what the Hulu subtitles did! For some reason they opted not to even attempt to rework this joke for English, and kept both Loid and Yor's dialogue as exact translations. This results in an exchange that makes no sense and will leave people wondering how Yor could mistake Loid's "can't tell consonants apart" as "can't tell causes of death apart."

However, there are some cases where the wordplay works similar enough in both Japanese and English that the joke can be translated without too much modification. An example of this is in chapter 59 where Becky asks Yor how she was able to "get" Loid…"pierce his heart" as she puts it. Yor thinks she means this literally, to which she replies that she wouldn't hurt Loid.

The Japanese version is very similar, with Becky using the verb 射止める("itomeru") which means "to shoot down" (with an arrow). However, it has a figurative meaning too, which is "to win" as in "win someone's heart." Yor thinks Becky means the literal meaning of shooting down, so she says that she wouldn't shoot Loid and that she doesn't even use a bow and arrows.

The Hulu subtitles translate it more or less directly, having Becky say "shoot an arrow through his heart" and keeping Yor's "I don't use a bow and arrows" that the manga omitted. Rare case where I think the anime translation worked better than the manga!

In the case of this joke, the concept of "shooting someone's heart" to mean "winning someone's heart" is universal in both English and Japanese, so little reworking was needed. This also helped keep consistency with Yor's tendency to associate otherwise benign concepts with violence due to the nature of her work.

I'll wrap up this post with what I think is the most commendable translation of a joke so far in the manga: how Casey translated the names of the guest characters at the ski resort in chapter 94.

Their names are puns in Japanese as well, and Annie over on Twitter already did a great breakdown of how each of the wordplay in their names was translated, so definitely check out that thread here. Since this chapter has yet to be animated, I'm really curious how the anime translators will handle this…since it seems like they don't reference the manga, they'll probably either translate the names literally or come up with their own pun names, and either will unfortunately lead to the same kind of inconsistencies between the anime and manga translations that I touched on earlier.

To summarize, humor can be a very culture/language specific thing, so it's up to the translator to make sure the same feeling is conveyed in their translation even if they have to essentially make up their own jokes. With that said, it's a shame that there isn't collaboration between the translators of the anime and manga to ensure consistent translations across the franchise. So I hope this post helped shed light, not just on how some of the jokes in SxF were conveyed in Japanese, but also on why some things in the English version of SxF seem inconsistent between the anime and manga.

<- Return to Part 4

(The rest is under the readmore!)

Maomao is the consorts pet cat:

1) She gets rid of pests

2) She eats things she’s not supposed to

It is 2024 I am once again asking for a tsubasa reservoir chronicle anime remake

(dramatically poses with a hand on my forehead) do you even SEE my vision....

alternate title: The Duality of Soukoku

I really like revisiting the earlier chapters after reading the newer ones because it helps give new perspective on the earlier interactions of these two.

The way how Hanako speaks to Yashiro, even from the beginning of their partnership, is so cute and sweet in a way I don't know how to explain. Sure, he's definitely still a jerk at times, but the general manner in which he interacts with her makes me smile like an idiot.

I like how he's not even angry or too upset with her, he's simply like, "Stop the cap. Just fess up and I'll help."