Hello! I only ask because I remember you being there: Did the Blue Exorcist discord get deleted? I went to talk about the new chapter and noticed it missing from my servers
The oldest one I was in did get deleted recently, yeah : ( Didn't have an admin up to maintaining it anymore
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! Thatās a big deal! Iāve never thought about it before but now that I have, itās ridiculous to me that thatās not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why donāt we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
Itās July 20th. Thatās the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. Iām ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and Iām going to have a goddamn potluck. Youāre all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
I scheduled this in 2025 to give you all a week to make Moon Day Monday preparations! I think I will order a little rocket cake or bake some moon phase cookies!
Actually, yeah, you guys wanna see my favorite way a translator ever handled the furigana shenanigans in a manga?
Some background: Japanese is written with a mix of kana (which are phonetic characters that each represent a sound) and kanji (more complex characters which have both a meaning and often multiple possible sounds).
But little kids aren't expected to know every kanji yet, and there can be obscure words or names with oddball pronunciations that would puzzle any reader. So you can also put some small kana alongside the kanji to tell people how to pronounce it. Those are called furigana, and they're common in a lot of manga for youngish audiences.
As an example, here's the kanji ē„ (meaning "god") with the furigana that say ććæ (kami) in case you didn't know how to spell that one in kanji yet:
But at some point someone figured out that, hey, you don't HAVE to have the furigana match the kanji. There's nothing stopping you from just...
Using a foreign or made-up word but with a built-in definition: the kanji ē„éåø« (exorcise-demon-professional) pronounced as the English word ćØćÆć½ć·ć¹ć (ekusoshisuto = exorcist)
Letting a character talk to himself really literally: äæŗ (me) with the furigana ćć¾ć (omae = you). You, by which I mean me,
Harping on the fact that you have a light themed villain this arc: å (light) but with the OTHER WHOLE KANJI é (darkness) as the pronunciation. Darkness, but our darkness is Different because it's actually Light...
Clarifying what someone means like a little parenthetical statement: äæŗé (us/we) pronounced ć¤ć«ćććć£ (iruminati = Illuminati). We, the Illuminati...
And many more. Those were just examples from Blue Exorcist that I already had saved to my hard drive. I cannot emphasize enough how much manga likes to create double meanings this way.
As you might imagine, this can be awkward to translate into a language that doesn't have even the slightest concept of furigana.
Usually you end up doing something that either ignores it (just pick the word that was most important of the two, or use the made up word but only define it the first time) or gets the job done but feels a bit like a cop-out (list both words, or put one in parentheses after the other)
But not always. Not in this one case from the first chapter of Blue Exorcist, translated for Viz by John Werry:
čē”ēļ¼ć²ććļ¼The realm of void, Gehenna (same deal as Assiah above)
ć® 's, of
ē„ļ¼ććæļ¼god
ć§ćć is
ćć® this
ćŖć¬ me, I (it's not weird in Japanese to say "this me." It just emphasizes the me. I, who am the god of Gehenna...)
ć® 's
ē (normally pronounced ć»ć®ć) flame
ć”ćć²ćć(normally spelled č” for that ć”) to inherit/be descended from (literally, to pull in their blood)
So we've got ē (flame) but we're pronouncing it ć” (blood) here due to shenanigans
We've already defined Assiah and Gehenna earlier in the chapter, so we can just call them Assiah and Gehenna and not worry about the kanji. It's the ēļ¼ć”ļ¼ćć²ć that's a pain to deal with. Rin, our half-demon main character, has inherited Satan's flame in the same way that you have your ancestors' blood in you. Which means we gotta come up with a way to say bloodflames on the fly in English.
And this was a good way, okay?
You exist in Assiah, but the flame of the god of Gehenna runs through your veins!
Goddamn that was slick. You guys saw that, right? I'm not the only one who saw how smoothly that went, am I?
What a good use of the idiom "my blood runs through your veins." You've got word A as furigana on word B, so you find an English set phrase that uses word A and swap word B in instead. Reader expected A and got B, so now both words are in their head and you've gotten the unconventional double meaning across. It's as near a perfect solution as you're probably gonna get.
I'm sure it's not the first time a translator landed on that general solution to the problem, but it was the first time I saw someone do it and it left an impression y'all.
PSA: Can we not treat official translations as the devil? Right in front of my salad?
Not gonna single out the (non-tumblr) thing that annoyed me today, because everyone in all non-Japanese-speaking manga/anime fandoms does it sometimes, and it's not like I'm upset with today's person or even keeping track of who said it, it just brought up a pet peeve I haven't really mentioned on here...
but man.
That thing where fan translations are infallible, and the official one is always presumed wrong when they "disagree" even if neither or both are actually wrong (which is usually the case, and when it's not I find the official ones are more often the "winner" in my mind.) Like to the point of hating the actual translator personally?
God I hate that thing.
I know why it happens, there are plenty of interesting practical and sociolinguistic reasons that it happens. I hate it though.
"Fan translations are more faithful" fan translations make style choices that reward people who already know some Japanese and make them feel good about the Japanese that they know, in a social circle where Japanese is basically a prestige language. This is independent of how accurate the translation is.
"fan translators are more passionate about the series" more than someone who turned that hobby into a whole-ass job? You think they're in it for the money? The money that MANGA TRANSLATORS make? What money?
And it's fun to compare translations! Everyone inevitably has favorite ones! And there are bad translations out there!
But whenever someone interprets "favorite" as "better" or "official" as "automatically one of the bad ones" AND ALSO says some breathtakingly nasty and completely undeserved thing about a person who has spent years making sure they can read their favorite series
All I hear is
"We totally value this skill you have! Except that if anyone ever values it enough to hire you for it you'll be taken out back and shot"
Did you know that the english word āstarā and the japanese word ęļ¼ć»ćļ¼donāt actually mean the same thing?
Language does not simply name pre-existing categories; categories do not exist in 'the world'
ā Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners
I read this quote a few years ago, but I donāt think I truly understood it until one day, when I was looking at the wikipedia article for āstarā and I thought to check the Japanese article, see if I could get some Japanese reading practice in. I was surprised to find that the article was not titled ćęć, but ćęęć, a word Iād never seen before. Iād always learnt that ę was the direct translation for āstarā (I knew the japanese also contained meanings the english didnāt, like ādotā or ābullseyeā, but I thought these were just auxiliary definitions in addition to the direct translation of āstarā as in "a celestial body made of hydrogen and helium plasma").
Itās an easy difference to miss, because in everyday conversation, ę and star are equivalent. They both describe the shining lights in the night sky. They both describe this symbol: ā . They even both describe those enormous celestial objects made of plasma.
But they are different - different enough to not share a wikipedia article. ę is used to describe any kind of celestial body, especially if it appears shiny and bright in the night sky. āStarā can be used this way too (like Venus being called the āmorning starā), but itās generally considered inaccurate to use the word like this, whereas there is no such inaccuracy with ę. You can say āoh thatās not actually a star, itās a planetā, but you CANāT say ćå®ćÆćććÆęć§ćÆćŖćęęć ćć (TL: thatās not actually a hoshi, itās a planet). A planet IS a ę.
ę is a very common word, essentially equivalent to āstarā, but its meaning is closer to ācelestial bodyā. I havenāt looked into the etymology/history but itās almost like both english and japanese started out with a simple, common word for the lights in the sky - star/ę , but as we found out more about what these lights actually were, english doubled down on using the common word for the specific scientific concept, while japanese kept the common word generic and instead came up with a new word for the more specific concept. If this is actually what happened, Iād guess that kanji probably had something to do with it - ę as a component kanji exists inside the word for planet, ęę, and in the word for comet, å½ę, and in the scientific word for āstarā, ęę, so it makes sense that it would indicate a more general concept when used standalone.
This discovery helped me understand that quote - categories donāt exist in the world, we are the ones who create them. I thought that the concept of āstarā was something that would be consistent across all languages, but itās not, because the concept of āstarā is not pre-existing. Each language had to decide how to name each of those similar star-like concepts (the ā symbol, hot balls of gas, twinkling lights in the sky, planets, comets, etc), and obviously not every language is going to group those concepts under the same words with the same nuance.
Knowing this, one might be tempted to say that ęęļ¼ććććļ¼ is the direct translation for āstarā. But this isnāt true either. In most of the contexts that the word āstarā is used in english, the equivalent japanese will be simply ę. Despite the meanings not lining up exactly, ę will still be the best translation for āstarā most of the time. This is the art of translation - knowing when the particulars are less important than the vibe or feel of a word. For any word, there will never be an exact perfect translation with all the same nuances and meanings. Translation is about finding the best solution to an unsolvable problem. That's why I love it.
A neat mirror image of the "that's a planet, not a star" thing: in Japanese it's possible to refer to the Earth - the one we're standing on, the one you basically never think of as small or bright or twinkling - as ćć®ę ("this ę"). Carries a bit of the vibe of calling distant stars "suns" in English, where you're purposely emphasizing that it'd look just like the other stars if you were farther away.
I just think it's fun that two languages were confronted with the fact that, say, Venus seems more like Polaris from a distance and more like Earth close up, and English deals with it by reminding you that Venus and Polaris are different while Japanese deals with it by reminding you that Earth and Polaris are the same.
to anyone who can read Japanese I have a burning question. do we ever get an honorific or anything for how Honda refers to his sister. I know he only ever mentions her in passing while talking to other people
In the first panel it's "this is my sister's brat kid" so "ane" (disrespectful, familial)
The second panel the joke is that his sister seems also to be a bit of a rowdy delinquent, and he has accidentally packed her old clothes instead of his own by mistake, so it's "aneki". Respectful, but in the same way you'd refer to your mob boss.
Adding also that the first one with no honorifics is the normal way to refer to your older sister if you're talking to someone outside the family. You would use the honorific version if you were, say, speaking directly to the sister or talking about someone else's sister.
So I've been reading The Summer Hikaru Died (having noticed via tumblr osmosis that it has my favorite character in it) and despite the genre I wasn't expecting it to just drop one of the most casually insane eldritch monsters I've ever seen in my life
It's been like a month and a half and I'm still f*cked up over Diegetic ć
Who does that
who does that for a throwaway monster that existed for three pages
bro it was in a FONT it had a SERIF what the F*CK how am I supposed to go about my life knowing I can't trust TEXT anymore
Apparently the English version of Blue Exorcist has forgotten that a whole man is named Uzai.
Which is a great opportunity for a quick vocab/spelling conventions lesson, actually!
ć¦ć¶ć (uzai) is a slangy Japanese word meaning annoying/obnoxious. It's a contraction of ćććć (urusai) also meaning loud/annoying/obnoxious.
It's very, very commonly written with katakana for emphasis.
ćØć¬ćć¤ć»ć¦ć¶ć¤ (Jeremiah Uzai) is the name of this Blue Exorcist character:
(Which. I mean. Aptly named man.)
It's always written in katakana because it's a non-Japanese name.
So yeah. That should say "Commander Uzai," which makes sense and fits a lot better in an otherwise formal sentence.
But there's a second way to figure that out besides context!
When i-adjectives and verbs are written in katakana, it's common to leave the parts that conjugate in hiragana.
This doesn't happen 100% of the time, but if it's in a sentence instead of just a one-word utterance it gets more likely. We might expect ć¦ć¶ć here if it meant annoying, but it's all katakana like ć¦ć¶ć¤, normal for a name.
Cultural differences: the words we say when words arenāt enough
I learned a neat thing years ago in a Japanese short stories class, and now I have a burning desire to share it with the Blue Exorcist fandom, so!
There come times in every humanās life where we need to tell a close loved one everything we feel about them at once. Maybe itās because one of you is dying or going away forever, or maybe itās just because you really wanted them to know you care right now. Either way, itās impossible to just sum up an important relationship in a few words.
But despite thatāor maybe even BECAUSE itās impossible to doāwe have a default for what to say. A stand-in for all those feelings that canāt get said in the time we have.
Where Iām from, itāsĀ āI love you.ā
Right? Just think of corny movie scenes; itās always like āIf I donāt make it back, tell my wife I love her.ā
And that makes sense, doesnāt it? Itās likeā¦Thinking about you fills me with joy. I want nothing more than to just be with you. You have left a deep impression on my soul. My life is better because you were in it.Ā āI love you.ā
But thereās no reason it HAS to be worded that way, is there? The people you care about make you feel a lot of things andĀ āI love youā is only one convenient way to say them. There are others.
In Japanese, the default If-I-Could-Only-Say-One-Thing-To-My-Loved-One thing isnātĀ āI love you.ā
ItāsĀ āThank you.ā
And that makes sense too, doesnāt it? Itās likeā¦You helped make me into what I am. You support me in all the hard times. Youāve done so much for me and I appreciate it so, so much. My life is better because you were in it.Ā āThank you.ā
And likeā¦Iād be crying at that scene from the chapter ANYWAY but I am crying EVEN MORE because I know that little tidbit.
Info on Mephisto from the new guidebook! Each character has a profile followed by relevant questions from fans, and then there's an interview section later where Kazue Katoh gives commentary on each major character and each manga arc. I have more guidebook than time, so I'm skipping the parts that are just like...summarizing who he is and stuff. So this will mostly be fan questions and Katoh's commentary
Biographical info
Gender: Male
Age: (Ā°wĀ°)
Rank/Titles: Director of True Cross Academy and head of the exorcism cram school, Honorary Knight for the Knights of the True Cross, King of Time
Anniversary [T/N Katoh gives demons these in lieu of a birthday]: August 28
Blood type: ( Ź¹ - Ź¼ )
Height: 195 cm (184 cm without the "horn")
Weight: 74 kg
Skills and interests: movies, manga, anime, games, music, toys, miscellaneous subcultures
Fan Q&A
How do members of the Knights of the True Cross usually find out that Mephisto is a demon king?
I think some people might find out from books, the internet, etc even before they become exorcists. They do publish demon field guides that you can find at regular libraries, and Mephisto seems like the type to mention it in online interviews. Rin was the only one who didn't know.
How long has he had his current body?
About 200 years.
Which media from Assiah has had the greatest impact on him?
I imagine he would have been shocked the first time he saw a cinematograph.
Mephisto really likes all sorts of entertainment; has he ever tried making something himself?
Demons in general (not just Mephisto) tend to be bad at creative pursuits, though there are exceptions. Mephisto has a certain respect for human creativity.
Why is he so fond of Beelzebub?
Beelzebub just kind of struck a chord with him. Meanwhile, Beelzebub also likes being spoiled by Mephisto.
Which other demon kings get along with Mephisto the best?
In order: 1. Beelzebub 2. Amaimon 3. Egyn 4. Astaroth 5. Iblis 6. Lucifer [T/N it took me like an entire minute to work out that Azazel is the one missing from this list. Presumably because he's a rock]
Has Mephisto ever altered the past?
He sure does say a lot of things that imply that! [T/N: Katoh. Katoh. Katoh.]
How rich is Mephisto exactly?
He's actually one of the world's top businessmen and investors. His total assets are probably over one trillion yen [T/N: Jesus f*ck][T/N: that's about US$6.7 billion]
Author interview
Mephisto is a character who can solve just about anything; does that make him hard to write?
Honestly, he's super easy to deploy. Mephisto has the plot in the palm of his hand and can fix stuff behind the scenes; he's the one pulling the strings. For adaptations and spinoffs, I just say "if you need to fill in a plot hole, make it Mephisto's fault" (laughs). But I do think it's dangerous to overdo it.
He even took on a sort of narrator role in chapter 44, didn't he?
Around Volume 10, I was trying to treat each chapter like its own self-contained oneshot. Mephisto didn't even feel out of place as an omniscient narrator for one chapter, and for me that really drove home what a convenient character he is. Though I'm always wondering when and how to show Mephisto's own serious motives and inner thoughts, since he does fall into that eternal comic narrator role.
He can suddenly turn terrifying just when you were thinking he was comical. Hidden depths.
Fundamentally he's on the humans' side, and he's often in charge of comic relief, but I do want to show his demonic side too. Same with the familiars; I want to portray the demons as something humans are afraid of.
And I'm not sure other English speakers realize that it's a title drop.
Frieren: Beyond Journey's Endācalled č¬éć®ććŖć¼ć¬ć³ (Sousou no Frieren) in Japaneseāis set in a fantasy world 80 years after the party of adventurers slays the demon king. It's a surprisingly soft and beautiful story about the party's powerful and long-lived elf mage grappling with themes of impermanence/remembrance/etc as she outlives the old generation of humans and befriends the new.
Let's look at that Japanese title a bit closer.
ććŖć¼ć¬ć³ is the name of the main character, no surprises there. č¬éļ¼ććććļ¼ means "funeral procession," spelled č¬ (bury/inter, note the ę» "death" surrounded by grass radicals) and é (deliver/send off).
Frieren of the funeral procession. Solid title, makes sense, main character mourning her old friends, got it.
We're calling her č¬éć®ććŖć¼ć¬ć³ because she buries all her friends. There's no reason to expect any other meanings from the title...
...until eight episodes in when we learn that the demons in-universe call her č¬éć®ććŖć¼ć¬ć³ because she buries all her enemies too.
Like. Hot damn. Active participant in making this funeral possible. Strap in, Frieren's about to outlive a b*tch RIGHT NOW.
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