"Doomed characters who don't know they're doomed are great" ok but what about doomed characters who KNOW they're doomed but TRY ANYWAY?? Doomed characters who RAGE AGAINST THE DYING LIGHT??? Who have nothing to lose so they give up EVERYTHING??? Who are in DENIAL even???
i started playing Disco Elysium and last night (the same day i started playing) i woke up to my stomach hurting so bad that in my delirium i thought it had to do with something from the game.
and looked it up…
i thought this was completely normal until waking up later after the pain was gone.
okay the insane aura radiating from yoshiki right now the mixed arm and the haircut???? that’s demonfucker7000 right there the great god of the impurities that’s the man who will tear down the company and rescue hikaru princess carrying him to the sunset
Some language and translation trivia from episode nagi
So, I recently reread episode nagi 1-3 in japanese, and since I enjoy translation trivia a lot, I thought I would compile all my observations in a post. Please don’t take this too seriously! While I do have a language degree, I’m not a professional translator. In no way this is meant as a dig towards the professionals working on the official release! These are just some fun facts I thought I’d share.
without further ado, let’s delve into it!
On top of his already limited (kinda childish) vocabulary, Nagi’s speech bubbles often forgo complex kanji and favor writing the words out in hiragana. He sometimes does the same with (foreign) words that should be written out in katakana (example: Barou’s beloved “king”). We know this is a quirk of Nagi’s because he sometimes uses kanji for the same words. The most notable example is his favorite one, mendoukusai, “hassle”—mostly written in hiragana, sometimes shortened, sometimes elongated for dramatic, whiny emphasis, and rarely written out in kanji.
Since kanji are taught by grade in japanese schools, the foregoing them in a certain character’s lines can hint that the guy doesn’t have a higher education. However, in Nagi’s case, I think it’s meant to make him come across as unsophisticated or a bit childish. Or maybe just lazy. I think the former, though, considering how all his compliments always circle back to the same, like, 4 juvenile variations of "amazing".
(more under a cut for length):
Still on the topic of speech patterns, Nagi talks in plain form. For those who don't know what that means, it's an informal register, very common between teens. Nagi seems to use it with his elders, too, though, and that's a bit less common. You're supposed to talk in polite form to strangers and to your elders. Then again, pretty much everyone in blue lock talks that way. There's not a lot of respect for your elders in this series. Or for your peers, lol
As for Reo, he talks in male speech! Still very much informal and common, particularly between rowdy teens, but if plain form can still be acceptable in a lot of social situations, male speech is distinctly cocky, self-confident and impolite, so not what you'd expect from the distinguished heir of a billionaire who prides himself as a businessman in the making, ahah. He talks that way to Ego as well, btw.
Both of them tend not to use honorifics. Reo more so. In all three volumes, Reo used them once, to calm Nagi down while he was angry at Barou. Nagi mostly goes without too, but he sometimes uses them, when the situation calls for it, or a bit ironically. If you're curious, here's what I noticed: he uses "san" for Baa-ya when talking to her (when he leaves Choki in her care), but not when he's talking to Reo about her. He calls Zantetsu "dentist-san" when the latter drops his backstory, and "Zantetsu-kun" when the guy scores after listening to Reo's advice. And when all three finally link up, Nagi tacks on a "sama" to Reo's name while calling him a king (in the chess sense. Fun fact, it might or might not have been a pun, since Reo's name contains the kanji for king btw). That's pretty much it for epinagi so far. He just uses surnames without honorifics (or nicknames) for everyone else normally. Same for Reo.
When talking to Nagi, Reo refers to his mother as 母親 (hahaoya, "mom") and to his father as 親父 (oyaji, "old man, pops") and クソ親父 (kuso oyaji, "shitty old man") respectively. Idk if that changes when he's talking to them tho, as he hasn't yet in epinagi. But so far his contempt seems to be only directed at his father.
Upon seeing Kira, Reo describes him as "Japan's gem", but the word he uses for "gem" is 宝 (takara), treasure, pretty much the same he uses for Nagi (= 宝物 takaramono, or treasured thing, prized possession). Hence Nagi looking up, unimpressed:
To check out what the fuss was about. His face dhsvbdhdhdhsbs When Nagi thinks Reo's talking about Isagi, then, Reo corrects him by pointing his face toward Kira and saying not the dark-haired one, but that "really good looking guy". He calls him an ikemen btw, lmao.
I'm not sure if this was in the eng version too, but Reo calls Nagi and Zantetsu's team up the "neet combo". It's pretty self-explanatory how this relates to Nagi, but I wonder what about Zantetsu screamed "neet" to him.
When Zantetsu adamantly refuses to take Reo's advice, Reo gets super mad and calls him "obaka-sama", which. I can't with his pettiness ahah. Okay, let me explain. He's tacking on an honorific prefix ("o") and the highest honorific suffix ("sama") to an insult. 😂😂 Normally, you use honorifics to pay respect to and elevate the status of whatever or whoever you're tacking them on to. In this case, Reo's using them sarcastically, but he goes extra out of the way to be scathing. Zantetsu hates being called an idiot, but Reo feels he's acting unreasonable with his holier-than-thou attitude, so he upgrades his regular insult to mock that, basically. He's more or less saying, "oh great, revered moron".
Not a linguistic trivia, but. Nagi has a weekly planner for his bread eating habits. The day Reo joins his class to spy on him was a tuesday, cause tuesdays are melon bread days.
When he's making a confident remark, Reo occasionally speaks with a sing-song in his voice.
During the match against team X, Barou mocks Reo and Nagi's coordination and mutual dependence with a jab. He calls them a couple who wear matching outfits. Still laughing about this one tbh
now onto my favorite one
Ever wondered why Nagi’s response here doesn’t come across as reassuring to Reo? Well, I think I have finally figured it out!
While the translation above is 100% correct, I feel like the miscommunication lies in a matter of contextual ambiguity. When Reo says, quote, “You were supposed to team up with me,” in japanese it’s more like, “But teaming up with me is a must!” To which Nagi replies, “You and I are going to be the best in the world. That’s a must.”
The theme (=what is being talked about) of Reo’s sentence is the “must” (zettai) part. Meaning, something that is absolute, unconditional. Reo is making a conjecture, the assumption that they’ll work with each other as they promised, but he’s also implicitly expecting Nagi to agree. He’s saying our combo is the unchangeable condition here. You know this.
Nagi responds with something he means as reassuring, as a confirmation that he has their promise in mind. But since he echoes Reo’s word choice (zettai), and applies it to something else, it comes across wrong, more like he’s correcting Reo on what the “must” actually is. Not teaming up with each other until the end like Reo posits, but the simple agreement that they’ll be world class one day. With or without each other.
This miscommunication is made worse by the fact that Reo’s declared ego is making Nagi the best striker in the world. So when Nagi follows this with a remark about how their team up wasn’t the strongest, Reo of course takes the “correction” to mean “someone else can better help me become the best instead of you. bye. nice hanging out with you till now. see you at the world cup, xoxo”
Simply put, Nagi thought he was explaining himself, but what he got across was that he was rejecting Reo’s ego altogether and moving on. That’s why the art then shows Reo’s ego chains falling apart.
When Bachira asks Nagi if he’s secretly the “super cold type” right after leaving for the 3v3, in japanese it’s a neat, direct callback to the scene in chapter 2 where Nagi tells Reo he's okay with him teaming up with someone stronger than himself, and Reo calls that “heartless.” Both times the word used is the same, 薄情 (hakujou), cold-hearted, heartless, though iirc it was translated differently in english
They both say they feel lonely after their split up. Nagi in response to Bachira’s line as per the previous point (here’s a post I made about it a while back). And Reo when he thinks about Nagi’s change in chapter 13 and says he feels lonely, scared and weak. I will go down with the idea that they’re each other’s first friend.
Ending this on a less sad note, when Rin calls Bachira “bowlcut”, the original phrasing reads okappa, from the mythical creature’s hairstyle. Now please google what an okappa looks like, lmao
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More epinagi language and translation trivia you might enjoy:
notes on Nagi’s line “I’m gonna say something selfish”
notes (and misconceptions) about Nagi and Reo calling each other “partner”
