#lhff rants

[loghorizonfunfacts]

Some (rare) messages in my Log Horizon server sent me on a Log Horizon retrospective.

As I was looking through my Hara Kazuhiro tag, I realized that he posted a draft of what later became Volume 12's cover art in December 2016 (eventually shown in final form in Hara's artbook, published early 2021). By comparison, the web novel was (publicly) completed in 2017 and the LN was supposed to be published in 2018.

This means they were working on Vol. 12 around the same time they were preparing Volume 11 for publication (which happened around May 2016, around the same time Mamare started posting Vol. 12's web novel). That said, Vol. 11 didn't get published until 2018; Vol. 12 was also supposed to release in 2018 but got pushed back 3 times before finally getting removed from listings altogether.

Around the end of December, Hara posted some Log Horizon-related tweets, which got me excited... Only to find out he'd been posting because of the LHTRPG site going under maintenance, which was announced on the Coppelia twitter account (which reps the TRPG website). After a while, his last tweet on the subject was on the lines of "For inquiries about the Log Horizon novels, please contact Kadokawa." Not exactly the most promising phrase to read.

[loghorizonfunfacts]

Thought of the night... Elder Tale had a highly-advanced translation function that even worked on spoken word. From relatively small voice samples, it can properly adjust the voice modulation and recreate the sentence in the listener’s language with almost complete accuracy.

Obviously this is for narrative convenience, but taking it at face value, we can assume that the Log Horizon universe’s version of our world has extremely advanced language proficiency and technology. I wouldn’t think Atharva Inc. is hogging all that tech for themselves and their MMO just because of how huge the implications are, which means such technology is probably commonplace.

I would reckon the voice acting industry (and by extension, localizations) in the LH version of our world is significantly different from ours. If you can simply run a voice actor’s recording through a machine and get it translated into all different languages with barely any error, is there a need for a dub? You would probably need a translator to ensure the script for other languages is correct, but as far as hiring voice actors goes, why hire a voice team for each language if one set of VAs can cover all languages in one fell swoop?

[loghorizonfunfacts]

@skynya

I read a machine translated tweet from Masuda recently that I had interpreted as saying the series was over outright, and became very distressed. Thank you for clarifying the actual situation :)

To be unpleasantly honest, I’m not super optimistic about the series’ fate after reading Masuda’s tweet, and my post that you replied to was largely my attempt to remain hopeful for the series’ continuation.

The reality is that Season 3 has ended, the mobile game has announced it will close its servers in roughly two months, and there’s still no news on either the web novels or light novels. I’m not sure if Masuda has any say in the novels, though he has been involved in the past (such as the overseas classes sketches), so we’re still kinda in limbo right now.

The anime was more or less the prime time to announce volume 12′s release, and yet we’re still sitting here twiddling our thumbs waiting for it. If there’s a small piece of consolation, the Log Horizon Database finally updated for the first time since October 2019 with profiles for some of the Hamelin rescues that participated in the Guild Hall raid.

[loghorizonfunfacts]

Why do people lose their minds over the possibility that Tetra is non-cis?

Trans representation is still fairly uncommon, and more unusual is that it’s not a focus of her character -- it simply just is. The anime drew more attention to it with Touya and Rudy’s debate whether to call her “Miss” or “Mr.” (this doesn’t happen in the light novels, or at least it’s never mentioned), but the general fact is that characters simply accept Tet for who she is. She’s not bothered by her female avatar, so nobody else feels a need to impose on her outside a few short mentions.

People who don’t like “liberal” stuff don’t want to see her situation as allegorical to a trans person’s. People who are trans (or generally non-cis) are excited to see a character whose existence points out the fact that having a body of your choosing is an amazing side effect of being transported into another world.

(I would liken fan reactions to Tet’s situation to those towards Cagliostro in Granblue Fantasy; Cag was born into a sickly male body, but used alchemy to create herself a female vessel because that’s what she wanted. Some people see it as Cag being trans, others say Cag is a guy who just likes being in a girl’s body -- which to them is different from being trans.)

[loghorizonfunfacts]

So, according to Mamare’s class notes, Sorcerers can’t use ranged weapons.

Throwing daggers count as ranged weapons.

Indicus, a Sorcerer, uses daggers that she holds like throwing daggers. (Though we’ve never seen her fight in-person yet, so we have no idea what her actual combat style is like; we’re just told she uses “countless daggers.”)

Well, it probably means that someone somewhere (either Mamare or someone on the anime design team) retconned the fact that Sorcerers can’t equip ranged weapons, at least as far as throwing weapons go. Maybe it’s one of those “relaxed” rules after the Catastrophe?

[loghorizonfunfacts]

Thought of the night:

Mamare said that the Fox Tails’ skill-swapping race gimmick was created solely to make Nureha unique compared to Shiroe, and wouldn’t be practical to add to a real MMO...

But we’ve yet to see her skill-swapping gimmick in action. We’ve only ever seen her use Astral Hypno in canon, and a few other canon Enchanter spells like Pulse Bullet in the semi-canon WWB manga.

Actually, I don’t think we’ve seen a single canonical case of a Fox Tail using a swapped skill? I mean for sure, one of the problems with Fox Tail was getting useless AF skills, but the possibilities! The possibilities!

C’mon, Mamare! Where’s the skill swapping at!

[loghorizonfunfacts]

I’m still beside myself that it’s been 10 years since LH’s release and we still have no idea what the hell the Sword Saint/Master Swordsman subclass does. Like, we know the whole backstory to the Courtesan subclass (both lore-wise and development-wise), we know what Upashi makes for breakfast, we have recipes for tofu and cookies... and nothing about one of the only two officially-named Special Title subclasses.

Actually, no. We know one thing. Wielding a sword/katana is not a requirement for it...? (Looking at you, Misa.)

(Also, TIL the wiki had Sword Saint’s kanji written incorrectly for 7 years. Oopsies. That’s what I get for not double-checking the work of those who came before me!)

[loghorizonfunfacts]

Ugh, I’m gonna put the class skills update on hold. I need to figure out which skills are common to all classes or to all classes within their type first, since my sources are pretty contradictory on that front.

For example, Mamare’s notes listed Astral Bind as an Enchanter skill, but the TRPG lists it as a skill common to all Magic Attack classes. I checked volume 1 and it was vague on that front as well; Yen On’s translation says “one of their [Magic users’] basic combat tactics was to use this sort of spell,” and later in that same paragraph, “the three magic-user classes used spells with the same fundamental properties. It [Astral Bind] was a basic spell...”

It’s vague enough to be taken either which way, which does not help...

~ Some research later ~

I went and double-checked Mamare’s notes directly, and it seems that each Magic Attack class has a move-obstruction spell named “Astral Bind” with a slightly different effect...

Are you friggin’ kidding me. This is like, the biggest “Yes, but also no, but also yes” answer I could’ve gotten.