What Renji really said in chapter 173
I found an old tweet from Kubo where he had written, in Japanese, the phrase that Renji said in this scene:
And, translating that tweet, I realized that Renji wasn't saying what I thought he was saying.
First, how did I find that old tweet? Well, sometime ago I had heard about that Kubo had exchanged some interesting comments with Renji's actor of the first Rock musicals, Eiji Moriyama, on twitter. It was with Kubo's old account, in 2015, the one that later, that same year, Kubo deleted. But Eiji Moriyama has his account since 2011, and his tweets with Kubo can still be seen on twitter (despite above them it's written "This post was deleted by the post author" because Kubo, obviously, deleted all his tweets in 2015). What were those tweets about and why they got my interest? They had to do with Renji, Kubo told Eiji Moriyama that his wife, Kubo's, loved that phrase of the panel above.
In 2015 I read Kubo's twitter from time to time (but not those tweets with Eiji Moriyama, I didn't know about them). Sometimes Kubo mentioned his wife. In one of the tweets I read, Kubo asked people for help, because his wife wanted to get Renji at a gacha game. Also when he wished Renji a happy birthday, on August 31, he said that Renji and his wife had the same birthday date. So, with all of this, I supposed Kubo's wife was a fan of Renji, or at least she liked him, even though if it'd only be because they had the same birthday, lol. I´m not going to lie, that Kubo's wife seemed to be a Renji's fan made me happy. Here are the tweets with the translations, they are cute:
So when I heard about that tweet with Eiji Moriyama where Kubo said that his wife loved what Renji said in that scene, I tried to find it. I went to the Eiji Moriyama's twitter and, searching for his tweets with Tite Kubo, it was easy to find them. This conversation appears on 2 tweets, I've taken an screenshot of both and put the translation below to be more understandable:
What Kubo wrote in the first tweet is this:
"ちなみに当初は恋次の「誰が放すかよ馬鹿野郎が」も入る予定だったんだけど、LINEの規定で「馬鹿」がNGということでお蔵入りになりました。”
"By the way, we originally planned to include Renji’s line, “Who’s going to let you go, you idiot?”, but it got scrapped because LINE’s guidelines prohibit the use of the word “idiot.”"
And, when I got it translated, I thought the translator machine hadn't translated that, "you idiot", well, because that line had to be "you bastard", that Renji was saying to Aizen, and bastard was surely the word that LINE had censored, because, why were they going to censure "idiot"? it's a mild insult. And most of the translations of the chapter I had read, fan translation, Viz, and the official Spanish one, said "bastard" as an insult aimed at Aizen:
I used more translation machines, and of all them translated it "you idiot", so I was confused.
But that "you idiot" sounded familiar, I remembered Renji often called Rukia like that. I checked if the Renji's line that Kubo had written on the tweet, was really the same as what was written on the Japanese text of that panel. And it was the same. Well, Kubo had used only kanjis for the word 馬鹿野郎 = "you idiot" = bakayarou, on that tweet; on the manga Renji says the same but he replaced the first 2 kanjis of "baka" with Katakana, so Renji said: バカ野郎 in the panel , but it's still pronounced the same, "bakayarou", and when you translate it with the same translator machines, the result is the same "you idiot". I searched for moments in the manga where Renji says that, "you idiot", to Rukia:
Surely there are more, but these ones I found them quickly because I remembered them. Here Renji used the 4 kanjis for "bakayarou" as on Kubo's tweet. I don't know why, in the panel of chapter 173, Kubo had Renji saying the same word but with half katakana/half kanji, but it means the same.
So, here I realized that the translations with that "bastard" aimed at Aizen were, probably, all wrong. It seems the word "bastard" is simply said "yarou"; "bakayarou" is "idiot", but it seems it's still a strong word, enough to be censured by LINE. Renji uses that word with Rukia, but by the way he is saying it to her, we can say he says it in an affectionate mode, but in his rough style.
Then, in this scene in which I thought Renji was indirectly saying sorry to Rukia, saying to Aizen that he is not going to let Rukia go, and calling him a bastard, instead, Renji was talking directly to Rukia, telling her, first, "I'm not letting go of you" and then “Who’s going to let you go, you idiot?", with the flashback of when Rukia let go of his hand because he let her go to be adopted. This is a more personal apology to her, he is talking directly to Rukia, and he is basically saying that only a stupid, crazy, person would let her go. He is admitting his mistake from the past, talking directly to her. In the previous page, Renji was talking to her too:
And in the next page Renji was still talking to her, and it'd be:
The other day I found on Twitter that someone had uploaded some photos of pages of the manga, with what I think it's the Spanish translation of Argentina, and this page says "I'm not letting go of you" and "Who’s going to let you go, idiot?", so, apparently, the correct one. So, at least this editorial translated it correctly:
So, even 20 years later, lol, you can still discover new translations mistakes by the editorials that translate Bleach. It's a pity we have to read translations and not the original text, because we are believing and discussing wrong things.
Renji saying to Aizen that he is not going to let Rukia go and calling him "bastard!" was, really, pretty cool, but Renji talking to Rukia and apologizing directly to her makes it more personal, and it's more romantic. I like both, but canon is always better because it's what really happened.
