anitations

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Author tries to define moe. We’ve been over this many times, although recently the more valuable turn in the discourse focused on “moe” not as a genre but a kind of flavor.

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The author compares female protagonists of Skip Beat and Karekano:

So, what’s parallel between these two? Why the heck is it so important for these two people to confine their selves with the opinions of others? The diverging point though is that Kyoko is being forced while Yukino is wilful.

Haven’t seen Skip Beat though.

Scamp goes over a common question:

What makes a good anime? No, I’m not talking about the details of the anime itself. Leave aside what is actually inside the package, I’m talking about reception. This also has nothing to do with popularity or sales, although they are closely linked. What I’m referring to is how do you know how ‘good’ an anime is. Sorry I can’t come up with more exciting vocabulary to convey my point. How would you define if one anime is better than another through sheer objectivity?

Though, I think he answers his own question, and sort of contradicts himself.

The quality of a show is defined purely on [the viewer's judgment of the show]. While you can define things that happen inside the show through purely objective eyes, these do not define whether the show itself was well-received. You can use them to explain why it was well received but nothing more. Using this wordy logic, if the vast majority of people thought a show was good, then it objectively is a good show.

He’s asking something more than just what is “good” – he points at a suspicious causality between the pieces which make up the anime and the viewer reception. It’s kind of tangential, but omo recently talks about this phenomenon in relation to “moe” not as a genre (a misnomer), but as a pervasive “flavor” that can seep its way into any anime, eg he calls tachikoma as moe.

I think scamp tries to compare apples and oranges to no avail – what is “art” and what is “business”. The two analytic frameworks don’t overlap, but sales of a show can probably be empirically linked to the “artistic techniques” of a show, eg the amount of fanservice or “moe”, which themselves would need operational definitions.

harvest post, beware of spoilers.

BB: Initial thoughts on Mikoto. He goes over the implicit physics of the Railgun universe.

Beste’s comment on first post:

“We have to remember the distinction between “energy” and “power”. One of the things about this battle is that Mikoto’s power level is sky high, but she doesn’t have an unlimited amount of energy and she’s well aware of it. Part of why she was holding back against Miyama is because she didn’t want to kill Miyama. But another reason is that Mikoto is cautious about running herself out of ammunition. If she uses all her energy but doesn’t take out all the enemies she’s facing, then she leaves herself helpless and vulnerable.

That was also the case in the early stages when she was fighting against the creature. She had the capability to really blast it (as we saw), but as long as it was able to regenerate then doing so was a losing strategy. So she was playing for time, using enough energy to keep the creature busy until something changed.

Eventually that happened. Uiharu managed to get the anti-program to play, and the level upper network shut down. The creature was no longer able to regenerate, and Mikoto decided to go all in. But at that point it made sense to do so.”

Beste’s response post [talks about Railgun mechanics].

BB’s response to Beste’s post on Touma and imagine break.

And Beste’s comments on this last post:

“I thought I might need to deal with the question of why Touma didn’t prevent the explosion entirely. I think there are two ways to retcon that.

The one I like better is this: Touma can’t run time backwards. When the edge of the explosion reaches him and he touches it, what’s already happened is permanent as far as he’s concerned. He can’t retroactively nullify it. But he can prevent it from continuing to spread past him and into the area behind him, and that’s what he does do.

As to the railgun attack, the entire path of the coin is the same as the explosion. Whether Mikoto is using electric fields on the coin or not, she is using her power to move it, in the sense that what it does after she thinks she’s ceasing to use electric fields is still the result of her imagination rendered physical by her power. So the coin would stop once it struck Touma’s right hand, and fall on the floor.

However, as I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I don’t think that Mikoto is really firing a projectile. What she’s doing is to vaporize the metal and use it to create a plasma channel for an electricity attack. So the channel would stop at the point where it touched his hand, and any electric arc passing down it wouldn’t connect to him and zorch him.

I don’t remember the specific event of a summoned car failing to drop on him. Where/when was that?

Also note that when Touma cancelled Mikoto’s iron-sand whip, he wasn’t doing so retroactively. He cancelled its existence going forward, and that works in terms of his power and his conception of what it can do. Cancelling an entire explosion, however, would require time paradoxes, so he doesn’t do that.

Yes, you are right that if Touma were to meet a magic user who could channel more power than Touma can (including whatever effective power boost he gets because reality inherently resists change) then he could be affected by magic. The same is true when it comes to psionics. (Why didn’t I think to use that word?)

But the other thing that’s distinctive about Touma is his power level, which I think really is level 6. However, he has twice encountered people even stronger than he is. One was the alchemist. The other was that angel. And he didn’t defeat them with his hand. The good guys won other ways”

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Maybe I’m alone – or maybe my weeaboofu is over 9000 – but I hate it when -chan/-kun/-san are changed into stuff like ‘lil sis, or changed at all, for that matter. Unless you’re translating katakana-based loan words (sorta re-translating), it’s futile to try and “translate” one exclusively Japanese meaning into another Engrish one. What exactly does “itadakimasu” mean? I don’t know, but it probably doesn’t mean “let’s eat”. Just like if you really think about it, what does “you’re welcome” mean? It’s a metaphor, but if you take “welcome” very literally, the phrase makes no sense. Similar confusion arises with prepositions. Why are things “under control” or “in control”? Again, they’re metaphors, they make use of reification, which makes no sense if you take it literally.

The following are a bunch of comments from our friendly neighbourhood fansubber, koda. Naturally, we share the same thoughts. This is regarding the Umineko VN, and the terribad/horribad literal translation thereof:

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Sterling01: Yeah the translation was very stiff for the earlier chapters of Episode 1, though it does get better.

miasmacloud: …do they get rid of the honorifics spam later? Because it’s quite terrible.

(I’m guessing “no” based on their multi-page grimoire entry about honorifics.)

Sterling01: The honorifics don’t go away… though I really don’t see the problem with them. (This may be because I read it in Japanese)
Well we could have used Aunt and Uncle instead of Obasan and Ojisan…

miasmacloud: Stuff like this. I was really apathetic about every nii/nee and shit being preserved in dialogue, but Rolo’s constant cry of NII-SAN!!! in R2 quickly wore me out on that. When used as an honorific, nii/nee should be removed. “George Aniki” -> just “George”. The line I linked in the screenshot could very easily be made to say, “he was like a brother to me” etc etc. As it is, mixing “brothers” and “aniki” in the same sentence is fucking dumb. Whenever nii/nee is used as a noun, it should be replaced with the persons name unless you absolutely positively don’t know what the name is. (IE: Kyon’s little sister) Like I have 2 older brothers, I don’t go around calling them “Brother [Name]“, I just call them “[Name]“.

And super casual stuff like “hey bro/sis” is a different story, but I don’t think that’s relevant to Umineko because of the time period it takes place during?

Shit like -san I think can be totally omitted unless it’s one of those “quit calling me -san” things. -sama can easily become Mr or Mrs/Ms. -kun/-chan you can sometimes just omit, but other times you might be able to come up with a nickname! (Unless the name is too short to nickname. Some people just put “little” or some variation in front of the name, I think.) Let’s go for the gay and say Battler-chan could be turned into Battie. *^_^*

Anonymous: >Battie

8/10

miasmacloud: Gonna have to sub Umineko now just to call him Battie.

Bocom: Ironically enough, there is at least one scene where it is a “stop calling me -san” situation. (’_’;)

miasmacloud: Then just put Mr and make it “Quit calling me Mr”. ┐( ¯3¯)┌

miasmacloud: Additionally, Blue-kun told me about a line in the translation where one character who usually uses ore switches to using watashi. There are some times when it is genuinely “lol idk how to do this” but that situation is very easy to translate by just having the character who usually uses ore speak in say, non-contracted more lolelitist-sounding language, and have the character who points it out say something like hurr durr you don’t like sound like a tuff gai or ic you speak better now or whatever the situation calls for.

Anonymous: Well, thinking up clever titles and changing the language to fit the tone of each character would require ::effort:: especially considering the massive amount of text. In any case, you should continue reading to at least see Beatrice, one of the greatest troll characters ever.

miasmacloud: I don’t think you’d have to fit language to tone of each character. Using stuff like casual and contracted language is just standard fare for uh, idk… “modern” dialogue so using un-contracted and trying to make it sound less casual for only the segment in question doesn’t exactly sound magically hard?

miasmacloud: Okay, Sterling, are the amount of notes that can be found in the Grimoire.doc’s really necessary? (´_ゝ｀)

• “We gotta start picking up tips!”
The original line in Japanese was 「後でツメの垢をもらってきてやるから一緒に飲もうぜ。」. “Tsume no aka wo nomu”, “to drink the dirt under someone’s nails”, is a Japanese expression stemming from the belief that if you make a potion with someone’s nail scrapings, you’ll steal their talents by magic. Considering its unintuitive meaning, we adapted this way. Obviously not conveying completely the expression, but any extravagant analogy would have more risk of a very different meaning.

I don’t see why this is needed for what’s basically, “We’ll follow in your/their/whoever’s footsteps”.
I also don’t see what’s so magical about the shinkansen that it can’t just be put as bullet train.

Sterling01: I did find the amount of translation notes to be a bit much for Ep 1 and many weren’t really necessary. But once the meta world shows up and you get into different types of checkmate (Epaulette mate, Back rank mate, etc) I think some type of note is needed.

miasmacloud: Seems more like a “Wiki on your own time” thing. ( ´∀`)