Japanese Linguistic Observations In Spy X Family - Part 1

Picture perfect Amanene coloring (^o^)

the apothecary diaries does such a great job of portraying how traumatizing it can be to be a victim of pedophilia and grooming, instead of romanticizing it like a lot of anime series do. it is disturbing, it makes audience uncomfortable and disgusted — which is how we must feel about pedophilia. you're not supposed to feel comfortable because it's 'normalized' or 'just fiction'; you're supposed to feel disgusted.

the creator didn't make anshi 'fall in love' with the previous emperor or develop a stockholm syndrome — instead, she took her revenge in the same way he hurt her and other girls, which he deserved. her anger, hatred and disgust towards him are rightly justified and realistic for a victim of pedophilia.

the older palace lady (who might or might not be a ghost) told the girls abt her story as a victim of the previous emperor at the ghost story gathering:

whether or not she was a ghost, she wanted her story to be heard, of how much the victims suffered at the hands of the previous emperor. they were imprisoned for the rest of their lives in the same place that ruined their lives. telling her story might be the only way for her to find peace within herself.

an abuser may die but the trauma he leaves on his victims will last forever. it does not go away.

it's even presented as a horror story because there's nothing more terrifying than SA.

(i may have missed a few points but im keeping this brief. thank you for reading my essay!)

We don't need Yugi's flashback because their story has been told for a long time. (an analysis) Part 1.

We don't know much about the twins, but I think that's enough because their personal story parallels all the characters in this manga. And we already know it. In this analysis, I will analyze the relationships of Kou with Mitsuba, the fourth secret, Hakubo with Sumire, and Aoi with Akane, because their arcs interpret one big arc of the twins.

1. Kou and Mitsuba. That boy was still that boy.

The main problem for Kou is the "real" Mitsuba. His entire arc is reduced to trying to bring back "that" boy, while Mitsuba's problem is wanting to live as a living person. Kou feels responsible for Mitsuba and wants to help him with his own hands, not someone else's.

He believes that he can make everyone happy, alone. It's really important to him, he's really dedicated to saving Mitsuba. So much so that he won't listen to anyone, even Mitsuba himself - he's so stubborn.

Just like Amane.

The problem is that Kou separates the two Mitsubas, he's completely confused about "who's the real one" and spends his time trying to figure it out instead of cherishing the time he spends with Mitsuba more often.

"You wanted to be my friend, right?" "You wanted to bring back the me you lost, please stay by my side..."

Mitsuba wants that understanding from Kou. "Admit it already, it's impossible, I can't become a _normal_ person, because no one can do that."

Mitsuba knows he's not the same anymore, but he still wants understanding. No one can turn back time, so why not just accept it? Kou is adamant.

And the famous "do you want me to die so we can understand each other better" page.

And then Mitsuba calls Kou an idiot because you can't say things like that. You have to value your life.

So how does this relate to Yugi?

Amane has trouble deciding whether the "new" Tsukasa who came back is the real one, while Tsukasa just wanted some simple human warmth.

Amane thinks he's responsible, thinks he can fix everything on his own, he never listens to anyone, and is very stubborn. It's believed that he tried to fix the big clock to turn back time and bring back the "real" Tsukasa. That's why he doesn't value the time he spends with his brother, because it's not the same. He's fixated on the idea of two Tsukases and a real brother.

"You wanted to bring back the me you lost back then (that birthday), please stay by my side..."

Tsukasa just wanted to spend time with his brother. Deep down, he was waiting for the joy of meeting and understanding from Amane. No one can return Amane to a real living brother, it's all too complicated and even the machinations over time did not solve the problem. And perhaps Amane could have thought that if they both died, it would somehow bring them closer together. Tsukasa is very angry with Amane's actions, because he gave his life in exchange for his brother's health, and he destroyed it so easily, without appreciating it.

2. The Fourth mystery and Mei Shijima.

I won't say much here, and maybe not very deep things, but nevertheless.

"Killing Shijima Mei is all I want." Yes, we have an obvious parallel with killing her twin with a knife, but the reasons for the fourth secret... "I wanted to protect the real you."

Shijima believes that this will bring Mei good. And despite the fact that she tried to kill Mei from the dream world, she still asks her not to leave, even though she is not "real" in the full sense, because it is too painful.

Also, the Fourth hates this fake world. It is too perfect in it, in a way that does not exist in reality.

How does this relate to Yugi?

Amane in the pp arc is parallel to Shijima, Nene just catches their similarity.

Radical problem solving, believing that they alone know what's best, doing horrible things "for your own good." Amane probably killed Tsukasa for similar reasons, believing that somehow it would be better this way. Amane also accepts the current Tsukasa as a fake, but even so, he doesn't want all the yorishiro to be destroyed, he doesn't want his brother to disappear, because losing him again is too painful.

Hanako hates the world of the perfect picture, everything is too easy and wonderful in it, as it was not in his real life, where he had to endure a lot.

3. Hakubo and Sumire. Mystery and yorishiro.

Sumire first appeared before us as proof that yorishiro can be in human form and her story is very parallel to Tsukasa. She had to spend many years locked away in the boundary of the mystery, in the form of the same place where she met her death.

She has not met Hakubo since that day. She hoped that he would come to her, but this did not happen, although Sumire strongly maintained some hope for her own importance to him - "after all, yorishiro becomes what the school mystery cherishes most."

She is tired of her existence, she has no particular purpose and she does not mind disappearing if it will help someone, if she will be useful at least in this way.

Nene asks Sumire what is so good about Hakubo? After all, he is unbearable, and Sumire probably fell in love with him because there was simply no one else. No one was as close to her. It is funny to hear this from Nene, but more on that later.

Sumire was also sacrificed to the hole demon in exchange for a wish, and later became a yorishiro, which is mechanically very reminiscent of Tsukasa. She also has a control complex due to the fact that she could not influence anything in her life.

She would also really like to be mourned and remembered - that is, at least some sympathy in her direction.

Hakubo, on the other hand, had problems expressing his will, and this is the main point of his personal history.

He suffers from the fact that he could have acted differently towards Sumire, these thoughts have haunted him since that day. He understands that he did not value the time spent with her during her life, he was cold in everyday life and he did not save her from death. The guilt for her death lies heavily on him.

"If I lived another life, I would have done things differently." He only grinds this thought in his head, and Sumire sits alone in the boundary, without the support of a loved one nearby.

How does this relate to Yugi?

I will continue this thought in the next post, since the image limit has ended 🙌🏻

Parts 2 and 3

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We don't need Yugi's flashback because their story has been told for a long time. (an analysis) Part 2.

3. Hakubo and Sumire. Mystery and yorishiro continue. How does this relate to Yugi? Tsukasa is also a sacrifice to the demon hole in exchan

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We don't need Yugi's flashback because their story has been told for a long time. (an analysis) Part 3.

4. Aoi and Akane, continue. Aoi is very similar to Hanako in her secretive, insecure and stubborn character. She is a cheerful introvert, i

some warmth for atsushi because he has suffered enough

I loved this episode and the Hanako blushing scene so much

14 dazai from last year i forgot to post 🤧

thoughts on beast!dazai

i have been thinking again recently about beast!dazai and that he was just a kid when he got to see the memories of the og!dazai, so it makes sense that he became so obsessed with saving oda.

just think about it, he was younger than 16, feeling lonely and he has these "vision" of someone that understands him and is by his side, someone he has a connection to and that genuinely enjoys his company and he too does enjoy being around oda (the only adult we have seen treat him like the kid he is)

oda is the closest person he has to a friend and all of it is an illusion of a future that isn't his to live and he knows the ending. oda dies and changes his life (the life of the og!zai) and there is no way to thank him, to show how important oda truly is to og!zai and him.

thanks to oda's words he knows he can find something akin to happiness, find something to appreciate and make life, even if it's just a little, worth

his only way of showing gratitud is trying to manipulate his reality to a universe where oda can live his life by his own principles, pursue his dream and find some kind of value in what he does and his life.

this decision is so full of love for his friend and that makes it so sad, because he abandons entirely the possibility of happiness to give him a life to live.

and the only thing he has to treasure are memories that aren't his. oda isn't his friend in the beast au and he makes it clear that he considers dazai his enemy

as much as he yearns for his frienship with oda, it isn't his, he will never be the other dazai. and that was his choice, because he was just a kid that wanted to do something good for someone that was important for him and abandoned a part of himself as the price.

KIMI NI TODOKE season 3 review

Sawako and Kazehaya are finally dating, but it isn't as easy and simple as expected. Meanwhile Chizu and Ayane navigate their own feelings about love.

I actually liked a lot this season, i'm not a big fan of romance and when the couples start dating i usually get bored, but it didn't happened to me this time.

About SawaKaze's relationship i enjoyed the conflict that builded up and the resolution, having them go "meeting parents" to awkwardness wasn't something i was expecting, but it made sense. Kazehaya worrying so much about doing the right thing, but losing the bigger picture while Sawako was overthinking things so much but still trying is something I love of her personality.

Then Kazehaya closing himself instead of actually talking his mind and hurting her accidentally wasn't as frustrating as i thought it would be. As I said before it made sense and I actually like a lot their talk in christmas and how it's made a parallel with the one of the past year to make the "break" of the conflict.

I really love their relationship how they grew through this season.

Chizu and Ryu were cute, one was waiting for this and it was incredible pleasing to see. Chizu's doubts and trying to navigate her feelings about Ryu before and after the confession was great especially how serious she is about it, so it didn't feel forced. A really wholesome childhood friends to lovers story.

And this season I fell in love with Ayane, don't get me wrong i already liked her, but developing her character and the arc it gave her was so good and relatable, is not the kind of character you always find (even if she is not the only one) so it felt refreshing and it was a good contrast with sawako.

Maybe, I wold have appreciated more of Miura tho, still i liked how things worked out between him and ayane. I'm not fond of all friends in a group ending up dating each other (it's boring), but i think this time it works, it felt real and how the bonds formed was natural.

To add i always adore seeing the friendship of the girls and how they accompany and support each other 🤧🤧

Now about Netflix's work, as an anime only fan i found it good paced and it was beautiful, but i didn't like how netflix uploaded it. The format of hour long episodes means people have to make themselves time to not cut it and that is annoying (at least for me), with all of them being up the same day... I really hate that.

I think there is a charm with building up the tension in weekly releases, especially with sawakaze bc it would represent more the six (6!!!!) months that pass, and that makes the payoff more satisfying (but maybe is just me).

The extra "6th episode" of summary was not the best choice in my opinion, it would have been better to be realeased before the season, it being after the s3 end it just feels weird.

So, this 3rd season was amazing, how the characters developed and the resolutions to their arcs were good. It definitely is a series that deserves it's popularity and i would recommend it to someone looking for a beautiful romance.

Japanese Linguistic Observations in Spy x Family - part 5

Part 5 - Translating humor and wordplay

Translating jokes from one language to another can be difficult, especially when the humor revolves around wordplay that's only apparent in the original language. Luckily for a comedy series like SxF, most of the humor relies on concepts that are universal to all languages, but there are the occasional jokes that require creative translation in order to get the same effect in English. What I think is the most well-known example of this kind of joke in SxF is from chapter 26, where Yuri tells Anya that "knowledge is power" during their tutoring session.

The Japanese phrase for this is 知は力 ("chi wa chikara"). Anya mishears this as ちわわぢから ("chiwawa jikara"), which means "chihuahua power," which is why we see the image of a muscular chihuahua in her thoughts. This results in Yuri calling her チワワ娘 ("chihuahua girl") from then on. Obviously this joke would be lost if translated directly, so Casey Loe, the official English translator for the SxF manga, got creative with making it work in English. He cleverly utilizes the English expression, "the whole enchilada," which sounds enough like "swole chihuahua" for Anya to believably mistake the two. This translation also makes it so that Yuri calling Anya "chihuahua girl" later on makes sense.

But unfortunately, because a series can have different companies working on the localization of its anime versus its manga, inconsistencies between the two often come up. In this case, the anime team translated this joke completely differently, and less effectively in my opinion. You can see from the below screenshots that they had Yuri use the word "unleash," which then led to Anya associating a (muscular) dog without a leash as powerful (?) Again, this translation was a stretch in my opinion and not as good as the manga version. This also makes it so that translating Yuri's nickname for Anya as "chihuahua girl" won't make sense.

But what's interesting is that, many months and episodes later in season 2, they stayed consistent with that translation and had Yuri call Anya "stupid leash girl" in episode 28.

Despite my dislike for this translation, I have to give them kudos for remembering it all that time later and not just directly translating it as "chihuahua girl." Though it makes me wonder if they'll stay consistent in season 3 where Yuri will be referring to Anya as "chihuahua girl" once again.

A further complication is that, not only do these kinds of inconsistencies exist between the anime and manga translations, but they also exist between the different streaming services that stream SxF with English subtitles throughout the world. I only have access to the subtitled version from Hulu, which is where my screenshots are from, and I think other streaming services in the US like Crunchyroll, Amazon, Netflix, etc, use the exact same subtitles. So when I refer to "the Hulu subtitles" throughout this post, I mean other major US streaming services too. However, I'm not totally sure if they all do share the same subtitle script, so if anyone who has these services could confirm, that would be great! However, @tare-anime informed me that Muse Asia's English subtitles for SxF are completely different! For example, they translated the above joke more closely to the original, by using the phrase "puppy power" and keeping Yuri's nickname for Anya as "chihuahua girl."

There are further differences with Muse Asia's translation as well, for example, they directly translate Anya's names for Loid and Yor, "chichi" and "haha," as "Father" and "Mother" instead of "Papa" and "Mama."

(thanks again to Tare for the Muse Asia screenshots!) This is different, not only compared to the Hulu subtitles, but also the official English manga as well, both of which have Anya consistently use "Papa" and "Mama."

Tare also let me know that Disney Plus in Asia, another service that streams SxF, has yet another version of the English subtitles! And these are only the subtitled versions for the US and Asia - if SxF is streamed with English subtitles in other countries, I wonder if those are different as well. That means there's at least 3-4 different English subtitle scripts for SxF, with different ways of translating certain things, like what I described above. This could make things confusing for someone without any knowledge of Japanese who reads the English version of the manga and watches the subtitled version of the anime on one or more streaming services...if they read the first few volumes of the manga with the "swole chihuahua" translation, then watch season 2 of the anime, they're gonna be confused about why Yuri calls Anya "stupid leash girl." There's other more minor inconsistencies too, like how the Hulu subtitles have Yor call Anya "Miss Anya" all the time, but the manga doesn't.

I'm sure there's some licensing reasons why there isn't one official English subtitle script that all the streaming services can use, and why they don't consult the manga translations, especially for the more difficult-to-translate parts. It seems like wasted effort for so many official English translations to exist for the same thing.

But anyway, back to the translations of jokes in SxF, another one that stood out to me occurred in chapter 23. During the scene where Loid is asking Anya about a name for Bond, he explains how dogs have trouble discerning the sounds of consonants. The phrase he uses for this is 子音の聞き分け("shiin no kiki wake"), which means "distinguishing consonants," with "shiin" meaning "consonant." However, there's another word "shiin" with the kanji 死因 that means "cause of death." This is what Yor thinks he means - 死因の聞き分け ("shiin no kiki wake"), which means "determining the cause of death." So in her thoughts, she imagines asking Bond if he prefers death by blood loss (失血死) or by being crushed (圧死), and when he shakes his head at both, she says "you're not good at these distinctions, are you?"

This is a difficult joke to translate, so Casey got a bit loose by having Loid use the word "plosives" instead of "consonants," and then having Yor mishear it as "explosives." He then changed up Yor's dialogue by having her say that Bond prefers C-4 explosions over other methods of death.

While I don't think the translation of this joke worked as well as the previous one (I feel like Yor wouldn't know about C-4 explosions?) I couldn't come up with anything better myself, lol. It just goes to show how translating things as closely to the original as possible isn't always the best choice…but oddly, that's what the Hulu subtitles did! For some reason they opted not to even attempt to rework this joke for English, and kept both Loid and Yor's dialogue as exact translations. This results in an exchange that makes no sense and will leave people wondering how Yor could mistake Loid's "can't tell consonants apart" as "can't tell causes of death apart."

However, there are some cases where the wordplay works similar enough in both Japanese and English that the joke can be translated without too much modification. An example of this is in chapter 59 where Becky asks Yor how she was able to "get" Loid…"pierce his heart" as she puts it. Yor thinks she means this literally, to which she replies that she wouldn't hurt Loid.

The Japanese version is very similar, with Becky using the verb 射止める("itomeru") which means "to shoot down" (with an arrow). However, it has a figurative meaning too, which is "to win" as in "win someone's heart." Yor thinks Becky means the literal meaning of shooting down, so she says that she wouldn't shoot Loid and that she doesn't even use a bow and arrows.

The Hulu subtitles translate it more or less directly, having Becky say "shoot an arrow through his heart" and keeping Yor's "I don't use a bow and arrows" that the manga omitted. Rare case where I think the anime translation worked better than the manga!

In the case of this joke, the concept of "shooting someone's heart" to mean "winning someone's heart" is universal in both English and Japanese, so little reworking was needed. This also helped keep consistency with Yor's tendency to associate otherwise benign concepts with violence due to the nature of her work.

I'll wrap up this post with what I think is the most commendable translation of a joke so far in the manga: how Casey translated the names of the guest characters at the ski resort in chapter 94.

Their names are puns in Japanese as well, and Annie over on Twitter already did a great breakdown of how each of the wordplay in their names was translated, so definitely check out that thread here. Since this chapter has yet to be animated, I'm really curious how the anime translators will handle this…since it seems like they don't reference the manga, they'll probably either translate the names literally or come up with their own pun names, and either will unfortunately lead to the same kind of inconsistencies between the anime and manga translations that I touched on earlier.

To summarize, humor can be a very culture/language specific thing, so it's up to the translator to make sure the same feeling is conveyed in their translation even if they have to essentially make up their own jokes. With that said, it's a shame that there isn't collaboration between the translators of the anime and manga to ensure consistent translations across the franchise. So I hope this post helped shed light, not just on how some of the jokes in SxF were conveyed in Japanese, but also on why some things in the English version of SxF seem inconsistent between the anime and manga.

<- Return to Part 4

tiesa quedé 🧍‍♀️🧍‍♀️

Now that we know Fyodor is old af, wouldn’t it be so funny if Fyodor reveals that he is Atsushi’s father?