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charmed and enamored by his abandonment issues

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i used to hate the tales of the abyss ending for leaving off on an ambigious and otherwise quiet note, but i know better now. ive had an entire character arc. ive grown. and honestly i believe its not only the best ending in the series - of the ones ive played, so far, i have high hopes for xillia 2 - but it fits the game perfectly. luke's character arc gets wrapped up perfectly, and you know exactly what happens with the rest of the party, so there aren't many loose ends. there are several side quests in the game that tell you exactly what happened to luke and asch, as well, and yet the man in the epilogue has several characteristics from luke himself. they give you the perfect amount of info to have a clue as to what happened, and a perfect amount of assorted pieces to leave you guessing. it really is a matter of not who deserves to live more - because the game itself beat you over the head with that every time luke and asch came on screen - but what you, the player, wants to believe. even if its narratively sound that asch lives, you could want to see luke come to terms with his life in the epilogue instead. even if you think luke earned his happy ending, you could prefer to see the resolution to asch's character arc. it could be both of them. it could be neither. frankly, whatever he said or looks like has no meaning in the grand scheme of the epilogue -- regardless of what you believe there is and will never be a "canon" answer. there was never meant to be one. it rules!!

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I liked your Zestiria and SNX content and I was wondering if you moved on from the Tales series after ToZ or if there just wasn't much about ToB/ToA to blog about for you

oh man!! I didn't think there was anyone left in the world still paid any kind of attention to my zestiria fic! (or the snx ones either I suppose. somehow those still feel so recent but damn, it's already been two years.) I definitely wouldn't say I've moved on from tales - I'm actually smack in the middle of a long-time-coming abyss replay and have been seriously considering a zestiria replay afterwards - but.... yeah, unfortunately neither berseria nor arise did much for me, save for the parts of berseria that functioned as zestiria lore.

I'm hopeful for the future of the series, though, with snx's director heading the team and with all the talk about rereleasing older titles to be available on modern hardware! I have my fingers crossed hard for the abyss remake of my dreams, featuring updated graphics and all-new character models and fully orchestrated music and new content with all the original voice actors AND full english voice acting for all the skits (not going to happen), and for an eventual new title that I can really sink my teeth into (more plausible)

...and someday, maybe, I might like to try to return to the zestiria fic (even less likely than getting the dream abyss remake tbh)

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This is probably so random but I read Can't Help Falling in like 2 days which is the fastest I've ever read a fanfic that long and I just want to say- WHOA!! Fantastic job!! I'm so floored by your ability to perfectly capture the comedic nature of all the Ososan boys while simultaneously introducing an impressive amount of drama. It felt really natural! And your prose spoiled all other Ososan fanfic for me- no one does it like you! Excited to read TATA next :)

waaah I'm flattered!! I'm glad you had such a good time with it!! I remember having a lot of fun with the comedy elements and how they played against the more serious developments, it's great to hear that you enjoyed it all so much! I hope tata treats you just as well!!

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first time in a while drawing the oc-in-law (aka friend's roleplay oc)

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I just want you to know your time and time again fic lives rent free in my head, i dont even osomatsu anymore but sometimes im just struck w the memory of your fic and im like OUGH… THAT SHIT HURTED /pos

I'm glad you had a good time with it! what an honor to have been able to make something that still gets thought about even years later!! really makes the whole thing feel so incredibly worthwhile

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thinking about the ring of gluttony

you may have noticed that in the official releases - both the anime and the manga - what fans usually call the "ring of gluttony" is instead called the "gluttonous feeder ring." this doesn't sound nearly as concise and catchy while communicating basically the same concept, so why'd they go with it?

the og name of the ring is 悪食の指輪/akujiki no yubiwa, where yubiwa = ring and akujiki, according to weblio (online jp dictionary), = eating things that aren't usually eaten, things that others would consider strange, or things that are crude/shabby/low quality. (it's also apparently a word for how eating meat is forbidden in buddhism, but I don't think that's relevant.) "gluttony" is a valid enough translation for this, BUT

this is a story about demons, so when we hear "gluttony," it's just a short mental hop over to the seven deadly sins. however, the jp wikipedia page for the seven deadly sins translates gluttony to 暴食/boushoku, a completely different word that weblio defines as overeating or eating voraciously - in other words, uh... gluttony. so actually, the ring and the sin have completely different names.

this isn't to say that there's no connection at all between iruma and the sin of gluttony, of course - our iruma represented gluttony in the 7-year anniversary artwork featuring all the deadly sins, and he's well known for inhaling way more food than he needs (i.e. exercising gluttony). but I think there's a tendency to see "ring of gluttony" and think that it has something to do with iruma embodying sin or that it suggests the existence of a ring of pride, a ring of sloth, etc., but these kinds of associations are almost assuredly not intended since, if the author did want to invoke that connotation, there's a different word that would have done so much more effectively

in conclusion official tls call it the gluttonous feeder ring precisely because it's not the ring of gluttony, it's the ring of will-eat-anything-indiscriminately. all-consuming ring? too ominous. all-hungry ring perhaps? or maybe they specifically wanted to use a word similar to "gluttony" as a nod at the demon-ish setting, since the og term uses the 悪 kanji (aku/evil/the first kanji in the word "demon")

idk! them's the thoughts for today.

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stream of consciousness thoughts about jp>en translation as it pertains to closeness in demon society, etc.

it's no mystery that when iruma asks azz and clara if he can think of them as friends, the word he uses is 友達/tomodachi. it's a casual word that denotes... you know, a friend. someone you like to spend time with. very straightforward.

there's also a more formal word for friend, 友人/yuujin, but to the best of my knowledge this one doesn't get used in mairuma, and this may be because it seems to strictly avoid using the 人 kanji (hito/jin/nin/person). it's often said that the way 人 is written makes it look like the two strokes are supporting one another, implying that people are things that live with the support of others. to my understanding this isn't the actual origin of the glyph, but it is a fairly common saying - and so it fits the worldbuilding nicely that the highly egocentric demons don't have 人 in their language. they do use the word "hito" sometimes, but I can't recall seeing it written in kanji

speaking of words demons do have, we see 仲間/nakama quite a bit, but while there are plenty of situations where it's valid to translate nakama to "friend," you don't actually have to like someone to consider them thus. someone is your "nakama" when you're united under the same banner, so to speak. it could be a classmate or a teammate or a coworker - anyone you share circumstances and goals with. the fact that this is one of the most friend-adjacent words demons have is also very like them.

demons also have 仲良し/nakayoshi and 仲が良い/naka ga ii, both of which describe getting along with and having a good relationship with someone. so demons do clearly have the concept of friendship, even if they don't have the word for it.

anyway, soulmates. the word iruma uses to describe what azz is to him is 親友/shinyuu, which is... I mean, it's really hard to translate this as anything but "best friend." it's a very close friend and/or someone you've been friends with for a long time. however, there's two reasons it's hard to translate 親友 to "best friend" specifically in the context of mairuma, both of which are summed up in this exchange:

it's a word that azz doesn't recognize. demons have the word "best" and azz knows the word "friend," so why would he have to ask what a "best friend" is? shinyuu sounds completely unlike tomodachi, so to have the same effect, the english word used to translate it also has to sound completely unlike "friend"

iruma's kind of embarrassed about it. "best friend" is usually a rather light term in english and not one we'd typically get flustered talking about. your best friend might just be the person you like spending time with more than anyone else. you could be talking about the past and say someone "was your best friend back then" and it doesn't necessarily suggest that you had a falling out or anything, you might have just kind of drifted apart or met someone else you got even closer to or something similar. I don't know if I'm explaining this completely accurately but from what I gather, "shinyuu" is more of an intimate, time-tested friendship. there seems to be a certain level of emotional vulnerability associated with it that "best friend" doesn't always convey by default.

if absolutely pressed for an alternative translation, I might posit "kindred spirit," but that doesn't quite feel like as natural a thing to say as "soulmate." I do think it's a shame that it has that automatic romantic connotation, but honestly that's society's failure. embrace the concept of platonic soulmates, you cowards.

anyway, them's the thoughts.

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couldn't possibly let the snx anniversary go by without drawing the fav

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a sketch that won't go any further because there's so many things I want to change that it'd be easier to just redraw it

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trying new stuff means new balam portrait

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Hi! I was a casual viewer of osomatsu san around 2021 and never really engaged with or consumed fandom content, so with the announcement of season 4, I decided to take a peek at the popular fanfics on a whim. I’ll cut to the chase- Time and Time Again is by far one of the best fanfics I’ve ever read (though I haven’t read many). Your prose and storytelling is enrapturing and had me on the edge of my seat the whole time. I finished in 2 days and loved every second. Thank you for writing this fic!

thank you for reading it, and moreover for taking the time to let me know you enjoyed it!! time and time again was an endeavor that once made me hate writing and then made me love it again, and in the end it became something that I think I can even say I'm proud of. I'm so glad to know that there are still people discovering and enjoying it all these years later 💕

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it's been a year today since I posted the first chapter of a little more like hell and I thought it'd be fun to make something like a cover image for it

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why's this kid so hard to pose!

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maybe this has already been discussed somewhere since the fanbook came out last year but I've only just gotten around to giving it a good look and there's something that caught my eye

so, most of the characters have a line in their profile that says what other characters they pay extra attention to. it's all pretty predictable stuff - they pay attention to characters they have significant relationships with or who they've had noteworthy interactions with, i.e. love trio all pay attention to each other, jazz pays attention to allocer and furfur and his older brother, keroli pays attention to iruma and lied and gyari, blushenko pays attention to sabro, ifrit pays attention to azz, etc. etc. but there's one that kinda stood out to me:

the people marbas pays attention to are iruma and balam. like, am I forgetting something? the only interaction I remember between marbas and iruma is during the heartbreaker when iruma rescued jazz and I can imagine how that might make an impression, but when has he ever even talked to balam? why is he paying extra attention to balam? why is he paying extra attention to the human and the only teacher who knows he's human??

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ooh it's been a while since I last thought about this subject, lemme see if I can dredge the explanation up from the depths of my own bell-pepper head. so, bell peppers are hollow, and in japanese (though I don't know if this is old slang that you wouldn't hear anymore or something that's still said) you can effectively call someone empty-headed by comparing them to a bell pepper. in snx this seems to have been elevated to something like a slur against people without any psychic affinity and then reclaimed by them

it's worth noting that the japanese word for "bell pepper" is ピーマン/piiman, but they instead use the english word "bell pepper" in snx. I assume this was done because the english word "bell pepper" would be less likely to bring the vegetable to mind for the japanese audience, hence sounding less silly. yuito I think even has a line about it - "bell peppers (eng)? as in, piiman (jp)?" - to make sure the audience knows what the word is even if they're not familiar with it. the english audience, of course, would have no problem recognizing "bell pepper," would always think of the vegetable, and would find it really silly to hear it all the time, so they chose to localize it to something similarly vaguely insulting and implicit of undesirable properties: dud

day 19 - translation aside, I have a handful of gripes about scarlet nexus’s localization choices. first of all is changing out bell peppers for “dud.” I know why they did it, I know it’s not the same experience hearing the english word “bell pepper” as an english-speaker vs. hearing it as a japanese-speaker, but still. second is how they changed kasane’s surprisingly childish “mama” to the formal and detached “mother.” and third is that they took the head of the historic sumeragi family, descendant of yakumo, husband of wakana, and father of yuito and kaito, and romanized his name to JOE.

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this isn't relevant to anything but every now and then it comes to mind: Mephisto's title as one of the 13 crowns. when he was first introduced during the deviculum, he was called the Gamesman. the next time he appeared at Siren Island, he was called the Mindgames King. two different translators, two very different translations. why so?

in the raws, he's called 盤外王 - or Off-Board King, to take it strictly literally. "board" in this context refers to a game board like for chess or shogi. "off-board" can mean in the literal sense, i.e. the place where game pieces are put when they're captured and removed from the board, but from what I've read, I get the impression it's more often a figure of speech. 盤外戦術, or "off-board tactics," refers to acts of psychological warfare: things a player might say or do before and during a game to get into their opponent's head and influence the outcome.

so I would think, then, that Mephisto's title suggests that he's very good at subtly manipulating whatever events he's a part of, likely by acting on elements outside of those events. dunno what the cleanest, easiest-to-understand way to translate that, but it's something interesting to think about wrt him declaring himself Iruma's ally.