#i brainrotted so hard over all these blog posts but translating them -> brain juice dead

[winterswhite]

So, translating drained me a little, but I have been meaning to talk about my thoughts on this year's relay blog, and a discussion in the Kisetsu server about the Homare -> Citron post order sparked a ramble from me, so I figured I'd post it here, too.

I think putting Homare and Citron in sequence was really fun and showed us a lot more about both of them than any other order could have this year. While at first glance it looks like Homare trying to fill out Citron's profile properly until the "someone I look up to" section, and Citron responding with nothing but jokes, but looking properly at both posts, you see a lot more of each of their characters and development.

The way I saw it, with Homare putting down his own name for Citron's "someone I look up to," it would've been easy to dismiss that as showing that Homare still struggles with understanding people, but Citron's reaction ended up proving that he was right, and it wasn't just by chance that he was. Homare says himself that he analyzed Citron over and over again, and it shows in all three sections of the profile book that he *does* understand him, with him writing down "wordplay" for Citron's hobby, pegging him as someone prone to loneliness (there's a ramble about shared feelings of isolation somewhere here) and wanting to love (again, I could go off about Citron loving harugumi and expecting nothing in return), and even in the names he put down in all three flowers in the association corner, including his own. The way he was able to do this and the way he talks about it both show a great deal of his development and how much more confident he's become in his ability to understand the people around him.

Going forward, Citron's reaction to his profile only further solidifies the idea that Homare saw right through him. He felt seen, his perfectly crafted character was seen right through, and his entire blog was a response to that feeling.

He starts off his post with a title in his typical misspelled fashion (though this carries very different meaning in Japanese than I could ever convey in English with him using wildly inappropriate kanji instead of just misspelling or using hiragana instead of katakana or vice versa and I think it's really interesting what kanji he chose for his own name because they imply these choices were very intentional, especially in combination with what he chose for Guy, but I digress), setting up the expectation for a typical Citron blog, but from the very first sentence, the tone of the post completely changes and Citron is suddenly speaking in a formal and proper way that he hasn't before. He also says:

This time, I thought it would be better to make this easier for everyone to read, so I adopted this way of writing. However, my other blogs have always gotten through to you, right?

Immediately, readers think something is off, and to anyone who doesn't know what Citron is really like, the first question is "okay, who wrote this for him?" And that question is further justified by the way he ends his blog with "Written by: ???" (the Japanese word is 代筆, writing on someone's behalf), creating the impression that he didn't write this post himself; someone else had to write it for him. His hobby is wordplay, you say? What wordplay? He's simply bad at Japanese and messes up his words out of genuine inexperience. Silly Homare. To any outsider, it would seem that Homare genuinely is mistaken, but Homare knows, as we readers do, that he hit the nail on the head with that one, and it takes someone who can understand other people to see that Citron is just putting up a front.

This is further seen in the profiles he filled out, a stark contrast to the tone of the blog post in how joke-y they are, especially when right after correcting his own, he tells Homare not to joke around like that.

His corrections are filled with references to his manzai duo with Tsuzuru, where we all know he plays the role of the boke or funny man. Aside from acting silly throughout his corrections, there are three references to manzai in that one sheet, serving to really drive the point home; he's just a funny man, no more, no less. The first is him writing in "manzai" for his hobby, the second is him crossing out "A kind person" and saying Tsuzuru is his tsukkomi (straight man) in Citrun, and the third, which I meant to clarify in the posts at some point but forgot to, is his reaction/response to Homare's incorrect username for him. I tried to have it come across by having it say "what the heck?" to make it sound sillier than something like "what the hell?" or "what are you talking about?", which are also both correct translations of the phrase he used. That phrase is 「なんでやねん？」, which means what I said above, except that it's in Kansai dialect as opposed to 'standard' Tokyo Japanese, the significance of that being that the Kansai dialect is frequently associated with manzai.

In combination with the way he misspells Sakyo's name in two different ways and jokes around on his entire profile (especially by adding on that he's unsure of Sakyo's ID when it's obvious that the ID is the only thing he got anywhere near the correct answer with), it's clear that Citron is trying to drive two points home: that he's bad at Japanese, and that he's a funny man whose character runs no deeper than it seems on the surface. Essentially, he's all but telling Homare that he hit too close to the truth in a way that only Homare will be able to see; to anyone else, it's just Citron being his usual silly self, and that's why I really appreciate that these two got put one after the other. It gave us a really interesting look at both of their characters that I don't think any other medium would have showed us as well as these blog posts did.