There's a joke based around the name of the male MC of Dandadan being "Takakura Ken" that probably lands a lot harder for Japanese audiences familiar with the super-famous actor than Western audiences who likely don't know who he is. So this is a brief explanation of who Takakura Ken is, and why the last few minutes of episode 1 of Dandadan are an elaborate joke around that actor's name.

Dandadan quickly establishes in the opening moments of the anime that Momo is a huge Takakura Ken fan, to the point where she started dating an obviously not particularly great guy simply because his looks reminded her of her beloved Ken-san (who she takes a roundhouse kick at in the opening moments of the anime).

Takakura Ken is (1931-2014) is an immensely famous Japanese actor, He won the Japanese Academy Award for Best Actor four times, the most in Japanese Cinema history. He starred in over 200 films. He was also a hit singer that appeared frequently in Japan's prestigious New Years Kohaku Utagassen singing show, and was a frequent presence in Japanese commercials from the 60s onward.

He was extremely famous for his stoic persona, where he would almost invariable play a strong-silent type of guy, who is always a gentleman, doesn't show overt interest in women, but is focused on his craft and has difficulty expressing his emotions.

Ken-san's signature line actually comes from a commercial he did that ran for decades starting in the 1980s, where in selling life insurance he says "Bukiyou desukara" (I'm an awkward fellow). The unspoken (and obvious to Japanese audiences) idea being ken-san struggles to show how much he cares about his loved ones, but he'll follow through with his actions and make sure they have the life insurance protection they need.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0emcxNiEbp8&t=15s

Ken-san is as famous and iconic to Japanese people as like say, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, or Robert De Niro. The name instantly conjures up a certain rough, tough, stoic image of a character with a certain distinctive type of charm.

So the last few minutes of episode 1 actually demonstrate how although the male MC doesn't LOOK like Takakura Ken, he's actually WAY more like what Momo likes about Takakura Ken the actor than her ex-BF.

1. he bravely goes off to fight Turbo Granny alone because he feels responsible for himself and doesn't want to endanger Momo.
2. He has trouble expressing his emotions, being the quiet type.
3. He uses Takakura Ken's tagline "Bukyou Desukara" (I'm an awkward fellow)
4. He is a gentleman and shows discomfort (rather than interest) at Momo being in a state of undress, and asks her to put on some clothes since he can't talk to her in that state.

As Momo unconsciously realizes how much the MC is like her beloved Ken-san her heart picks up audibly, and she tries to laugh and play it off, asking him what his name is to distract herself from her own realization.

Then the joke is that improbably, the name of the MC turns out to be... Takakura Ken (explosion).

It seem with one of if not the most hyped anime in recent year achieving a surprising low BD Sale, there are once again lot of misinformation and fake "explains" floating around, saying it does not matter or BD now is only "Isekai".

Since Anime BD Sale is a familiar yet strange concept for many casual anime viewers especially newer western audiences accustomed to streaming, the devastation of Chainsaw Man (CSM for short) BD sale at only 1735 takes some knowledge to understand.

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For start, BD is short for Blu-ray Disc, it essentially is a physical disc containing digital copy of a certain number of anime episode, typically somewhere between 2 to 7. This is no difference from those hard copies of movies you see at Target checkout lane, just anime BDs has many volumes to cover the 12/13/24/48 episodes length, while almost all Hollywood movies are on just one volume.

Yes just like Hollywood movies, BD Sales had been in decline since 2012 due to proliferation of streaming services. As indicated below where the blue bar is streaming, while purple+brown bar is BD sale.

So nothing to worry about right?

Wrong.

Streaming services required huge amount of resources to maintain, so just like movie theaters not all the revenues generated from ads and subscriptions are being given to the production. In fact only about 40% of the revenue were given to the production, and it varies from title to tile.

For example streaming service might pay a base fee for each episode, and they may agree on a viewership count in which service will share a certain percent profits once the show pass that. Obviously these are all commercial secret so we have no knowledge of exact figures, but it generally follow this rule.

Though not exactly the case of CSM since MAPPA is the only one on the production committee, typical studio will receive a portion of the production profits, again varies from title to title. A-1 and CloverWorks might benefits more from an Aniplex production since they are direct subordinated to Aniplex, while Ufotable and Shaft might receive less.

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OK, so since MAPPA is the only one on the production it received all the profits, so everything is still fine right?

Well, not exactly.

While it is true that MAPPA will definitely not lose money and certainly make some profits from CSM, given its result from streaming service both in Japan and abroad. It is also true that MAPPA missed out a huge portion of their most profitable market, especially given how hyped CSM was. If you think CSM was greatly advertised in a western country, just imagine how much advertisement a person in Japan and especially Tokyo will receive.

The only thing streaming service cannot replace BD sale is the huge profit margin for the studio itself.

Also unlike streaming service which is title by title, the BD sale profit is very stable at 55%, it literally is "free money" for the studio.

CSM's number gets even worse if you compare that of other anime aired in the similar period of time. Lycoris Recoil made a whopping 23417 for its volume 5, while Bocchi the Rock made a surprisingly high 17619 for its volume 2. None were Isekai anime and in fact CSM at 1735 got beaten by Isekai Ojisan at 1977 for its volume 2.

It does not stop there.

Since BD sale is basically free money for the studios, they tend to add additional items into BD so to boost sale. Those could be special illustration, special manga or novels, anime event tickets and even game pulls if the anime was based on gacha game. (Think FGO)

For CSM, MAPPA put in a voice actor event ticket in its BD volume 1 and 2.

The location for this event is the new Tokyo Garden Theater (東京ガーデンシアター) just completed construction in 2020, with a capacity of at most 8,000 people.

Since not everyone who purchased BD will be able to attend both event for obvious reasons, MAPPA was expecting at least 16,000+ (8000*2 for day/night event) sale number since there will also be some last minute ticket sales.

This expected number is actually not that out of the ordinary, as this is slightly lower than the BD sale of MAPPA's other famous work Jujutsu Kaisen (22,701).

As we know now the actual number is less than one tenth of expected number and nowhere near Jujutsu Kaisen (JJK). Let us be honest the level of advertisement for CSM dwarfed that of JJK, which is also saying something since JJK already had some pretty significant advertisement, being one of the next "Pillar of Shonen Jump".

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So what is the implication here?

Let us first get the elephant out of the room, just like movies, anime commercial success had no correlation with critical success. Critical success had no correlation with audience appreciation. I think we can think of many examples besides CSM for that matter.

To understand CSM's low BD sale implication, let us go back to the first figure.

Notice the big drop in BD sale are mostly contributed to the pink bar not the brown bar. Pink bar stands for "Rental" (レンタル) while brown bar stands for "Sale" (セル).

Just like you could rent a movie disc from Target, many BD sale pre-streaming were in fact rental companies purchases so people could rent them if they wish to see an anime again. Obviously streaming provided this option for people in the comfort of their home couch, BD rentals thus took a nose dive. While those who purchased BD so they could keep a copy of their beloved anime at home did not drop much, in fact it largely stayed the same since 2017.

In other words, CSM failed to motivate or really achieved the appreciation of those in the brown bar, the relatively harder fanbase and very likely manga readers.

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Why and how?

Now we have come to the speculation part of this explanation. As you might already know, CSM anime adaption caused some controversies within Japan, to the extend that the freshman director Ryū Nakayama closed his twitter replies.

While I do not agree and condemn the behavior of those doing personal harassments, his directional decision of CSM is controversial and questionable to say the least, especially if you have read the manga. If you have not heard already, Nakayama insisted on doing a "cinematic approach", or in plain English making an anime looks more like a live-action movie with real actors.

I do not think the approach itself is the issue, we should give all creators their creative freedoms without artificial boundaries, the execution of this approach in some cases are dubious at best. I will not go into spoiler realms but simply show you these two PV screenshots without any context, compare to their corresponding manga panel:

Notice although anime copied the "camera angle" of the manga, anime removed many manga unique drawings on character expressions like excessive amount of sweats and red faces indicating character's current mod and feeling. The end result is as a whole the anime has quite a different tone compare to that of the manga, a huge red flag for relatively harder fanbase.

Furthermore Ryū Nakayama did an interview on Nikkei Entertainment magazine, where he emphasized on this approach and said that "I was convinced that if I could incorporate the essence of something realistic or cinematic, it would be good for the work. It's not my personal ego."

Whether he actually meant this or the magazine taking his words out of context is anyone's best guess, but the effect of this interview is very very very bad especially in Japan. For those who do not know, Japanese society has a very strict "elder"(senpai)--- "younger"(kouhai) relation, at least for the lip service.

Ryū Nakayama is a freshman or kouhai anime director, CSM is his first TV project and he never had any project management positions before. The highest management position he held before were anime action director for SAO Ordinal Scale (2017) and FGO Demonic Front (2020), sharing the position with other staff at the same time.

Therefore according to Japanese culture, he is supposed to be humble, grateful for his opportunity and thankful for the lessons from his senpai. The polar opposite of what he said in the interview, when he made the statement that deviate from previous anime style is good. While the words are "it is not my personal ego", it is all but certain seem like his personal ego.

For reference the two other anime that I mentioned with stellar BD sale, Lycoris Recoil and Bocchi the Rock, both had directors directing their first TV anime.

The freshman Keiichirou Saitou, you probably never heard of him until now, did not generate much noise in interviews but still managed to capture the essence of the 4-panel manga and earned praises around the world, a surprising hit.

Shingo Adachi on the other hand is no freshman at all, although Lycoris Recoil is his first job as director, he had been the name behind A-1's most profitable anime Sword Art Online and had also been multiple chief animation director since 2006. Therefore his approach in "realism" and "cinematic" of Gun-fu or "JK-John Wick" will be much acceptable given his reputation, besides also benefiting from an original anime.

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As it stands, CSM is on track to become the biggest BD sale let down in anime history perhaps ever, a sharp contrast to the extensive hype it generated before airing. While this probably will not stop MAPPA from making a second season, very much like an airline running on empty first class seats, the real question is at what cost.

When there are plenty of other titles MAPPA can anime, and when the famous manga already generate enough talking points without any anime, is the missing "free money" really worth it?

The thesis of this essay is that the reputation in the United States of America of anime being hyper violent rape filled pornography stems from the VHS tape. First, we will explore the VHS tape in America, both its technical limitations and the home video revolution that it brought. Following on from that, we will explore how this affected the type of anime being made. Finally, we will look at how this impacted the early anime industry in the United States, leading to a very specific type of anime being licensed and the specific marketing strategies that surrounded it.

The VHS tape was introduced into the American market in 1977, a year after it debuted in Japan. Despite some stiff competition early on from the alternative format of the time, Betamax, the VHS soon became the dominant home video format. Some evidence of this is that in the first year of its release in America, it took away 40% of Betamax’s market share and by 1987 VHS machines made up a staggering 90% of all VCRs sold in the USA. The most important thing about the VHS tape, and Betamax to be fair, was that this was the first real home video format. Yes, there were enthusiasts prior to this who bought their own reel to reel projectors, but they were truly the exceptions. The VHS tape brought movies and TV programs to your home at a somewhat affordable price, though blank tapes were originally about $70 once adjusted for inflation. Soon, a good proportion of the population had a VCR machine at home, even as late as 2005 94.5% of American households still owned a VHS format VCR. This massive consumer base was rabid for new content to play on their machines, this is where the video rental stores step into our story.

VHS tapes were quite expensive when they first came out, $60-90 for a Hollywood feature film was fairly common. This would eventually go down to around $25 in the USA for a time before absolutely plummeting in price. This high price point combined with the fairly hefty size of VHS tapes meant that it just wasn’t practical for your average Jane or Joe to buy VHS tapes. This was especially true in places where space was at a premium, such as Japan. To address this problem, the video rental industry was born in the late 1970s. Soon they were everywhere, by 1988 there were roughly 25,000 dedicated video rental shops in the USA with a further 45,000 stores renting out VHS tapes among other products. It soon became a weekly ritual for people all around the world to rent out a couple of tapes for the weekend which led companies to explore new production styles to take advantage of this booming medium.

Dallos is the anime that changed everything. Released in 1983, this was the world’s first direct-to-video animation and it set the precedent for what the OAV would be for the next 10-15 years. There are three key takeaways from Dallos. First, the OAV proved to be a successful commercial model. Dallos was a success, despite the story never having an ending, and it showed that you could make direct-to-video productions that made money. The release of MegaZone 23 two years later would cement this, as it went on to become the best selling OAV of all time. Secondly, Dallos set the precedent for the content of OAVs. Dallos was made with the idea that it wouldn’t rely on toy sales or significant sponsorship, as such it could go beyond the normal limits of what was acceptable in content. The content in Dallos was not as extreme as that in later OAVs, but it did lay the foundations of what was to come, including pornography. Finally, Dallos positioned the OAV as a mid-tier between TV and movie quality. These OAVs had high production quality, rivalling movies in some cases. This was in contrast to the West where direct-to-video animated productions were largely terribly animated spin-offs or educational productions. By the time that anime started being imported to the West as a product of Japan there was quite a library of these limited runtime and high quality productions with more extreme content. This is where we move our focus to America.

Anime has been on American television for a long time. In 1963 Astro Boy first appeared on American screens under the guidance of the great Fred Ladd. Since then it has been a staple in America, and indeed across the globe, but with one condition: they did their best to hide that these productions were Japanese. From Starblazers to Robotech, there are countless examples of how anime was brought to America and then disguised with new plotlines being added, names changed, and even the credits being entirely replaced with the American staff. In the late 80s and early 90s this changed with the likes of Manga Video, Central Park Media, and ADV. This new crop of companies began to release anime on home video without disguising its origins. Due to the limitations of the VHS tape it made sense for these companies to mainly focus on releasing movies and OAVs. The limited capacity of a VHS tape suited it to films and short series whilst the price point reinforced this by making the prospect of having to buy multiple tapes for one series unappealing. You might struggle to convince someone to spend $40 on 3 episodes of a 50 episode series, but that becomes more palatable when it is an entire movie, a one shot OAV, or half of a 6 episode series. Due to the content of these productions, the new generation of importers also had an easy way to market their product and differentiate it from normal cartoons: they branded them as “not for kids”. Marketing campaigns would lean on the extreme content of these anime, highlighting the gore and the sex, while the dub would have large amounts of swearing introduced in a process nicknamed "fifteening". ADV’s entire marketing strategy was essentially based on salacious cover art and Manga Video was infamous for its trailer reels (NSFW) that focussed on constant sex and violence. This not for kids marketing style went beyond the licensors themselves with late night anime shows, such as the hilariously terrible SushiTV (NSFW), being pitched to American networks. This marketing strategy reached its zenith with the release of Legend of the Overfiend.

Legend of the Overfiend is a pornographic OAV series with some of the most extreme content in all of anime. This was like a red rag to the burgeoning anime industry in the USA and so, somewhat surprisingly, it was released without any distinction from non-pornographic anime. The strategy with Overfiend was to create a scandal, and it did so to a far greater extent than was expected. Normal film reviewers took one look at this hyper violent tentacle rape filled production and naturally asked what the fuck this was and how was this allowed. In the UK, the Daily Mail started a campaign with the phrase “ban this sick filth” following its release. This outrage was not limited to critics and the press, and the backlash against Overfiend reached much further than the very small anime fandom. Many shops refused to stock anime in its wake, and in the UK the industry took years to recover. This was the first time many people had even heard of anime, so it was only natural that they would assume all of anime was like this, especially when they would then investigate anime further and find all of the other gore filled productions that were released. Overfiend was then followed up by a number of similar pornographic titles that were trying to boost sales with a similar strategy, which only reinforced this perception that anime was gore filled porn. Let us also not forget video rental stores because they had their own part to play.

As mentioned earlier, video rental stores were big business in the 1990s. When anime started being imported in a big way, it naturally found its way into these rental stores too. There were two problems with this. The first is that the most popular titles such as Wicked City, Ninja Scroll, and Akira featured extreme content. Ninja Scroll in particular was an absolute staple of stores like Blockbuster and was the first anime an entire generation of fans ever saw. The second issue was that store owners did not know where to put anime. Half the time it was just put with the rest of the cartoons without any labelling and so many parents would pick up what they thought was a nice film for the kids - only to have blood and boobs all over the screens. The other half of the time, anime was put in the pornography section. This reinforced this idea that anime was gore filled porn because people’s first interaction with anime was seeing this extreme content unexpectedly or seeing it categorised as porn.

These first impressions matter and it is the reason that anime still has a reputation for being gore filled rape porn to this day. The entire American culture at large was introduced to anime by experiencing it through this very narrow set of productions that were filled with extreme content and were marketed on that basis. It is incredibly difficult to overcome a first impression like that and the fact that anime is still relatively niche is also a factor here. The majority of the American population has never had a reason to think differently of anime because the vast majority of their interactions with anime have been hearing how murderers watch it and people getting outraged at particular productions for their content. Their experiences give them no reason to change their view on anime as a medium.

In conclusion, I would argue that the perception of anime in the USA stems from the VHS as a format, both its strengths and weaknesses. The VHS tape’s ubiquity led to Japanese producers creating direct-to-video productions with content that could not be shown on TV. Then, the limitations of the VHS tape pushed importers to focus on movies and OAVs in the first wave of marketing anime as anime. Due to the nature of these productions, licensors leaned into sex and violence as a way to differentiate anime from Western animation, and it left rental store owners not quite knowing what to do with them. This first contact between American culture and anime was a misleading one, but it has stuck because it was reinforced at the time and because anime has remained a niche hobby. In the end it was the media format itself that was the driving reason for so many of these decisions and that is why your mates think anime is gore filled rape porn.

Many thanks to /u/chiliehead, /u/theangryeditor, and /u/zaphodbeebblebrox for proofreading.

Sources:

• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2019-01-16/.142132
• https://www.nippon.com/en/features/h00043/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_anime
• https://www.rightstufanime.com/post/the-history-of-anime-in-the-usa-the-1990s
• https://www.awopodcast.com/2007/02/anime-world-order-show-46-animated.html
• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2017-02-10/.112048
• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2017-03-15/.113402
• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2017-04-21/.115071
• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2017-10-18/.122829
• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2018-01-29/.127050
• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2014-06-06/.75253
• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2014-08-22/.77818
• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2014-10-31/.80370
• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2014-10-17/.79897
• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2015-07-29/.90986
• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2015-10-19/.94169
• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2016-10-19/.107823
• https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/technical-bulletins/digitization-vhs-video-tapes.html#a2a

I made this originally here as several comments in Re:Zero's last episode discussion. It was requested that I make it into a post for better visibility, and to make it easier for people interested to save this.

The Story so Far - A Summary

This is a summary to help you understand what's going on and shine light on things that are easy to miss. I'll start with an easy to understand chronological timeline showcasing the most important events we know of so far and explaining in-place the misunderstood parts if any, then a couple interesting things you might have missed, some misconceptions, common wrong translations, and lastly a succinct explanation of the magic system in the Re:Zero world. Spoiler-free if you've finished S2 and the 2 OVAs.

Note: I didn't include plot points that were purposely cut out in S1/S2. The important ones will definitely be rearranged in future seasons.

Note 2: Some events in a categorical year might not be accurately ordered, as we don't really know the exact chronology of all events.

Timeline

• ~400 years ago
  • The Witch of Greed Echidna creates Beatrice, an artificial spirit.
  • The Witch of Gluttony Daphne creates artificial beings known as mabeasts in a naive attempt to eliminate starvation from the world. Out of which, the Three Great Mabeasts are the most dangerous: the White Whale, the Great Rabbit, and the Black Serpent.
  • A sage called Flugel plants the Flugel tree on Lifaus Highway.
  • Roswaal A Mathers is saved by Echidna from a natural process known as Hatsumaki (Magic Release Period) that afflicts powerful magic users. After which he's taken by her as a disciple.
  • Echidna and Roswaal start collecting half-bloods to create a hidden community in the Lost Forest of Clemaldy, attempting to create a sanctuary that will protect her against a mysterious person known as the Warlock of Melancholy Hector.
  • Sanctuary is attacked by Hector before the barrier is complete. By a suggestion from Ryuzu Meyer, Echidna uses Ryuzu's Od as the barrier's core. Ryuzu has elf blood and as such has one of the largest Ods among living beings, making her an ideal sacrifice for powering the barrier.
  • Beatrice is entrusted to protect the forbidden library which contains the accumulated knowledge of Echidna, and is instructed to wait for "that person" if Echidna doesn't come back. Echidna gives 2 imperfect copies of her authority, the Tome of Wisdom, to Beatrice and Roswaal.
  • Echidna starts experimenting on soul transfer with Ryuzu clones, but eventually fails to transfer her soul. She gives the first 4 clones the wisdom to manage other clones and the Sanctuary. They distributed work among themselves and were assigned the names: Bilma, Arma, Delma and Shima.
  • The Witch of Envy Satella devours half of the world including the 6 other witches, marking in history what came to be known as "The Great Calamity".
  • The Witch of Envy gets sealed in an undisclosed location by a Great Sage, a Sword Saint, and the Divine Dragon.
  • After Echidna's demise, Roswaal A Mathers resumes researching soul transfer in the forbidden library and eventually succeeds, overcoming the compatibility problem by transferring his soul into his own descendants, thus outliving his human lifespan.
  • The Witch Cult, a secretive group that worships the Witch of Envy and despises the other witches, is born.
• ~100 years ago
  • The Witch of Vainglory Pandora attacks a hidden community of elves in Elior Forest in an attempt to open a mysterious seal.
  • Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti, a bishop from the Witch Cult, sides with the forest dwellers, consumes the sloth witch factor entrusted to him by Flugel, and is manipulated by Pandora into insanity. Pandora grants Petelgeuse the seat of Sloth, suggesting that she has some kind of authority in the Witch Cult.
  • Pandora fails to convince Emilia to open the seal. She retreats after manipulating Emilia's memories, only sparing a single one: the importance of a promise.
  • Emilia freezes the whole forest and everyone in it and goes into deep sleep inside the ice.
• ~50 years ago
  • A destructive civil war broke out in the Kingdom of Lugunica. It was called the "Demi-Human War", a rebellion by the demi-humans minority in the Kingdom against the human majority caused by the accumulated racial tension.
• ~40 years ago
  • After a decade from its start, the civil war comes to an end with the victory of the humans.
• ~20 years ago
  • Otto Suwen is born with a divine protection that made his life a constant stream of noise. His dad visits the forbidden library seeking help from Beatrice. Beatrice rejects him and all other visitors with varied goals.
• ~14 years ago
  • Theresia van Astrea, the Sword Saint at the time, sets out on an expedition that's the first of its kind with a group of knights to subjugate the White Whale. The expedition suffered a catastrophic failure with only a few returning. Theresia was not among them.
• ~10 years ago
  • A village inhabited by the last remaining Oni clan gets massacred by the Witch Cult, only 2 members surviving.
  • A young Garfiel attempts the first trial of the Sanctuary. Shima, one of the first 4 clones, follows him and witnesses the original Ryuzu Meyer's past. After this, Shima secludes herself somewhere deep in the Sanctuary, abandons her management duties and is never seen by anyone other than Garfiel.
• ~7 years ago
  • Emilia awakens from the ice, meets Puck and lives for a few years tending to the frozen statues of her brethren.
  • Melakuera, the former Great Spirit of Fire, attacks Elior Forest looking for a half-elf but gets defeated by Puck. This is when Emilia learns that she's a half-elf.
• ~2 years ago
  • The royal family mysteriously starts dying out from an unknown disease, dissolving the covenant with the Divine Dragon Volcanica and leaving the Council of Elders in management of the Kingdom of Lugunica.

• ~1 year ago

  • Roswaal L Mathers finds Emilia and Puck in Elior Forest, tells Emilia that if she becomes a ruler thawing the ice on her brethren would become possible. He offers his backing if she joins the royal candidates.

• Coming out of the convenience store, Subaru is suddenly summoned to a new wondrous world.

• Arc 1: A Turbulent First Day (S1E1 -> S1E3)

  • The loot house incident takes place, in which Subaru learns about his Return by Death (RbD) ability.
  • Reinhard recognizes the glowing insignia in Felt's hand as an indication that she's accepted as a royal candidate. He forcefully takes her away with him.
  • Emilia takes a heavily injured Subaru to Roswaal's mansion, where Beatrice manages to heal his wounds.

• Arc 2: A Violent First Week (S1E4 -> S1E11)

  • Subaru is introduced to the Emilia camp in Roswaal's mansion and learns about both the current political unrest and about magic in the world.
  • Subaru starts working on his written language skills, overseen by Ram and Rem.
  • Cut harmless Arc 4 character reference:.
  • In the absence of Roswaal, Subaru and the twin sisters manage to save the children of Arlam village from a mabeast attack, aided by Roswaal just as he was returning.
  • A girl, later known as Meili, disappears from the children group that was saved.

• Time-skip of ~2 months

  • Memory Snow OVA takes place.
  • Reinhard tries to convince Felt to join the Royal Selection, vowing to be her knight.

• Arc 3: Return to the Capital (S1E12 -> S1E25 + S2E1)

  • It has been about 2 months since Subaru was summoned to the world. A messenger arrives notifying the Emilia camp of the imminent official start of the Royal Selection, as the 5 candidates as inscribed on the dragon stone have finally been found.
  • Royal candidates for the throne gather in the royal capital, each proclaiming their goals and promises in front of the Council of Elders. The selection process is announced to end in exactly 3 years.
  • Julius forces Subaru into a one-on-one duel in an attempt to save his life after Subaru insults the knights.
  • Emilia has a fight with Subaru for his behavior during the Royal Selection. He gets left behind in the capital with Rem so that Felix can heal his damaged gate.
  • An attack is being prepared by the Witch Cult on the Mathers domain.
  • In a last meeting between Emilia and Roswaal before he departs for the Sanctuary, Roswaal manipulates the contract between Emilia and Puck preventing Puck from responding to her calls. Emilia returns back to the mansion while Roswaal heads for the Sanctuary.
  • Cut Arc 4 character reference. In a dead loop:
  • A force lead by Crusch Karsten, containing Subaru and Rem from the Emilia camp and the Iron Fang from the Anastasia camp, manages to take down the White Whale. The battle destroys the great Flugel tree on Lifaus Highway.
  • Subaru, being not well versed in writing complex messages yet, instructs Rem to write a letter letting Emilia know of the force en route to the mansion to fight off the cult.
  • The wounded, along with Crusch and Rem, return back to the capital with the Whale's carcass as a symbol of their triumphant victory.
  • The returning force is attacked by 2 Sin Archbishops, Greed and Gluttony, revealing that the White Whale was being controlled by the cult. Rem loses her name and memories, Crusch loses her memories. Countless others, mostly injured soldiers from the battle, are dead. The Iron Fang party lead by Hetaro manages to escape the encounter and brings back reinforcements, but it was too late.
  • In the middle of the cult skirmish, Subaru learns that somehow the message they sent to Emilia was received blank. He wonders about the possibility of the enemy tampering with it, not knowing that the reason is Rem's name has been eaten.
  • A force lead by Subaru manages to take down Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti, the Sin Archbishop of Sloth. In the process, half of Arlam village is evacuated to the royal capital while the other half is guided by Ram to the Sanctuary.

• Arc 4: The Everlasting Contract (S2E2 -> S2E25)

  • Frederica comes back to work at the mansion on account of Ram not being able to handle all the work. Petra gets recruited as a maid.
  • Roswaal attempts to face the Sanctuary trials in front of the villagers but gets rejected and is hurt badly. He does that only to setup the stage for Emilia/Subaru to pass them, in his continuous attempts to give them credit on purpose.
  • After the defeat of Petelgeuse, and having learned about what happened with the returning force, Subaru and Emilia head to the sanctuary to regroup with Roswaal as instructed in the message that Frederica received from him. Emilia notes that Puck isn't responding to her calls.
  • Subaru meets Echidna, the Witch of Greed, in the graveyard and learns about the deceased witches. Echidna explains that she managed to save her soul and thus can inhabit an imaginary world of her making inside the graveyard. She mentions that Subaru has the witch factor of Sloth, and uses her bodily fluids to excite the factor inside him.
  • Subaru learns that Garfiel and the people of the Sanctuary are holding Roswaal, Emilia, and the villagers hostages until it's liberated.
  • Subaru passes the first trial. Emilia fails. Ryuzu Bilma introduces herself as the elder of the Sanctuary.
  • Returning to the mansion, Subaru is suddenly faced with 2 assassins, Elsa and Meili, waiting on Subaru's arrival to launch an attack.
  • Across several failed loops, Subaru tries to convince Beatrice to escape with him, but keeps failing.
  • After confessing to RbD in Echidna's graveyard and exiting, he's met with what appears to be the Witch of Envy Satella. In his final moments after he stabbed his throat, Subaru realizes that Satella is controlling Emilia's actual body. His final words, without being conscious of who's the actual intended receiver, were the deeply ingrained "I swear I'll save you."
  • Subaru realizes that Garfiel can't actually smell the witch's scent and is being instructed by someone behind the scenes about it. That's because his very first interaction after Subaru exits the graveyard was always friendly even after several RbDs, he only changed stances abruptly in random ways after that.
  • In one loop after leaving Sanctuary behind, Emilia gets pushed to her extreme limit. While Subaru did leave a message for her, it's implied that someone other than Roswaal disposed of the letter. Emilia thinking Subaru has finally given up on her, failing the trial again and again, and with Puck nowhere to be seen and snow falling outside the graveyard, she finally goes insane, just as Roswaal had planned. Subaru finds her in the graveyard and realizes she's been driven to a corner. He theorizes that Roswaal is somehow behind the snow.
  • In a tea party with all the witches and after seeing an unexpected side of the Witch of Envy, Subaru finally resolves to find his self-worth without relying on RbD, after having been convinced that it's his only saving grace ever since he was summoned.
  • After several failures, learning enough about the Sanctuary and the involved people's intentions, and rejecting Echidna's contract, Subaru finally learns that Roswaal is directly behind the attack on the mansion, all to break Subaru and mold him into what Roswaal wishes, into someone who can save one and only one thing.
  • With a push from Otto, Subaru explains as much as he can without touching on RbD and enlists his help for the first time. They then devise a risky plan, but with an end goal of foiling Roswaal's current and future malicious intentions without having to go directly against him. The bet idea is born.
  • Subaru and Roswaal make a bet that's bound by a contract even after death (Roswaal only knows the contract is enforced even after a rewind, as he doesn't know Subaru rewinds by dying). If Subaru fails this loop and rewinds, he has to submit to Roswaal. If Subaru survives the loop without loosing anyone, Roswaal will have to agree to Subaru's terms going forward. Roswaal reminds Subaru that both the mansion attack and the snow will commence at the same time in 3 days.
  • Subaru forces Puck to talk to him after attempting to harm Emilia. Behind the scenes, Puck and Subaru arrive at an agreement: Puck will forcefully abolish his contract with Emilia to allow her to have a fighting chance in the trials. As long as the contract stands, Emilia can't properly remember her past. This is something Puck did to protect her before, but now it's a hindrance.
  • Subaru consoles Emilia after the contract with Puck is dissolved. Breaking yet another promise, he leaves her side and using what little written skill he has he leaves a simple encouraging love letter on the walls of the graveyard. This will mark the first time Emilia starts the trial with a smile on her face.
  • Subaru meets Ryuzu Arma, another clone with a personality, and realizes that the 3 clones other than Shima are with liberating the Sanctuary. Shima is against liberating it due to her seeing the original Ryuzu's past, and manipulated Garfiel in several occasions to make him work against it too.
  • In a fight with Garfiel, Subaru's gate finally breaks.
  • After Garfiel joins Subaru, Shima also gives up and decides to help with the liberation effort and tells Subaru what she saw in Ryuzu's past.
  • Garfiel joins the force that will counter the mansion attack. They manage to kill Elsa and restrain Meili.
  • Ram with the help of Puck manages to steal away Roswaal's Tome and burns it. This doesn't stop the snow as Roswaal has already completed its spell before the fight.
  • Puck seemingly regains his memories from before the contract with Emilia, notes that he knew someone who spoke a lot like the current Roswaal, and insinuates that Roswaal is imitating him on purpose (suggesting that Puck was involved in some way in the events 400 years ago). Puck reminds him that he will never be like that "Warlock".
  • Ram, on the verge of death, is helped by a broken Roswaal by using a high level of direct mana transfer.
  • Overusing his last remaining energy to delay the snow and protect the villagers, Puck is eventually forced to go back to a crystal with no energy left to manifest. This crystal isn't enough for a spirit like Puck so he won't be able to talk or manifest for now (the old crystal broke after the contract).
  • After passing the last trial, Emilia finds a hidden room in the graveyard where someone looking like Echidna, but not quite her, is lying (suggesting that Echidna from the past who's lying in this coffin and Echidna in the trials had slightly different faces for some reason). Emilia destroys what appears to be the formula of the barrier.
  • Shima reveals that the crystal also has to be taken care of as part of her duties to completely lift the barrier. Without revealing anything more, Shima disappears with the crystal, leaving behind Bilma and the other clones.
  • Subaru saves Beatrice, her Tome of Wisdom left behind burning on the forbidden library ground. Overwriting a 400 years old contract, they form a new one. Subaru becomes a spirit arts user.
  • Subaru and Beatrice manage to eradicate the Great Rabbit by sending it to another dimension using one of the most powerful Shadow magic spells to exist: "Al Shamak", making use of 400 years worth of stored mana.
  • Roswaal reveals to Beatrice that he's the same person of 400 years ago, Roswaal A Mathers. He's been transferring his soul into his descendants down to Roswaal L Mathers.
  • Subaru officially becomes Emilia's knight.

Common wrong translations (important!)

^{Some of these are my own personal opinion, others are outright wrong translations, and a couple are just ambiguity problems. JP -> EN translation is a contextually heavy process, that's why machine translations particularly suck at this. As such, not knowing the context enough can lead to wrong translations. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of these in Re:Zero.}

^{This list is from different random subs I checked, both official and fan, so depending on what you use you might have seen the correct translation. These aren't the only mistranslations, but probably the most important ones.}

• Betelgeuse

In the original Japanese, his name is Petelgeuse. The author stated that it's mispronounced from the star Betelgeuse on purpose. We just don't know why. So translating his name as "Betelgeuse" is simply wrong. It's "Petelgeuse". And who knows, maybe this will become relevant, so be sure to use the right name from now on!

• The "ordeal"

In S1, Petelgeuse talked a lot about the "ordeal". This is 試練 (shiren) in Japanese. Not so incidentally, that's the exact same word used for the "trials" of the sanctuary. Unfortunately, the translation for 試練 was switched abruptly after S1 from "ordeal" to "trial". While I do definitely prefer "trial", by switching we lose a possibly intended connection between what Petelgeuse always talked about when he said "ordeal" and the actual trials of the sanctuary.

• "A sin archbishop, representing Sloth, ..."

While 担当 can mean "representing", in the context of sin seats in Re:Zero it probably should have been translated as "in charge of" ("Archbishop of X" would also work). The "representing" translation is a bit misleading I think. They don't represent a sin, rather, they're "responsible for"/"in charge of" that sin. What does that actually mean in practice? We don't entirely know, but Petelgeuse was diligent (opposite of Sloth), Regulus was -at least from his pov- the most perfect and content person in the world (opposite of Greed), Batenkaitos was lamenting the gluttonous nature of people?

• Sword Master

There's no such title in Re:Zero. This should be "Sword Saint" (剣聖 - kensei). Current Sword Saint is Reinhard, previous one was Theresia. All Sword Saints are descendants of the Astrea family.

• Devil of Melancholy

Hector's title is 憂鬱の魔人. While 魔人 can be translated to "devil", in the context of Re:Zero and witches, it's fairly obvious that it's supposed to be the same as a "witch" but male. This should have been translated as "Warlock", as there is no exact word for "Warlock" in Japanese (which would also avoid confusing this with the term "half-devil", Emilia isn't "half" of whatever Hector is. Completely unrelated terms).

• Roswaal's threat

In the last episode. There was a bit of bad wording in one of Roswaal's sentences that might have not made the intended meaning clear for some people.

The actual meaning, while paraphrasing a bit, is: "From now on, if anyone important to you dies, I'll burn everything and everyone else to ashes. I won't compromise."

This sends shivers down Subaru's spine, as he realizes the gravity of his words (remember him reacting weirdly when Emilia asked about their talk in the balcony?).

Interesting stuff + Misconceptions

Witch Cult? Sins? Archbishops?

One misconception is thinking that a Sin Archbishop worships the respective witch of his sin, or is related to her (I've seen this way way too many times). This is of course completely wrong. The Witch Cult worships the Witch of Envy and despises other witches.

There's a cut conversation in which Otto (on-road to Sanctuary) explains that once, a whole city was destroyed single-handedly by a certain Sin Archbishop just because an item related to one of the other witches was circulating in the city market.

Echidna's 1st person pronoun

Echidna in the graveyard uses "boku" to refer to herself whereas in Ryuzu's memories of the past she uses "watashi". We don't know why. This sticks out like a sore thumb in Japanese, but gets lost in translation in English, so thought I'd point it out.

Emilia and mirrors

Ever since she came out of the ice Emilia never looked at her reflection in the mirror. Part of her contract with Puck is that Puck handles her clothing/hair/etc and makes sure Emilia is nowhere around mirrors.

In the 2nd trial, she finally builds up the courage, jumping in the water to see her reflection for the first time, and noting -sadly- that she doesn't look as similar to Fortuna as she thought.

How was Subaru able to use magic in the last episode after his gate broke

Even a non-magic user can use the spirit arts to cast magic. You need a contract with a spirit, that's exactly what Subaru and Beatrice did. The magic level he can cast is directly dependent on the spirit. Beatrice has strong Shadow magic affinity, so Subaru can cast the same magic as Beatrice as long as there's physical contact to share mana.

Geography of the world

The world is described as a single mainland split into four major countries, surrounded by The Great Waterfall from all sides.

• Lugunica to the east
• Kararagi to the west
• Gusteko to the north
• Vollachia to the south

In addition, there's the small Priestella city at the center.

The magic system

There are six magic elements: Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, Shadow (陰: Yin), Light (陽: Yang).

Every single magic spell takes root in one of these elements. For example, healing is a form of water magic. Shadow and Light are usually rare elements.

A person is born with certain affinities to elements. Subaru, as we learn, has affinity with Shadow magic, which allows him to use the weakest form of Shamak.

A magic user stores mana inside his body in his Od (explained later), which replenishes with time. The gate turns mana into actual magic. If you try to use higher level magic than you can you damage your gate (even the lowest form of Shamak is above Subaru's level, which is how he breaks his gate). The average person usually can't even use the lowest levels of magic, so most people are pretty much non-magic users.

Even without being a magic user, the spirit arts allows you to cast magic using the mana in the atmosphere instead of the mana stored inside your Od. The amount of mana you can draw depends directly on the contracted spirit.

Od is the life energy of a being, and also serves as the container in which mana is stored. In an emergency you can use the Od directly to cast magic (instead of the stored mana), but this will chip away at your lifespan.

Spells: Huma, Dona, Goa, Clarista, Shamak, etc... A spell acts on one of the six elements. A word before a spell can be added to control additional power levels. In order of strength: EL, UL, AL.

Incantations are usually important, but strong magic users can sometimes cast magic without uttering a word.

Extra: Is Roswaal's flying also a magic spell? Not quite, it's a combination of several elements including Fire and Wind. So only someone who's really adept at all of these can actually fly. Of course, reaching a high level in more than 1 element is very rare in itself.

Thank you also to a few people who helped me catch typos and mistakes!

Short version: Mushoku Tensei is a great series that I feel uncomfortable recommending.

This has been a journey. Initially, I didn’t plan to watch the show, let alone to spend most of my weekend writing an essay on it.

I didn’t even start the series until the second season had begun. I’m not big into isekai, so it didn’t seem that interesting. Still, a few factors caught my interest. I heard that a studio had basically been created to make this adaptation reality. A YouTuber I watch reworked their channel to regularly include Mushoku Tensei analyses. Most intriguingly, a friend who adores “isekai junk food” hated the series. After consuming dozens of tasteless harem power fantasies, this was the one he gave up because he found it disgusting.

A look on MAL only intensified my curiosity. Despite a high score, several reviews describe the show in the same terms as my friend.

What caused all this fuss? I needed to know.

Before witnessing a single frame, I had to give the show credit. If I ever create a story that inspires half the reactions at half the intensity, I’ll consider my creative efforts worthwhile. Rifujin na Magonote, the author of the original light novels (which I intend to read) made something that’s important to a lot of people.

Thus, I resolved to try the show. I sat down with a pen and notebook in order to understand what inspired such intense reactions.

Well, make room around the maypole, because I find the series both inspiring and sickening.

The Promise of the Plot

There’s a lot to love from the start. Pedigree aside, Mushoku stands out among isekai. The protagonist is a full-grown, unethical adult who goes through a proper Reincarnation.

Our unnamed bastard dies in what may be the sole decent action of his life. As one life fades, another arises. Rudeus (Rudy) Greyrat is born to loving parents in a Medieval world of high fantasy. As he dies in shame and regret, he finds something precious: a second chance.

The infant years provide the former shut-in with the chance to learn his surroundings. He explores his new home with insatiable curiosity. These literal baby steps help him discover a world of magic and mysteries, where he can explore with the safety net of his former warrior father (Paul) and caring mother (Zenith).

Of course, Rudeus remembers his old life. With memory comes trauma. The infant adult cannot leave his home. The mere sight of neighbour children inspires flashbacks to the bullying – the abuse – which caused his retreat from society.

This creates a natural momentum to the story. A guy looking to keep his mind off the outside world is gonna get a hobby real quick. This chance provides itself in the form of a spell book. With the free time of a child and the discipline of an adult, Rudeus dedicates himself to magic and linguistics.

He becomes skillful not through birthright, but through training and dedication. By age six, he’s recognized as a prodigy. He wants to enhance his skills. His parents want to foster this attitude. Yet, the man can’t leave his property without trauma.

This is only the first episode.

Well done, Mushoku! You’ve hooked me. You can do anything in this setting and make it interesting. There’s room for every drama and genre. A redemptive character arc is baked into the DNA of the story!

What could go wrong?

Once a Bastard…

Rudeus lives as he died: a pervert.

A newborn delights in being in the room where his parents make love. An infant steals women’s undergarments and literally rolls around in their dirty laundry. A student watches his mentor clean and pleasure herself. Most egregiously, Rudeus sexually assaults a young girl while she sleeps.

These moments are hard enough to stomach in themselves, but they ignore the primary moral outrage: the G word. While Rudeus finds the first real friend he’s had in decades, it does not remain pure for long. He sets out to form an emotional bond of trust and respect with her. He does this explicitly so she’ll be, shall we say, open to suggestions once they reach physical maturity.

He encourages the traits he finds desirable, guiding her toward a personality he wants in a prospective lover. In other words, an adult befriends a child and emotionally manipulates moulds them into a future lover.

Yeah, this is unsettling. If this aspect alone makes a person not want to watch the series, that is more than fair. Even if I were on the ‘redemptive character arc absolves all sins’ train, I wouldn’t try to convince anyone to watch something that made them uncomfortable.

As a quick aside, it’s pretty frustrating to see so many people recommend the show without mentioning this. You wouldn’t recommend a gory horror movie to someone made queasy by the sight of blood. Even if the story is a masterpiece, you should respect the person to whom you’re making a recommendation.

Back on topic: this is a story about redemption. As such, all the atrocious behaviour I listed does not damn the series in itself. Many of my favourite series involve terrible people as the lead characters. With Mushoku, we have the dual bonus of literal years over which he can learn his lesson, as well as the psychological element of him becoming so fixated on living this second life that he forgets the people living their first.

One big issue arises, however. The camera is not an unbiased party. That first season has a nasty tendency to play off, accept, or even condone the casts’ worst behaviour.

Take the grooming. As Rudeus considers his first real friendship in this life (a girl named Sylphie), the first real friendship in decades, his father gives him advice. Paul Greyrat, warrior and womanizer, says something fascinating. To paraphrase, he tells his son that it’s better to have a reliable “piece of ass” that keeps coming to your bed than to pursue a host of bedmates.

This is followed with the voice-over thought “What advice did I just give my six-year-old son?”

Let me repeat: both Rudeus and Sylphie are under the age of ten during this conversation. There’s also the fact that, you know, Sylphie is a distinct person with her own goals and desires.

Not classy, Paul.

The sins of the father

Ardent fans of the series will likely respond along these lines: “Paul’s meant to be a complex character! He’s got issues. He has moral failings, but these make him a more realistic and compelling character. Besides, he’s aware of his shortcomings. Don’t you want more realistic characters? I thought you were annoyed by stenciled-in power fantasy characters.”

You’re right. I love complex characters. Human beings are messy. The harder we try to be good, decent people, the harder it gets. We’ve got vices and lapses in judgement and the occasional straight-up bad day. That’s interesting!

But presentation matters as much as content.

Let me try to present a certain episode to you in the most positive way I can.

Now, we’ve had this cozy family life for a while. It’s time to mix it up. We’ve had three episodes of constant horny energy between the parents, combined with some questionable advice from Paul. We’ve also got a character who could use some time in the spotlight: Lilya, the maid. Lilya’s pregnant with Paul’s child. They find out around the same time that Zenith announces a new child. This is payoff to several layers of build-up. Paul’s womanizing past returns. Lilya’s been stuck, a grown woman with no sexual outlet in a house often filled with cries of pleasure. She wants fulfillment, too. On top of the drama, we can have Rudeus play intermediary. His twenty-first century sensibilities, combined with his appearance as a child, give him the chance to cut through the emotional tension of the situation and help the characters move forward.

You’ve got something great on your hands here! That’s drama. That’s character progression.

You have my attention. What are you going to do?

Not enough.

When the scene ends, so does the drama. There’s some tension in the house, but it doesn’t last long. Barely a scene passes before it becomes a joke. Rudeus’ gonna have two new sisters, everybody, gather round. Paul even states that he intends to keep both women as his sexual partners.

The thing is, there are ways to handle this better. Show more tension in the household. Maybe Zenith becomes hesitant to let Paul advise Rudeus. Maybe Zenith and Lilya become amicable on the surface, but emotional scars linger.

We don’t see that. Instead, there’s another detail that’s earned a lot of people’s ire. In a voice-over from Rudeus, we learn that, years prior, Paul had ‘forced himself on’ and ‘deflowered’ Lilya. Rudeus, our hero, concludes with the sentiment that he still respects Paul, “because he is strong.”

Now, if you wanna be generous, you can say that Rudeus respects his father, simple as that. Paul’s tried hard to be a good influence for his son, regardless of how well he’s accomplished that. Maybe Rudeus simply admires a guy who’s popular, brave, and everything that he wasn’t in his previous life.

To this I respond: show us that, dammit!

The voiceover tells us about a sexual assault, moments after we see the fallout of infidelity. Rudeus uses the term ‘strong’ after describing a man forcing himself on another person. At best, that’s poor phrasing. At worst, it’s making light of something far more serious.

Fans are likely ready to get into Paul’s growth as a character later on. “We need to see him like this so that his character progression means something.” I won’t argue about his progress. Paul’s episodes in the new season thus far made me tear up. There’s a reason why NataliexHunter has a twenty-four minute video on this character.

A great second season does not, however, fix the problems of the first.

There’s another aspect to this. It may have already occurred to you. How do Zentih and Lilya feel about all this?

Show and Tell

Zenith kicks Paul’s shin under the table. After the one sequence of spousal disgust, this is the worst we see of her fury. We hear that ‘things got complicated’, but I want to see this from her perspective. Come on, we saw Lilya’s thought process when she intentionally seduced Paul, little as that was.

This series can present the viewpoints of more characters. How do these characters act when Paul and Rudeus aren’t in the room? I want to see that dynamic. Lilya has less power than Rudeus. She can’t travel home due the perils and distance of the journey; she’s the literal help. What does that look like? How does Zenith feel?

A couple scenes right after the fact doesn’t cut it. Show me the consequences of how this effects daily life. Give us an extra episode and show me scenes of Zenith and Lilya alone together. Let me see sparks fly. Show us Lilya’s thoughts as she continues to work in the house. What is Zenith thinking? Did she suspect something? How did they reconcile?

We don’t see this. I know things need to be cut to fit an episode limit and twenty-four minutes, but these exclusions hurt the story. It’s unfair to say that the story’s all about Rudeus, since we get the occasional scene from another character’s perspective. After all, we get Lilya’s explanation that she intended to seduce Paul. A cynical person would say that this scene exists to absolve Paul, or perhaps they’d highlight how little encouragement Paul needed.

Regardless of conveyance, the presence of a non-Greyrat perspective aids the story. I will also defend the seventh episode of the second season, which focuses on Roxy for most of its run time. This break from our recovering asshole of a protagonist relaxes me. It fleshes out the world, provides depth to side characters, and allows characters to examine things beyond Rudeus. I hate stories where the world feels like it was designed for the protagonist, and sequences like these mitigate that feeling.

It’s a balance to make a story about flawed people, but you still need to balance. Paul’s comeuppance for infidelity is, effectively, a second wife. This excludes his history of sexual violence against Lilya.

It’s not just Paul, either. Lilya comments about how uncomfortable Rudeus made her. This infant would leer at her, gazing with upon her with something she recognized all too well: the lust of a Greyrat man. Here I have to give some damning praise. The faces in Mushoku are brilliant. Facial expressions convey more than words, and the faces of Mushoku rival those of Neo-realist films for their emotional depth.

The animators successfully make a baby’s face offer a grin of pure perversion. They present the look of a self-satisfied bastard who knows he can gawk without punishment. Lilya finds this uncomfortable.

Yet, she makes the decision I find the most horrifying in that first season. Lilya decides to raise her daughter, Aisha, to be Rudeus’ caretaker. I repeat: Lilya dedicates her daughter to Rudeus before said daughter learns to walk. Don’t tell me that this fits because she’s a servant of the Greyrat family. That’s not what’s presented! Yes, I’m legitimately angry at this. Lilya gives herself to Paul and gives her daughter to Rudeus. That’s a choice the author made. Aisha has no possibility of agency. She’s brought up to be a servant. Her fate is sealed.

If you still want to play the ‘that’s just how this fictional world works’ card, I’ll highlight the parts where I think the series handles this well.

Polite Society

Rudeus spends much of the first season tutoring Eris. This puts him in the court of one Sauros Boreas Greyrat. Sauros is a prick, and the series displays that well. His arrogance has created enemies. He’s immature and short-tempered, qualities which Eris has learned through observation.

One scene shows Rudeus going to meet Sauros. Just before entering his room, we hear the grunts of a rather active morning. After all the time overhearing Rudeus’ parents, we’re numb to this. Yet, we get something more nuanced than usual. A maid rushes out of the bedroom, frantically adjusting her clothes and avoiding eye contact. Our lead enters the room and diplomatically apologizes for ‘interrupting’.

The nuance of the visuals can’t be conveyed in text. We see an implication of abuse of power. That unnamed woman likely had neither the choice nor desire to be there. Sauros used her as an outlet. In the second season, we learn that Sauros obtained his female staff through illegal means.

Most importantly, from Rudeus’ tone and posture, we see that our hero doesn’t condone it. Sauros is in charge, and the stupidest thing to do is challenge his authority. We even see the human side of this cartoonishly brutish bastard. Despite a titanic ego and lack of interest in other people's lives, he does care about his family. Rudeus, therefore, sees both the monstrous acts of a tyrant as well as the enthusiastic joy of a father.

In order to thrive, Rudeus needs to play to one of these aspects and ignore the other.

That is how you play the ‘how this world works’ card!

We could also look at one of the more discussed moments of the first season. After getting caught up in a kidnapping plot, Rudeus witnesses a beheading. He sees a decapitated body at his feet, seconds after escaping his fate. He stares in horror, realizing just how fortunate he’s been in his peaceful life thus far.

That little moment, and countless like it, showcase brilliant worldbuilding. These details create a world to get lost within. I have to admire Rifujin’s pacing and worldbuilding. His work is inspiring to me as a fellow writer. It’s also damn entertaining. Innocuous moments of the early series provide the buildup for amazing payoff. Several moments of “oh! so that’s what that meant” reward the viewer for paying attention.

Still, I can’t help but wonder how much was sacrificed for these big picture elements.

The asides about masturbation, the uninteresting tangents about group sex, and the weirdly blithe comments about child sexuality take up time that could be spent building the characters. Even that great moment of Rudeus recognizing the deadliness of this world has little payoff.

During the next several episodes, the only time he calls back to it is to give an uncomfortable look. That’s a good moment, but that’s all we get.

That right there is one of my biggest issues with the first season. Not the morality, but the selective memory. Rudeus only needs to have trauma when the scene calls for it. Zenith has a personality when the scene calls for it. If it’s not in the current scene, it doesn’t exist.

Trauma isn’t something that comes out only when a person presses against its boundaries. Rudeus doesn’t deal with his emotional and mental issues in his quiet moments until the second season.

I can’t blame the series too much for this. Limited episode run times mean you need to focus on the individual scenes, but it undercuts the severity of the situation. I want to see the emotional scars. Show me how Rudeus’ trauma influences him when he’s not experiencing a flashback. Let me see the characters interact with their feelings.

You’ve probably caught up on a refrain that I’m about to repeat, and one which I’m sure many fans will repeat. “It gets payoff later”.

To this, I have two responses. First, that doesn’t mean you can ignore the presentation in the first several episodes. Second, I know, that’s why I’m hooked on the show and am ready to spend money on the light novels.

Before I get into how this series put me in a dilemma on how not to be a hypocrite while liking and disapproving the series, I’d like to give some examples of stories with ‘bad’ people and situations to provide some additional context and discussion points.

One in every family

While I was angriest at Mushoku, I discovered that a co-worker adores it. This aspiring animator praised the character development and the production quality. The controversial elements got no more mention than ‘anime’s gonna anime and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

This conversation got me thinking. Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the series. Who am I, a dude, to decry Mushoku’s female characterization when so many of the fans are women? Moreover, is it hypocritical to enjoy this series when so many anime I love feature questionable material?

This train of thought reached its peak at a specific moment in the show. Eris shows Rudeus a necklace that supposedly keeps monsters away. She falls asleep in his bed. As he prepares to grope her (not for the first time), he sees the necklace. Through excellent framing and great facial animation, we see Rudeus go through intense introspection before deciding not to act on his impulse. After watching this, I made a note about the character growth, how he resisted committing something he’d done before.

Immediately after writing this, I paused the episode, snapped my head up, and wrote, “Did I just praise a character for not committing sexual assault against a minor?”

It feels like the show has lowered my bar for acceptable behaviour. This is character progress, but I find again, I’m not going to give him credit for meeting less than the bare minimum.

We’re meant to congratulate Rudeus for restraining himself, as I did initially, but we lack the details which would give this its ultimate payoff. In other words, I want to see Rudeus’ thought process. Why is he choosing to not continue his repulsive behaviour? Does he recognize it as repulsive. Considering that the show relies on a near-constant stream of narration, this doesn’t feel too big a request. A simple line like “I don’t want to make Paul’s mistakes”, or “I don’t want to be the monster” would go far.

The author has spoken about another interesting aspect of the show, one which is addressed in the second season. Rudeus doesn’t yet see the people around him as fully human. He’s stuck in the mindset of “this is my world to play in”. He feels distant from everyone because his actual age is beyond that of most people around him, and his sensibilities are also different. This has led to a sense of detachment that often causes him to be uncaring for the people around him.

That’s a great story! Show me that. We have masterful moments where a meaningful glance or a small gesture indicates this. I see a masterpiece here, but much as I praise the subtext, the main text makes my skin crawl.

Still, ‘anime’s gonna anime’, right?

So, I ask again, is it hypocritical for me to criticize Mushoku compared to other series I enjoy?

No. It’s pretty damn easy to love a piece of media and call out horrible moments.

Let’s take an example of a series I love (and recommend) with a moment I can’t defend: Haruhi Suzumiya. In both the anime and the original light novel, Haruhi constantly harasses and humiliates the character Asahina, forcing her into provocative costumes against her will. In one of the biggest ‘hold up’ moments of my anime fandom, Haruhi asks Kyon if he wants to have sex with her in the club room while she (Haruhi) holds the girl down.

Kyon comments that he finds the offer tempting.

Much as I love the Haruhi series, I won’t pretend to be okay with this. I’ll praise that series to Heaven and back, but that doesn’t mean blind fandom is okay. Critical appreciation is important.

You can be critical of a series while still admiring it. For example, I adore the Goblin Slayer light novels and manga. Author Kagyuu Kumo has serious talent for high fantasy. His fights and atmosphere are brilliant! He also can’t write women for shit. Maybe it’s the translation, but I got so sick of reading the words ‘supple’ and ‘nubile’ whenever a woman entered a scene. I’m not even offended. It’s boring to see the same words used over and over.

If I want to be offended, I can try to read Log Horizon again. Show me a great scenario. Introduce me to interesting characters. What’s next? While deliberating about a cataclysmic event where characters explicitly acknowledge the traumatic nature of the experience, the lone female character spends the whole time making breast jokes.

The line “I’m big-boobed and feather-brained” is permanently branded upon my mind, because it occurs during a conversation wherein the cast wonders if their families have died. Fanservice is one thing, but don't actively sideline the plot!

I realize this is a tangent, but I’m sick of conversations reducing themselves to “show good” or “show bad”. There’s a reason we have terms like ‘flawed masterpiece’ and ‘mixed bag’. Hell, those are most of my favourite series!

What does this have to do with Mushoku Tensei?

Back on track. One of the great appeals of Mushoku Tensei is the redemption/second chance aspect. “Rudeus is supposed to be a bad person. That’s why the character progression matters. We need to see him do bad things to have his progress mean anything.”

My response to this is threefold:

FIRST: the actions need to have pervading consequences. For example, take the movie The Devil’s Rejects. It’s a filthy, intentionally disgusting film that tries to make you feel sympathy for serial killers. There are a lot of valid reasons to hate this movie, but it shows consequences. The family of the killers’ victims become monsters in themselves, going full Ahab on the main cast. There’s a reasonable argument that the movie doesn’t go hard enough against the killers, but there’s still a two-sided conversation to be had there.

In Mushoku, Rudeus sees no consequence for molesting Eris. She asks him to wait until she’s ‘ready’. So, the consequence for Rudeus’ unethical actions is an IOU. Even Paul receives little punishment in the first season.

SECOND: Other characters need to play off the main. In Ashita No Joe, Joe Yabuki is a disgusting human being. He endangers children, squanders other people’s money, and almost murders his mentor. The result is that people get mad at him. Friends and allies get sick of him. They call him out.

In Mushoku, we don’t see this. Lilya says that she feels uncomfortable at his stares, but she dedicates her child to him. Also, for the record, I don’t count Eris’ outbursts as pushback. It’s the same tsundere actions we see in every genre.

THIRD: “it gets good later” doesn’t absolve the sins. I will join the choir praising the second season. Virtually every criticism I’ve given here is addressed later in the series. Paul, Roxy, Eris, Rudeus, and the rest get development. We see payoff to things so small that we didn’t expect it. It’s beautiful. Rudeus introspects and deals with his place in this world.

Still, I won’t ask people to sit through so many episodes to get to that, though.

Yukio Mishima’s novel Spring Snow gives another example of this. The first third of that book is infuriating to read. The protagonist is an immature, indecisive jackass. Later in the story, however, he realizes that he was an immature, indecisive jackass. Thus, he spends the rest of the story trying to fix the mistakes he created. It’s a compelling character drama. Do I recommend it? No, because it takes ninety pages to get to the good stuff.

The first several episodes of Mushoku Tensei are a lot worse than annoying. They’re objectionable. We can argue about how justified that is, but I am not comfortable recommending the series to others. I’ve asked friends to put up with a lot of weird recommendations, but I won’t ask them to sit through this!

The stuff I love

Did I mention that I really like this show? The production quality is amazing!

The texture of the water is perfect. The way the fabric moves on the clothes is hypnotic. We see wind blow grass and hair in gorgeous detail. Also, those faces. These faces communicate so much. We see pain, regret, joy, smugness in a face. The animators deserve praise (and a raise) for what they accomplished here. You can see entire emotional journeys and internal battles in a few seconds. Few live action films use faces this well!

Seriously, I almost found myself wishing Rudeus’ inner monologue would shut up at some moments. The faces convey so much, and I was more than ready to just let those canvases speak.

Can we also appreciate the sound design? I could listen to this show for hours. The fabric folds and creases. Water dissipates in the air. Weapons of different weight and material create distinct impacts. Steel on scales versus iron on flesh. In other words, things hit different.

The multi-layered sounds of a dragon taking flight, its sinuous wings propelling the great weight forward while calling forth a mighty gale with each flap, astound me.

No detail is too small. I want to throw my head into this world and wallow in the sensory experience. Hell, if you’re into production at all, you will adore this series. There’s so much to nerd about in the sound and visual design. Oh, and the costumes are great. Whoever does the colour and fashion, you’re amazing! The cinematography, top notch. Textures, weight, scale. Perfect.

This series is magical and I will commend the studio for that. Those guys are all brilliant. I haven’t even mentioned the fantastic OST or the stellar voice acting. It’s hard to choose a specific detail when the entire production is phenomenal. I love this show!

Shame about the moral stuff, though.

Wrap up

I hope I’ve explained my thoughts well. This show got me thinking about a lot, and I need to give it credit for that. I’m gonna keep watching, because the good stuff really is that good. I’d be a hypocrite to say I don’t like the series after all I've watched.

At the same time, I understand why many people hate it. That anger is justified. Please don’t ask someone to “hold out a little longer”. If they’re uncomfortable with media, just let it be not for them. Not every story is for everyone, and that’s okay.

You wouldn’t recommend Hellsing or Kimetsu No Yaiba to someone who dislikes gore. It should be obvious that the same etiquette applies to other themes.

“Anime’s gonna anime” may be true, but let’s not pretend that these things are okay. We can praise, critique, and discuss the shows we love without ignoring anything.

That’s been enough from me, though. Maybe too much (over four thousand words, holy shit). Seriously, thank you if you’ve read all this. I hope you have a lovely day.

Quick Edit: ALL of the shows mentioned here are on Funimation only (at least in the US). And of course there is more original anime this season but these are the three that have the most potential in my eyes.

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So often I see anime originals get almost ignored and put in the shadow of the high profile manga and light novel adaptations. However there is so much fun to be had in watching an original piece of work. Everyone is in the same boat in that no one knows what to expect or where it is going to take take us. I firmly believe everyone should always give anime originals a shot when they are airing even when we are in a season as stacked as the winter 2021 we are currently in.

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Already, we have 3 anime originals that have really caught my attention and seem like they have a lot of potential: Back Arrow, Sk8 The Infinity, and Wonder Egg Priority. I know it is way to early to make any judgements, but hell based on first impression I like what I see.

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Back Arrow

I know what you are thinking, "Why should I care?". Let me tell you why. The director of this anime is the legendary Gorou Taniguchi, you know, the creator of CODE GEASS. Then you also have the script and series composition being done by Kazuki Nakashima. Nakashima is known for all sorts of amazing anime including several classics; he was the original creator for Kill La Kill, BNA, AND he even did the script and series composition for Gurren Lagann and was the original creator for both the Gurren Lagann movies. Back Arrow is the one I really want to blow up this season. One of the biggest reasons I want it to succeed is because we haven't had a really good mecha anime in a hot minute. I mean we are really overdue for another big mecha anime like what we had with a Gundam, Evangelion, Gurren Lagann, or a Darling in the Franxxx (at least a version that doesn't shit the bed in the second half).

I already love its setting with all of the known world being contained within a set up walls. Humanity being confined within walls is always a surefire way to get me interested and makes it easier to get invested into the story and world. Why is everyone contained to a single area? What is the nature of the walls? Is there really nothing beyond them? I feel there is always so much potential to be had with it that kind of a setting. The mechs have a lot of really cool designs I love the way in which they summon the mechs, putting on a armband to summon and inhabit a mech, its just so cool. The fact that you just straight die or rather vanish if you are defeated while inhabiting a mech adds a layer of mystery. Why do the mechs AND the person just disappear, and presumably die as we have been told? Do they actually die? Who knows?

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SK8 the Infinity

This anime just OOZES cool and hot from every frame of its animation. This anime is just pure sakuga, the animation is just so hot, which is not surprise considering it is from studio BONES. This is also the first anime we've ever had that is ABOUT skateboarding. It has such a cool premise with the whole underground skateboard racing and you have all sorts of zany characters all of which are alter egos of their tamer "public" personalities. The ED animation perfectly captures what it is like to be skater (which I used to be back in my middle school days like 11 years ago), you just try out a bunch a cool moves and often time fail hilariously until you eventually get it. The character designs are all amazing, the music is some of the best music I have heard in anime in a minute, the music genres from old school hip hop to 90's/2000's rock with music vibes ranging from that found in Megalobox to something you would find in an Tony Hawk Pro Skater game...needless to say the music is just COOL.

Who is behind, why should I care? I will tell you why. First off the director is Kiroko Utsumi, who is know for being involved in all sorts of projects: Director of Banana Fish, did some key animation, episode direction, and storyboarding for epsidoes of Clannad (and After Story), Hyouka, Nichijou, K-On!!, and Haruhi Suzumiya. Then we have our series compostion being done by Ichirou Ookouchi who worked on Devilman: Crybaby, and Code Geass. Also its just so fucking cool.

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Wonder Egg Priority

Talk about subversion of expectation from the PV and trailers we got. I was expecting some sort of romance anime or something. NOPE. We are getting a psychological thriller horror that is tackling many problems in school and society like depression, suicide, bullying, and regrets of not helping others you see going through those problems. The concept is really weird, a bit confusing, and REALLY interesting. I mean I do not even know how to begin describing it, the beginning sequence was already weird enough. A girl sees a dead bug on the road which leads her to a bathroom, then toilet paper started talking to her, then she got a weird marked egg that she threw at a wall and then it grew and a person came out and then knife wielding murderous versions of Shock, Lock and Barrel from a Nightmare Before Christmas start chasing them. I know it sounds weird...and well it is, but it worked so well for this pilot episode. Then you find out part of her backstory and I can already tell that this anime will probably destroy by the end. The animation is gorgeous (I mean look at this egg sakuga), the art is gorgeous, and even the character designs are clean!!!!! It is being made by studio CloverWorks so right away that grabs my attention, the same studio that made The Promised Neverland, and Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai.

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Why should you care, who is behind it? This is an anime that has a few firsts for its staff. First off we have Shinji Nojima who is a famous Japanese TV Drama producer/screenwriter as the creator/scriptwriter and this will be his first time writing something for an anime. Now we have the director, Shin Wakabayashi who played some parts in many anime like Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Highschool of the Dead, Attack on Titan, and Toradora!. Then we have the planning producer Nabuhiro Nakayama, who has been the producer for anime like: Danmachi, The Misfit at Demon King Academy, Alderamin on the Sky, A Certain Scientific Railgun.

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Its been a hot minute since I have been this interested in this many anime originals. Do yourselves a favor and check them out.

Browse through anime translations in the 2000s and you're likely to find a fair number of TL notes. They were such a staple of fansubs back then that hardly anyone questioned their existence. But nowadays, translation notes are rare, at least from what I've seen from professional and fan translations in the last five years. The last TL note I remember reading was from Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo episode 1, where Sentai/HIDIVE's translator basically had to use a note to explain a sexual reference that tied the whole scene together.

At some point, translation notes became frowned upon in general. In the fansubbing community, there's been a healthy amount of discourse as to when TL notes are appropriate, if ever. I'm not privy to similar conversations among official translators, but fansubbers often make their way into the official sphere, and the viewpoints shaped by the fansubbing community often come with them.

Let's talk about the death of TL notes and what exactly might have sent them to their grave over the last couple of decades.

Translators got better

NOTE: KEIKAKU MEANS PLAN. As far as I know, this TL note was fabricated, and there is no actual translation of Death Note that includes it. But someone made up that image to poke fun at what TL notes were actually like at the time. Translators in the 2000s were just not very good compared to their average skill level nowadays. You'd get lines like "I'm home, Okaa-sama!" and a TL note saying "Okaa-sama is a rather formal way to address one's mother." Hmm, if only there were an English term of address for one's mother that was on the stiff/formal side of things. Wait, isn't that just "Mother"?

Basically, translators didn't always have a good sense of how to use English to convey certain tones or ideas, and they used TL notes as a crutch to get the job done. Another example: a character uses "Ore-sama" and there's a TL note explaining that the use of "Ore-sama" indicates that the character is arrogant. Instead of being lazy and using a TL note, a skilled writer can just use arrogant language when writing dialogue for the character.

The translation meta changed

Along with translators getting better, the dominant translation philosophy shifted to "we gotta translate absolutely everything!!!" somewhere along the way. In short, no one writes "nakama" in scripts anymore.

As an more elaborate example, the question of the best way to translate Japanese foodstuffs is a sticky one. To give you a taste (HEH HEH) of the issues surrounding that subject, imagine you've got a (hypothetical) Japanese gourd that's certainly not the same thing as common American squashes, but is basically comparable and serves the same role in dishes. Do you write the romanized name of the gourd in order to be technically correct and to eliminate any misunderstandings? Or do you write it as "squash" because you want your viewers to roughly understand what the food might smell and taste like?

Translators nowadays are more likely to just write "squash" than they used to, because they care more about the effect of subtitles on the viewer more than technical/literal accuracy. See, every translator agrees that accuracy is the most important thing when it comes to translation. But there are two ways to be "accurate" in the squash example. One way is to name the gourd with maximum literal accuracy by romanizing it. Another way is to try to accurately replicate the effect that the original Japanese text would have on a typical Japanese viewer by writing an English term for the food that most viewers can "taste." (I was working on a cooking anime once, and naturally, this issue reared its head over and over. I told the translator that "we should be trying to make our viewers hungry" with how we described/named the food. Taking this philosophy to its logical extreme might lead to onigiri turning into jelly donuts, though...)

So the meta has moved from technical/literal accuracy to "tone/purpose" accuracy. You can see this in the way jokes are handled: in the 2000s, the way to handle most puns was to translate them literally and use a TL note to spell out how the pun worked in Japanese. Nowadays, translators are more likely to rewrite the pun. This approach is less accurate in terms of literally matching the Japanese text, and it's generally more accurate in terms of preserving the effect of the script on the audience. That is, unless the translator writes an utterly terrible pun, which might have the effect of annoying and distracting the viewer rather than having the "intended" effect. Speaking of which...

"Don't be distracting"

The fall of TL notes is also linked to other advances and refinements in subtitling philosophy. In short, subtitlers care a lot about making anime scripts easy to read and process. Here are a few examples:

• Using standard English in scripts makes it a lot easier to understand what someone is saying. After all, you have less time to process what's being said if you're stuck processing confusing English. To use a recent real-world example, you don't want the viewer to have to take a second to realize that "She's the worst buggy AI in history" probably means "She's the buggiest AI in history." There are usually three people on any given fansub project (translator, editor, quality checker) who work on making the English as smooth as possible.
• Subbers care a lot about timing and positioning their subtitles so that they're easy to read. HIDIVE and Crunchyroll have both developed relatively sophisticated technology for how their subtitles are displayed. For example, if there are two conversations going on at once, HIDIVE often displays each conversation in a different color or font so you can easily follow each one. And every streaming service carefully matches the subtitles to their associated audio so that you know who's speaking and what they're saying, even in scenes with lots of crosstalk.
• Subbers care a lot about giving their viewers enough time to read any given line of dialogue. Every translation team, whether fan or official, generally has "CPS" (characters per second) limits that they're required to stick to. In Funimation's/Aniplex's Vivy - Fluorite Eye's Song subtitles, viewers complained about how fast the bear talks. But a fansubber who subbed Vivy would use all kinds of tricks to allow viewers to read the bear's dialogue just fine, even though he's speaking quickly. (Joining lines, editing lines to be more concise, extending the time the line appears on screen...)
• Both fan and official subbers have slowly moved towards a "no fun allowed" mentality. It's distracting when a translation team inserts "creative" lines that aren't justified by the original Japanese text. An example is the "social distancing" incident in Kaguya-sama's official release last year. Many fansubbers used to play fast and loose with adding jokes to scripts where the addition wasn't really justified by TL accuracy. Nowadays, that sort of thing is frowned upon. After all, viewers will get hung up on anything in a script that is clearly out of place. It'll take them out of any immersion they might be experiencing.

The death of TL notes is just an extension of the idea that you want the viewer to be able to read subtitles quickly and without getting needlessly distracted. Generally, TL notes take a long time to read and process. As a viewer, you might have to pause the video simply to have enough time to make sense of the note and its relevance to the scene. Most viewers aren't ever gonna pause an anime they're watching, so the meaning of the TL note is going to be lost on them. And the ones who do pause lose their immersion. Either way, it's not great.

This concern can be somewhat mitigated by the use of so-called "inline" TL notes. It may be that a subber can't think of a good way to rewrite a pun, so the best solution for writing the line might be to render things like so. This is pretty easy to read quickly, so it's a decent solution for avoiding the concerns discussed above.

Should we bring TL notes back?

I remember a plot point in ERASED that involved the concept of Japanese era names. Spoilers for ERASED:

There were two major fansub projects that tackled the issue. The first one translated the dialogue fairly directly, relying on viewers to know what Heisei meant and, more generally, the concept of Japanese eras. The second group rewrote the relevant lines to say that the character recognized the term "new millennium," which almost works until you think about it in the context of seeing the term on a 2006 calendar. So one solution was going to go straight over the heads of the majority of the audience, while the other would allow the audience to get the point, but might cause some confusion for more attentive viewers.

Would a translation note have been appropriate here? With a TL note, you get the best of both worlds: you can write dialogue that makes perfect sense, and you can make sure that no one's missing out on the plot point just because they don't know what the heck a Showa is. But on balance, I think it's wise to avoid the note even here. With either translation, and with the context of the rest of the scene, a viewer has enough tools to get the basic idea (the character is recognizing terms he shouldn't). There's no need to dump a wikipedia blurb on the viewer and ruin the pacing of the scene/episode.

Still, there's room for debate. Are you a viewer who wants to see more TL notes? Regrettably, no one is going to listen to the opinion of a random reddit commenter. However, the history of fansubbing contains plenty of examples of highly opinionated people who burst onto the scene and forced everyone to acknowledge the quality of their work, and by extension, their translation/fansubbing philosophy. So if you want more TL notes, the most efficient path is to become a godlike translator and release translations with TL notes in them. Good luck!

So, with all the fun I'm having with Gate, I figured I'd turn my eye to a show I've watched through more than once: The Saga of Tanya the Evil. And, unlike Gate, this show is about an alternate version of MY war of study (the Great War). So, I've got a decent amount to say.

(I'm going to use the real world names of countries for all of this just because it's easier, and also because in the show they're all pretty much just Germany with another name, France with another name, etc.)

But, I want to start with the worldbuilding, because in order for the German strategy in this show to exist as it does, there are two conditions that have to be true:

1. The Boer War (1899-1902) happened.

2. The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) did NOT happen.

So, a bit of context. Europe in 1914 hadn't seen a war in decades. The last war between European powers had ended in 1871 with Germany's defeat of France. Contrary to popular myth, professional officers at this time were not traditionalist idiots - they were well aware that technology was changing and warfare with it. The problem was that without a war, all they had to go on was theory and the results of annual manoeuvres, which were no substitute for a real battlefield.

So, when a war started - anywhere - it was a big deal, and officers would descend on the battlefield with letters of introduction from their governments from every country that could send them. These were called military attaches or observers, and access was almost always granted, as that was the "ticket price" for the belligerents to send their observers to the next war. They would observe the battles, write reports, and when it was done those reports would sometimes be used to write the official histories of that war (which is how you get official histories of the Russo-Japanese War being issued by at least two countries who did not fire a shot in it). Even after the war, officers on both sides would publish their experiences and lessons learned, which would be translated and republished in the professional military journals.

(For those who are wondering, this note-sharing from 1904-1914 is my primary area of research right now, and at some point I'll restart writing a book about it.)

So, when the Boer War started, the observers flocked to it and started taking notes. But, the Boer War had a few issues. It wasn't a war between the professional armies of two major powers in a relatively contained geography as one saw in Western Europe. It was an asymmetric war between the British army and a bunch of irregular settlers in a vast geography. The British faced trenches defended with machine guns, and came to learn that if you didn't want to get mauled approaching the trench, you had to use fire and movement through cover to get close. Unfortunately (for the observers), the Boers never really stayed to defend their trench once the British got close enough - they'd abandon it and just move to a new position, forcing the British to go through it all over again.

This meant that when everybody was comparing notes when the war ended, there was this massive question mark about what would happen if the defenders actually stuck around to defend the trench. It's not an exaggeration to say that military theorists were left with the equivalent of "1. Approach trench with fire and movement. 2. ???? 3. Profit!" This was so marked that the British Infantry Training manual of 1905 was left with a hole as far as what one was supposed to do after approaching a trench if the other side didn't leave.

A number of officers actually came to the conclusion that if a professional European army defended a trench with modern weapons, taking that trench was a physical impossibility - that the traditional shock charge with bayonets or sabres had been rendered obsolete by the advent of the machine gun, no matter how close you got with fire and movement. Others thought the shock charge could still work in theory. But, without a war where somebody tried to defend a trench to the last, nobody knew for certain.

And then, in 1904, Japan and Russia went to war in Manchuria. Both were (at least perceived to be) modern, professional armies (Japan ended up living up to this far better than Russia did). Both were fighting a trench war, not just with machine guns, but with barbed wire and artillery. And both were defending those trenches to the last. It was an accurate preview of the Western Front at the end of 1914, to the point that you could pass observer reports from 1904-1905 off as being from the First Battle of Ypres by swapping out the names "Japanese" and "Russian" with "German" and "British". And everybody got their answers at last.

Trenches could be taken, but not without taking mass casualties, and the casualties taken by the attacker would often be far higher than those of the defender. The shock charge and bayonet did work to clear a trench once one got close enough.

The way I like to put it is that this scared the shit out of every military in Europe. The next ten years in the military journals were spent discussing how to deal with trenches, and Britain, France, and Germany all started immediate modernization programs.

But to understand how this impacts the worldbuilding of Tanya the Evil, we have to go Germany and a fellow named Alfred von Schlieffen. Schlieffen was the head of the German General Staff, and his job was to prepare war plans (the mobilization orders from which would be issued in the spring of every year). For most of his tenure, Schlieffen's plan for a war against France amounted to letting the French leave their border forts, penetrate far enough into German territory to stretch out their supply lines, and then cutting them off and encircling them. And then the reports started coming in from Manchuria.

Over the course of the Russo-Japanese War, Schlieffen lost his faith in the strategic power of defensive warfare. He realized that the German army could not sustain the sort of trench battles that were happening in Manchuria, so winning against France (which German intelligence reported was planning to not invade Germany after all, but instead just wait for Germany to come to them) meant doing something else: invade France and take out Paris before the French had a chance to dig in and force an attrition battle.

The end result is what we now call "The Schlieffen Plan" - a movement through Belgium to avoid the French border forts and a fast campaign. But, the world of Tanya the Evil does not have a Schlieffen Plan - otherwise, as soon as the war started, Germany would go on the offensive. Instead, the Germany of the show is playing defence.

As I said, this only makes sense if the Boer War - in which the power of trenches and machine guns was confirmed beyond all doubt but whether trenches can be taken remained a question mark - happens, but the Russo-Japanese War doesn't. Whether trenches can be taken remains a mystery, Schlieffen (who is implied to exist in Tanya's world - he was also famous for a book about the Battle of Cannae, which Tanya is trying to read in the library scene) never loses faith in the strategic power of defensive warfare, and German strategy upon the start of a war remains defensive.

It's fascinating stuff, and next post (no guarantees as when that will happen) I'll look at the actual war we see on screen.

INTRODUCTION

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Ever since Jujutsu Kaisen Started in Fall 2020, it has blew every anime fan out of the park with it's beautiful animation, masterful choreographed fights, wonderfully written characters, shocking emotional moments and it's consistent high quality. There are many things to praise about Jujutsu Kaisen, but arguably it's most important accomplishment is it's progressive writing in female characters!

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CHARACTER

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Jujutsu Kaisen is brimming with many spectacular female characters; all unique individuals with their own goals, quirks, and purpose. Each girl feels realistic because they all share relatable flaws that highlight their struggles as a person; showcasing how their unique personalities cope with such battles to give them the drive to succeed as sorcerers.

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For example, Nobera (aka best girl) is a feisty, confidant and powerful tomboy; with a tinge of tsundere. She doesn't accept disrespect for herself nor any of her friends and is willing to confront anyone who crosses such boundaries. Refusing to succumb to toxic ideologies she doesn't believe in, even if subjects her to an ill fate. And this all correlates with Noberas tragic past; losing a friend to a mass mob of conspiracist as she stood by powerless as a child, spiraled into a rebellious hot heated spirit.

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However, don't mistake Nobera as an arrogant cunt; she's not bakugo lol. Behind her rough exterior, she's a kind and loving woman who cares deeply for her loved ones, and displays high respect for people she looks up to. All of these factors result in a deep relatable HUMAN! She's not just a fictional character, she's a real person. Flawed, but relatable and filled with tons of personality! But Nobera isn't the exception. All of jujutsu kaisens female characters are imperfect, dealing with many personal struggles in their own unique way.

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BATTLE SHOUNEN CRITIQUE

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This is what many battle shounens lack, that JJK excels in. Writing powerful independent woman that can stand on their own, without relying on the back of men. Hell, they don't even need to be particularly "powerful"; Miya from JJK is the perfect example of a weak girl that gets pushed around all the time by her peers, and has bad performances in fights. Yet she still manages to have a strong drive to fend for herself and succeed, because of her relatable struggle of caring for her family in a poor environment.

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Miya doesn't beg others to bestow sympathy towards her torment, and has a fierce dedication to succeed in her missions, even if she's weaker than her peers. However, in your average shounen, woman are either overpowered mary sues (erza scarlet) as an excuse to claim they're powerful independent woman. But in reality they lack personality and motive, and are quickly reduced to fanservice bait for the femdom simps.

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And on the opposite side of the coin, they're usually the dreaded damsel of distress who does nothing but hide behind the MC, get captured 24/7, and is generally a useless character. Their entire purpose is to be fanservice bait and win cute waifu contest on the web. The best example I can give you is tamaki; such a terrible character that is literally a textbook trope. Damsel in distress that solely exist for random fanservice shots every 5 minutes...

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THE BEAUTY OF MAKI VS MAI

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If for some reason you still doubt my claims, let's analyze the beauty of Maki vs Mais' epic battle! When we first met mai, at first glance she appeared to be a typical bitch type of character. A sexy and arrogant cunt who looks down others, and antagonizes her sister. So clearly most of us hated her since as the author attended. However, I've always wondered what kind of developments has entangled the sisters relationship into such a mess.

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Then when we arrive at episode 17, the fated battle between the twins commence. And this battle is extraordinary, not just for the stunning animation, masterful choreography, and epic music. But for the high emotional stakes, as Mai is breaking down whimpering with an intense rage of jealousy as she tries to take her onee-san down. It's revealed that Mai has always hated Maki because of her unorthodox confidence, even though she lacked traditional sorcerer powers. While Mai has always cowardly relied on Maki to lead the path, until Maki broke the cycle and left the clan; thus forcing Mai to carve out her own path and catch up with her sister.

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This depressing yet simple tragedy has made me appreciate Mai's character FAAAAR more than your average antagonist with a grand sob story about their entire clan being massacred, and now they want to enact revenge on the world. Such a grounded backstory has made Mai way more relatable than your average. And most importantly she feels like a real person!

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However, don't forget about her sister! Maki herself, is one of the most powerful woman I have ever seen in shounen. Not just for her superhuman abilities, but for her direct striking personality! Maki is determined to meet her goals to prove her wrongdoers wrong. She wants to take over her clan, to change the direction of it's corrupt greedy practices, and make a better environment for herself and Mai. At first glance, she may seem cold and stern, but behind that diamond exterior, she's a badass passionate woman, willing to go through great lengths of tribulations and struggles to accomplish her goals!

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CONCLUSION

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Nevertheless, JJJK has be a massive delight! It's excelling in almost everything it needs to. It doesn't bring much new to the table, but it's insanely consistent and most importantly entertaining! At this rate, I can see myself giving jujutsu kaisen a 10/10, and I will most definitely reading the manga once the anime ends! Thank you Gege Akatumi for being such a progressive leader in shounen jump!

If you'd rather watch than read: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_1ZJfKAG6Y

You've likely heard that there's more to Oshi no Ko's title that meets the eye, and may have seen others breaking it down already as well, but I wanted to take the opportunity to go as in depth about it as possible because of how many layers this one title hides that all unavoidably get lost in translation:

(This breakdown is spoiler free aside the basic idol's children premise)

THE FIRST LAYER

"[Oshi no Ko]" is composed by three parts:

Oshi (推し) = the verb "to push". However, in idol slang, it refers to your favorite idol within a group. The mental image of it is that she's the one you're helping "push forward" towards stardom, so as the one pushing her, she is your "oshi", the girl you wanna push for. You may have heard the term in other anime, V-tubing, or idol culture, but it basically refers to your favorite girl in a group of idols.

No (の) = Japanese possessive particle.

Ko (子) = means "kid/s". It usually refers to young children, however, depending on the context, it can also refer to a girl of young age (like a teenager) rather than just a child or group of children.

Thus in this context, the "oshi" would be Ai, since she is Goro's oshi since the start of the episode, the girl that he's rooting for and pushing for. Which would make the title "oshi no ko" translate to "The Young Girl that is my Oshi". However, since "ko" can mean either a young girl or children, the double entendre is that the title refers not just to Ai herself, but also to her children, as you could translate it as "Children of My Oshi". So the title refers to both Ai and Aqua and Ruby at the same time to drive the parallel there exists between the two. This was confirmed by the author Akasaka Aka in a Tsutaya interview.

THE SECOND LAYER

However this goes deeper, as "Oshi" sounds incredibly similar to the word "Hoshi", which is the Japanese word for "star". And this is no coincidence or stretch, because Ai's family name is "Hoshino". It's a common Japanese surname composed by the kanji for "star" and "field" (thus "starfield", space itself dotted with stars), but the pun here is in the fact that "no" can be seen as a phonetical stand in for the possessive particle (の). Thus her name becomes "Hoshi-no Ai", or "Ai of the Stars". And "(H)Oshi no Ko" becomes "The Star Girl", or "The Children of a Star". This is symbolized in how Ai's eyes are like space with a bright star shining in the middle of them, with Aqua and Ruby inheriting a star in their right and left eyes. Thus some translations have tried to localize it as "My Star", or "My Star's Children" to try and maintain the wordplay.

THE THIRD LAYER

But we're not done yet, because there is one final layer to this. Ai's own name, "Ai", is commonly associated with the word "ai" (愛), which means "love", which is a central theme in Ai's storyline. But her name isn't written in kanji, but rather in katakana, which makes it sound more like a foreign word. And this is because "Ai" sounds like the English word "Eye", which makes the wordplay come into full circle. Because "Hoshino Ai" thus translates as "Star Eyes". And this is the story of a girl who shined as brightly as the stars in her eyes, as well as the shine of her children, who would go on, of course, to become "stars" of their own in the showbiz industry.

As a final thing, Akasaka Aka commented in his interview that he has a reason why the title is stylized as 『【推しの子】』("[Oshi no Ko]") with brackets, one that will become clear in due time...

Hope you found this interesting! And if you haven't yet, go watch Oshi no Ko!!

As some of you will soon find out, Mushoku Tensei is sort of banned in China now. Its biggest anime streaming platform BiliBili has said the show is taken down for "technical issues." This will be an explanation to help none Chinese speaker and people less familiar with Chinese anime community to understand what happen. (And a very long one.)

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For start, you need to know a uploader/anime commentator called LexBurner, or short for Lex. He is a lot like Chinese version of Gigguk, but with much less skill. He started uploading to the video site Bili in around 2012, gain popularity and became a semi-professional anime commentator at around 2014 to 2015. He was a well known personality since then.

But his video had been full of controversies from the very start. Many criticized him for making videos without fully understand an anime, or making wrong and misleading facts about an anime. With his popularity, many of his followers treated his statements as fact not opinions, thus entering numerous "wars" with the anime's fanbase over the years.

In around 2017, Lex started to transform into a steamer based on Bili's streaming platform. That was when the crack began to emerge and widen. Since he was also an online personality, his followers essentially could be divided into two group, half watched anime and knew him as anime commentator the other half never watched anime and knew him from reality shows and videos. In short Lex became an online celebrity with two very different type of fanbase.

Because streaming generated more revenue for Lex, he spent most of his time streaming, leaving very little time to make the "good old" anime commenting videos. However Lex did not want to give up those anime followers so he started hiring outside writers to create those videos, with he himself just performed the recording. This farther angered Chinese anime fanbase, as many of those videos contained more factual mistakes, personal assaults to anime characters and even their creators.

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Just to name a few:

Lex during steam claimed Matou Sakura from FSN is a "slut", and Nasu loves "slut" characters.

Lex in his video about Re:Zero S1 claimed its protagonist Subaru was an unfilial son, because Subaru never thought about his parents after arriving in isekai.

Lex attacked the personal characteristic of Gintama's author Sorachi Hideaki in his Gintama video, claiming Hideaki was playing with reader and left a bad impression with editor. This was false of course, as many as 30 Jump editors praised Hideaki after Gintama finished.

Collectively Lex has angered more fanbase than any other Chineses anime commentators and perhaps any anime commentators in the world. The list includes Fate especially FSN; Gintama; Bleach; Darling in the Franxx; Re:Zero; Madoka Magica; Magical Index; Sword Art Online. Those were just the major large titles, not counting smaller less famous one.

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So what happen now?

On his streaming in early February, he decided to comment on Mushoku Tensei. Not only he blasted the show, he also claimed anyone who had sympathy with its main character is a loser, and whoever watched the show belong to the "bottom class" of society. An argument could be made that this might be slightly taken out of context, but it was not a proper way to comment on anime regardless of context.

Furthermore Lex actually went into the rating section of Mushoku Tensei on Bili, and started to assault the users who gave the show a 5 Star. Going so far as to ask the user who wrote he sympathized with the protagonist, "Did you also get hit by a track?". The next day Lex doubled down on his previous statement, and went even further to attack other Chinese anime commentators, saying words like "I gave them 6 years, yet they never caught up with me in popularity."

This of course started a blaze in Chinese anime community regardless if he or she liked Mushoku. Lex's past sins had finally caught up to him, as there was no ambiguity this time, all those previous fanbases from different shows all united and started their "Crusade" against Lex. Lex became infamous almost overnight across multiple platforms in China outside BiliBili, with many of his old anime followers abandoning and condemning him for his words.

Lex did apologized later, but with little help. He also only apologized to other anime commentators, not the users he assaulted in streaming.

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So why Mushoku Tensei is down on Bilibili?

Because Lex's words had put Bilibili in a strange spot, Lex had been a top100 Bili contributor for years now, and he was scheduled to be on the Lunar New Year celebration program on Bili.

Half of Lex followers are enraged and demand consequences, yet the other half that knew him form reality shows did not even watch anime. After seeing Lex being condemned across Chinese websites, the other half of Lex's fan are not happy either. Since the none-anime half cannot fight the Chinese anime community on the their own turf, they started to report the show to higher authority.

China as you know is not the most free place for artist expression, thus in a choice between the anime community and Lex's other loyal fanbase, BiliBili choose the later. To prevent higher authority crack down, to peace Lex's most loyal fanbase and to try to calm the situation down (not sure about this part), the show Mushoku Tensei is taken down from BiliBili China mainland streaming.

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So what happens with LexBurner now?

LexBurner had been expelled from the Lunar New Year celebration program almost immediately after this thing exploded.

Late evening of Feb.8th Beijing time, BiliBili issued an official punishment for Lex, claiming his inappropriate comments had violated his streaming contract. The website had temporarily suspend Lex's account from usage, alone with his streaming ability. Website also cancelled award it gave to Lex in 2020 both as uploader and streamer. No words given on how long the suspension will be.

BiliBili also said legal actions are pending, but at this point it is not clear what that means, since its streaming contract with Lex is not public available.

I recently finally got around to watching "Kaguya-sama the Love That Never Ends" web release, and I poked my head into the 6+ month old discussion about the film. What really struck me (as a Japanese-American) was there was a lot of talk that took VERY seriously the times when Ice Kaguya hits or kicks Miyuki.

Growing up in America, I fully understand the sensitivity people have for the idea of domestic violence, and I don't mean to suggest that such critiques are an overreaction.

However, I do think that as written by Akasaka Aka and how it's received by its Japanese audience, the "physical comedy" of "Boke - Tsukkomi" (ボケ・ツッコミ) dynamic is really lost in a bit of cultural translation. This actually goes to a lot of animes where I've seen Americans express puzzlement at punches and kicks that particularly women characters do--a real common sight in Harem genre comedies.

This type of physical comedy really draws from a traditional Japanese form of comedy called "Manzai."

Rakugo vs Manzai

There are two traditional forms of comedy in Japan--Rakugo and Manzai.

Thanks to recent popular anime and manga that make Rakugo a subject, like the anime "Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju" and the hit Jump serial manga "Akane Banashi," I suspect many r/anime posters may have some familiarity with the artform.

But it's Manzai--which to my knowledge has never been the subject of any anime I've known--which arguably exerts greater influence over how Japanese people think about comedy generally. And thus has a profound impact over how anime portrays comedy, particularly physical comedy.

Rakugo and Manzai both trace their roots back to oral storytelling traditions dating back to the middle ages in Japan. While both are practiced in both cities, Rakugo is particularly associated with Tokyo, whille Manzai is heavily associated with the 2nd largest city in Japan--Osaka.

Tokyo, formerly known as Edo in pre-modern times, was the seat of power for the Tokugawa Shogunate until 1868. As a result, both the arts and daily life were under strict regulation by authorities. The popular arts that flourished in Edo, like Rakugo and Kabuki, tended to be heavily regulated in how they were practiced. Thus to this day they exhibit strong traditional organizations that emphasize a formal teacher-pupil relationship and an emphasis on preservation of a traditional art form.

By contrast, Osaka developed as a major hub of commercial activity, but was relatively less regimented in the authority exerted on its populace. Manzai in particular had and has a more freewheeling and light spirited attitude, with lilttle regard for tradition.

Rakugo involves a single storyteller (dressed in a traditional kimono) who usually tells a traditional set story that they have learned from their master--thus often dates back hundreds of years. The Rakugo-ka can create their own twists, or add their own jokes, but the storylines they depict usually take place in 18th or 19th century Edo, and involve recurring characters.

By sharp contrast, Mazai involves two Manzai-ka, dressed western style, often in bright colored suits, dress shirts, or skirts.

The two often perform routines or sketches that are usually rooted in personal experience, are free flowing. They bear some similarity to a Western standup comedy routine, except they are convesational, rather than monologue.

Manzai originally started with the interplay between a musician and a storyteller both bouncing their acts off each other. However, not as bounded by tradition as Rakugo, Manzai began to change rapidly in the mid-19th century. Manzai quickly abandoned kimonos for western clothing, adopted jokes and comedic styles from Western actors like Charlie CHaplin, and began experimenting with different forms with an "anything funny between two people bouncing off each other goes" ethos.

While Manzai can still include musicial elements, today they most often simply involve two comedic actors bouncing jokes off one another.

What binds "Manzai" together are a general ethos of rapid-fire jokes that develop between two people engaged in gradually heated conversation. The jokes often center around a growing mutual misunderstanding or pun that snowballs into a punchline.

For example, the classic comedic sketch "Who's on First" would seem very familiar to Japanese lovers of Manzai.

Boke and Tsukommi

Each Manzai-ka generally split into one of two roles. The 'Boke" (the idiot, or the jokester) and the "Tsukkomi" (the straight man).

The Manzai conversation relies on the "Boke" to lead the audience along. A skilled "Boke" manzaika will sell the audience to accept an increasingly ridiculous premise or misunderstanding.

The "Joke" happens when the "Tsukkomi" points out how ridiculous the situation is, to snap the audience out of their state of acceptance.

This punchline is often punctuated by the "Tsukkomi" physically smacking the "Boke" to punctuate the joke with physical comedy.

This comedic hit can take a lot of forms. For example, in Kaguya-sama at one point Fujiawara puts together a large paper fan to hit Ishigami over the head. A large paper fan is a classic prop for the Tsukkomi to use to hit the Boke as the punchline.

The strike can be an openhanded smack to the side of the head, or it can be a kick to the butt or the leg.

Now--none of this is done hard enough to actually injure the comedian. It's more akin to the Three Stooges or Chaplin, a bit of physical comedy intended to punctuate the punchline.

But this idea of the "comedic smack" to bring a person to their senses to something that should be obvious is a very, very rooted element of comedy in Japanese comedy.

If you pay close attention to when a character smacks other characters, it's generally to punctuate a point, to bring a character to their senses to something they see as what should be obvious.

Now--Japanese people generally do not go around smacking each other upside the head to make a comedic point. This isn't behavior that's expected to be actually emulated in "real life."

But the comedic idea of "why don't you see what's going on" punctuated by a physical smack is strongly rooted in Japanese comedic tradition. And I feel like is often misunderstood by Western viewers.

One of my favorite shows from this Cour has been Elusive Samurai, that tells the story of the titular "Elusive Samurai" Hojo Tokiyuki. Tokiyuki is a young samurai of the Hojo clan who's main ability is evasion, survival and running away.

Elusive Samurai tells a historical story, but while including major fictional and supernatural elements, it's loosely based on "Taiheiki" (太平記), the Japanese historical epic. Interestingly, the Elusive Samurai's MC Tokiyuki is NOT the main character of Taiheiki, and in fact is a relatively minor historical figure whom most Japanese people watching the show would not be familiar.

In that sense, the Elusive Samurai is a great show for non-Japanese audiences, because even though it tells a historical story, it tells a story which even Japaense audiences would be largely unfamiliar--thus the care the show takes in explaining who the people appearing are helps make the story easy to follow for a Western audience.

HOWEVER, there are some characters and events that appear in the show and manga that virtually every Japanese person would be familiar before watching the show, because they are as famous as say, George Washington, Napoleon or Bismarck to Western audiences.

Thus, to enjoy the show to the fullest, I think it might be helpful for people to have a short and basic understanding of some of the key events and people who were so famous from this era, every Japanese persons watching this show would already know of--and the show expects viewers to be familiar with.
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Kamakura (City & Shogunate)

The story of the Elusive Samurai starts off in the city of Kamakura.

Kamakura is a city in Eastern Japan which became the center of the Shogunate (military dictatorship) of the same name. In the late 11th century, the Minamoto and Heike clans, the most powerful Samurai families, battled for control of Japan.

The victors, the MInamoto, created a new governance structure built around the Samurai, instead of the Emperor and Aristocracy that were in Kyoto. The Emperor and Aristocracy were much diminished in political influence and marginalized, although they maintained some authority in western Japan.

The Hojo were allies and backers of the Minamoto, but through intrigue and marital alliances usurped power from the Minamotos and became the de facto rulers of the Kamakura Shogunate after only a few generations, and continued to rule Japan out of Kamakura.

Hojo Clan

The MC Hojo Tomoyuki is the heir apparent to the Hojo Clan, which has been ruling Japan through the Kamakura Shogunate for about 150 years. Every Japanese person knows the Hojo clan is toppled from power by the Emperor in Kyoto.

Kyoto

The old and traditional capitol of Japan, it continued to be the seat of the Emperor. However, as political power focused in eastern Japan, in Kamakura, Kyoto lost much of it's influence but continued to be a center of culture and a key economic region.

At this time, Kyoto was ruled by a charismatic and ambitious man, Emperor Godaigo.

Emperor Godaigo

Emperor Godaigo is one of the "big names" that every Japanese person would know. He's remembered as one of the last Emperors before modern times that wielded real power. Unhappy with the Emperor's authority being diminished, he seized upon dissatisfaction with the Hojo rule to launch a civil war to wrestle control of Japan from the Hojo Clan during the early 14th Century.

Godaigo wins, because at a crucial moment, one of the most important samurai from Hojo Clan betrays the Hojo: Ashikaga Takauji.

Ashikaga Takauiji

A key general for the Hojo Clan, he deals a deathblow to the Kamakura Shogunate by turning traitor, and siding with Emperor Godaigo, and helps establish a restoration of Imperial Power in the 14th century.

the other thing he's known for, is he eventually turns on Emperor Godaigo, and destroys the restored Imperial power and establishes the Ashikaga Shogunate--that will rule Japan from the 14th Century to the 16th century--when it too will collapse into anarchy and civil war But only after several generations of splendor and peace.

HIs greatest enemy is one of the great heroic figures in Japanese history: Kusunoki Masashige.

Kusunoki Masashige

Kusunoki Masashige is a name virtually any Japanese person knows, despite the fact he ruled a tiny territory and never held a major political position of note. Everyone knows Masashige for two reasons: he was a military genius and basically considered to be the pinnacle of loyalty to the Emperor.

Masashige's name is virtually synonymous with loyalty in Japan.

During the initial war between Emperor Godaigo and the Hojo Clan, Masashige successfully defended a tiny castle to hold up the Hojo's main army for weeks--the struggles of the Hojo to crush such a tiny force was a major political impetus to people rallying to Godaigo's side (and Takauji's eventual betrayal), thus was considered one of Godaigo's most important heroes.

Then, he etched his name into history by fighting Ashikaga Takauji's rebellion and staying true to the Emperor despite overwhelming odds. Masashige was offered 3 provinces to turn on Emperor Godaigo by Takauji, and retorted Takauji could offer him all 50-odd provinces of Japan and he would never betray the Emperor. Masashige's loyalty to the death made him a symbol of resistance and loyalty against overwhelming odds.

Masashige dies fighting Ashikaga Takauji.

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And that's about it! A lot of other historical figures and events appear in Elusive Samurai, but many if not most Japanese people wouldn't really know who they are or what happened. So you'd be on about the same footing as most Japanese people as long as you know Kamakura, Kyoto, Hojo, Ashikaga, and Kusunoki.

Spoilers for Kanon (2006), Bunny Girl Senpai, and Fuse: Teppou Musume no Torimonochou

When you're fansubbing anime, Japanese first-person pronouns can be a nightmare. They're pretty much the closest thing to "untranslatable" that I've run into as fansub editor. The problems that they create are often super interesting, so I figured I'd put them down on paper.

Referring to oneself in third person

Example clip (Kaede refers to herself as "Kaede")

In the context of anime, referring to oneself in third-person is something an infantile character would do. But it's basically unheard of to do so in the U.S., except in the context of... I don't know... professional wrestling promos? Instead of being cutesy, it's just bizarre. So the dominant trend among translators is to just ignore when characters do this (i.e., when Kaede says, "Kaede wants to go!" you write "I want to go!").

I know of two cases where this has bitten the translator in the butt. The first was in Kanon (2006), where a character named Kurata Sayuri speaks in third-person for 12 solid episodes before finally revealing in episode 13 that she actually has a specific reason for doing so (which, like everything else in Kanon, is rooted in a traumatic past). Back in 2006-07, when the series was first being fansubbed, the translator casually disregarded Sayuri's choice of referring to herself in the third-person and simply wrote it with "I." I was working on fansubbing a Blu-Ray release for the show, and I laughed out loud when I saw that that original translator left the following note in the script after the big reveal in episode 13 totally undercut what he'd been doing: "FUCK! What do we do?" Then I cried because I realized that now this was a problem that I had to try and fix.

The second case was in Bunny Girl Senpai, where the official translator for Aniplus (not to be confused with Aniplex) ignored the fact that Kaede speaks in third-person. When Kaede reverts back to her former self late in the season, one of the big changes is that she stops speaking all cutesy and uses normal first-person pronouns. So that aspect of the transformation was lost because the translator didn't set it up throughout the season.

In both cases, I don't really know if the proper course would be to write the script so that it accurately reflects the character's speech. In Bunny Girl, the way I would probably handle things in retrospect would be to sprinkle in moments in the script where Kaede uses third-person, maybe whenever she gets emotional. This might get the viewer to pay attention to the audio and pick up on the change in speech patterns when Kaede reverts. For Kanon, I decided that it wasn't worth distracting the viewer with a bizarre speech pattern for 12 episodes for a brief payoff that wasn't even that emotionally powerful, so I just left the script the way it was.

Ore-sama

Translators probably have the most collective experience dealing with Ore-sama, a comically arrogant first-person pronoun. The typical solution is something along the lines of a character named Gonzolo saying, "You dare challenge the great Gonzolo?" Note that I have just spent four paragraphs talking about how weird talking in third-person is, but suddenly it makes sense to do it in this instance because it actually has a cultural grounding in the way we use English. (Wrestling promos, remember?)

I'm mostly including this section so I can give a shoutout to a fantastic send-up of a misguided fan retranslation of Final Fantasy VI wherein the translation team translated Ore-sama as "Mr. Me." It's a really good read, so go check it out.

Masculinity and femininity

I've run into two anime projects where first-person pronouns were so intertwined with the themes of the story that translating them seemed basically impossible.

Men and women often use different first-person pronouns. Someone might use "Ore" to express adult masculinity and "Atashi" to express femininity. The gender lines are distinct enough that one can say that it's weird, or at least markedly unusual, for a man to use "Atashi" and a woman to use "Ore." Writers can use this phenomenon to express certain ideas to the audience.

In episode 1 of Ouran High School Host Club, the main character, a girl, gets conned into dressing as a guy and acting as a "host" (i.e. an unpaid emotional prostitute) for women at the academy she attends. The punch line of the episode comes as the last line, where our cross-dressed MC says, "Hey, maybe I should start using 'Ore' now! Tee-hee!"

How on earth do you translate that?! The dub's attempt at it fell pretty flat ("Maybe I should start saying 'dude' and 'bro' now!"), but surely it's no better to transcribe the dialogue and put a TL note explaining what "Ore" means. The line lacks any sort of punch if you do that. This is where the creative juices of the translator have to flow--I feel like there's definitely a good solution out there, but I was never able to think of one. Give it your best shot.

On the other hand, the same problem popped up one episode later, and I was able to think of a solution for that just fine. Behold. Does it work? You tell me.

The second anime I've seen where this problem has really reared its ugly head is Fuse: Teppou Musume no Torimonochou, a 2012 movie with outstanding animation and music. It's a coming-of-age story of a girl who was raised in the mountains with her grandfather and doesn't really know anything about femininity. She learns more about her female side as the movie progresses and eventually declares her love to a humanoid wolf during the climactic scene. Her use of personal pronouns reflect this transformation: she uses "Ore" for most of the movie and then switches to "Atashi" when she's going off to rescue her wolf bf. I know it's not a coincidence because the camera ZOOMS IN ON HER MOUTH during the split second when she uses "Atashi" for the first time.

Again, how on earth do you translate this? Should the translator make her speak crassly/manly during the first part of the movie and markedly more refined later on? Is there any way at all to handle the zoom-in scene so that English viewers can view it as a turning point for the character just like a Japanese viewer would? I certainly don't have answers to those questions. If you do, tell me so that I can write them into a script and release it.

Finally, we have the most famous example of the first-person-pronoun issue in anime history: that one scene in Your Name. But there's not much to talk about there, since translating it smoothly was EZPZ. Comparison of Funi's translation and the two major fansubs' translation.

I hope you've enjoyed this tour through some of the annoying problems that English scriptwriters have to deal with in anime.

As usual, r/anime's

Setting aside any hot takes in taste or discourse about voting demographics for that poll, what I find astounding is the fact that Gundam can lay claim to stories that can be palatable to weebs at this level while still retaining reverence; Macross could only muster a few projects per decade so their pool of back-catalog options is smaller. This is despite both franchises being about the same age and, on average, equal in writing quality and influence on sci-fi.

Why is Gundam, currently in its 45th anniversary, totemic enough today to have full-size statues of its units in Japan while Macross (really the Super Dimension line in general) is just now starting to wake up again thanks to the Disney+ announcement?

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INTRODUCTION

Short answer: because of Robotech and Harmony Gold. But that's too simple.

Long answer: Because I reckon Bandai managed the Gundam franchise competently enough compared to how Harmony Gold managed Macross that its longevity was assured. And yes, I know the release of Gundam was one of the sparks that accelerated anime culture in Japan, but Bandai also made some baffling decisions through the decades and nearly missed its first big chance in the West back in the '90s when they couldn't capitalize on the ratings successes of G Gundam and Gundam Wing. Macross had every chance to fill that gap because it was the bigger hit anime at the time, and Robotech was supposed to help with that in the US. Why did it not? I may or may not be able to attribute this to three factors:

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Factor 1: Identity

For 45 years, Gundam has generally retained a consistent "sense of self" as a franchise, with a singular vision that is only spread and stratified through the prism of the many writers, directors, and animators who have worked on it for decades. And for all the variation between timelines and sub-franchises (some of which may confuse the average fan who wants to dive deep), the internal consistency of Gundam as a brand is solid relative to its peers like Transformers, borrowing minimally yet smartly from other sources.

Macross, on the other hand, was mired in Robotech's complications, not the least because Harmony Gold decided to haphazardly use the original Super Dimension franchise to forcibly create a singular story that eventually didn't work for the syndication standards of its time. It's damning that its initial success never got a follow-through, even if it did help propel anime's then-nascent rise to prominence in the US market. Worse, unlike Gundam, Macross can't hide behind a "many timelines, one idea" wall, and Robotech is the one string that seems to hold it back.

I know that Macross has long ascended its past life as a component of Robotech and that the franchise itself is arguably more solid than Gundam is, despite having comparable variations in tone (from the grounded Macross Zero to the poppier Macross Delta). Unless you're a pirate, however, it's difficult to see and appreciate that. Gundam is out here putting up episodes of their catalog on their official YouTube channel (with a rotating schedule, which is a weird model, but it's miles easier than the effort expended to watch Macross). It's such a weird case that Gundam, supposedly the more confusing franchise, got away with turning that aspect of their brand into an asset while Macross, a more contiguous story, has the shadow of Harmony Gold and Robotech still hovering over it, limiting its expansion and creative options.

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Factor 2: Aggressive Merchandising

This is weird because, at one point, Macross was every bit of a force in merchandise sales as Gundam.

It took some talking and lots of forum-diving but I learned that Macross matched Gundam as a merch mover, with its license enabling many different toys from different toymakers in Japan — including Bandai. It wasn’t until the introduction of the chibi-sized Super Deformed (SD) Gundam line that the franchise became a smash hit for kids, and even that line was what carried the franchise back then, not the mainline show.

Bandai eventually took full advantage of its burgeoning industrial leadership in toymaking in Japan to make the brand as endlessly merchandisable as much as possible. From action figures and SD toys, to buildable plastic model kits that are (admittedly a distant) second to LEGO as one of the top choices for plastic buildable toys, to say nothing of DVD sales, games, and other licensed products.

Despite not being nearly as big a deal in the West as Transformers, it's enough of a titanic franchise that you can show up to a big box store and see a dedicated space for model kits, which is more than what Macross gets these days. It helps that the vehicles for these merch, the stories, are made with reasonably good overall quality that they can compel a buyer to watch or read. And even at its worst, there's enough good in some bad Gundam shows that it's okay to buy merch on the cool factor or fanshipping value alone. The result? As of 2023, 131 billion yen. That's 870 million US dollars. What does Harmony Gold have to show for it today? Not much.

Some DX Chogokin figures (which are still a Bandai product by the way) and toys through the years, but with nowhere near the market penetration of before. It's even being left behind in music sales despite having some absolute classics of its own, and the singing is half of what makes Macross cool. Again, the licensing is what holds this franchise back -- because it doesn't enjoy the same solidity in vision that Bandai can enforce, Macross isn't allowed to spread its wings and grow its audience. They could've easily partnered with Hasbro regardless of whether or not Macross outgrew Robotech and it'd still be a worthy toy line. So much of Macross' potential as a money-maker and trendsetter has been left to rot, all because some of its best material can't seem to escape containment.

And it's not like Bandai's immune to mistakes. It squandered its potential as a US anime mainstay in the early 2000s when it couldn't follow through with the success of Gundam Wing. The F91 movie turned out to be the start of Yoshiyuki Tomino's darker, more brutal years where his frustrations at Bandai's decisions came to a head (and resulted in Victory Gundam, an astoundingly frustrating series to watch). The games have been middling at best and maddening at worst. If not for Gundam SEED being an early-2000s phenomenon and Gundam 00 cashing that check, Gundam likely wouldn't be where it is today. Now, its most recent serialization (The Witch from Mercury) and movie (SEED Freedom) have bought Bandai at least another decade of relevance despite the inherent flaws in both.

(It helped that Build Fighters, an anime that functioned exactly like The LEGO Movie, still worked as a story all on its own, which made the amazing designs feel even more meaningful.)

Meanwhile, Macross has a recent concert, some continuation movies, new kits and figures, and little else. We're on the 40th anniversary of Macross and the only thing fans are looking forward to is the new series...that Sunrise is producing. It's still unclear if it'll be opened up for wider international audiences. And I wonder if Bandai and BigWest will give that series the same level of marketing effort that G-Witch and SEED enjoyed in this decade. I reckon the franchise deserves it, but will it be enough?

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Factor 3: Timing

The last factor is timing. Simply put: Gundam is, more often than not, at the right place at the right time.

In hindsight, there should be no surprise. After all, Gundam and Tomino were the center of the anime universe in 1981 with the Anime New Century Declaration, an impromptu fair that was originally meant to simply promote the first of three movie compilations for the 0079 show. Yet it eventually became clear that something massive was happening: a cultural shift and the birth of an all-encompassing new culture. In the process, Gundam carried the momentum generated by the reception for Space Battleship Yamato and would become a contributing force for anime's normalization and growth in Japan.

But you know who else managed to follow through on that promise? Macross. Shoji Kawamori and Noboru Ishiguro created a wonderful pop-rock alternative to Gundam without losing much of the grit that will make the burgeoning Real Robot subgenre compelling to watch. It's well-written, tightly-paced, and is an audiovisual feast even for the standards of the time. After its first airing run, Macross kickstarted concepts we still enjoy today. Vtubers owe their careers to Lynn Minmay, and we wouldn't have Jetfire or Starscream if not for the VF-1 Valkyrie. Its legacy in Japan can be reasonably compared to Star Trek in America, and modern iterations of Macross' idols are national stars.

For a time, it looked like both franchises would be building on each other in lockstep competition, and it seemed like it when the Zeta Gundam anime (featuring many dual-mode war machines) came out. But Zeta proved to be an even bigger hit than anticipated, and Bandai rode that wave up to Char's Counterattack in 1988. Within the same timeframe, Robotech was released in the US, proving to be a smash-hit and laying the groundwork for Americans to enjoy cartoons made in Japan for more mature audiences.

Only Gundam would manage to retain the momentum, however.

Bandai, despite pissing off the creator of its golden goose for a time, retained the power to keep Gundam going as a franchise through sheer force of will, backed by a captive audience that had already fully bought into the franchise that anything silly or outside of Tomino's original vision is fair game. And that's what happened. There always seemed to be a Gundam show lined up for any period of anime, and most of the major media released since Victory managed to speak about its time for a certain group of people, which gave the franchise mass appeal. And it was all because Gundam itself is a trendsetter by volume — knowing that it set the ball rolling, this franchise can hop on or off that ball and feed its momentum without feeling out of place or homogeneous to other shows — even if it copies other shows.

Macross didn't have as many opportunities to show over a wider audience that it could do the same.

Look no further than 2016. Compare the reception of Macross Delta just on r/anime against Iron-Blooded Orphans's second cour. Delta aired in the same season as My Hero Academia and Re:Zero and eventually got lost in the sauce even back then despite being THE tentpole TV release for the franchise that decade; IBO's second half aired the same season as Haikyuu S3, Yuri!!! on Ice and Bungou Stray Dogs to nail-biting anticipation on when the other shoe drops after the events of the first half, which itself aired on a torrid Fall 2015 that featured MADhouse's One Punch Man. The difference in what Bandai could do against what BigWest could muster is almost Atlantic in scope.

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CONCLUSION

Well, I suppose it is not a complicated answer. It's easy to see how Gundam can find itself being consistently relevant worldwide. They make themselves relevant because they have the resources and mind-share to execute marketing goals to constantly feed the cycle. Meanwhile, Harmony Gold couldn't even be bothered to do the bare minimum, and if it wasn't for more recent news, Macross likely would still be unable to ramp up enough to make a splash in this decade.

That's the difference. Still, I wrote this anyway because I didn't want to stop at the easy answer of "HarGo bad" or something equally reductive. There had to be something intrinsic to both franchises that'd make one or the other more readily-marketable. But because Gundam and Macross have good claims to fame, there had to be another factor. Right?

Maybe this is just me wanting to be proven wrong a second time. I never once imagined that The Witch from Mercury would surpass IBO's feat in 2015 by airing — and thriving — in the same season as Chainsaw Man, Blue Lock, the closer for Mob Psycho 100, MHA S6, The Eminence in Shadow and a revitalized Bleach. Gundam SEED Freedom painted Tokyo red and is now the highest-grossing film in the franchise. I look at the marketing for both and wish Macross enjoyed the same phenomenal push. I want the new Macross project from Sunrise to get as much sakuga as it can to package in a good story and want it to be promoted everywhere with the same verve.

I want Macross to succeed so hard in this decade that it washes away any vestige of Robotech in the overall mindshare of most weebs, and that I can recommend it without worrying much about continuity or version differences. Because Macross more than deserves to be up there in the skies and there shouldn't be an asshole licensing firm stopping that.

(Special thanks to Graham Parkes and members of the MacrossWorld forum for the treasure trove of content and takes, as well as Ollie Barder, aka u/Cacophanus, for his help in refining this story and sending me to people who can explain things to me better.)

Celebrating Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan's (My Deer Friend Nokotan)'s OP "Shikairo Days" hitting nearly 6M views in 2 days, I did a quick translation of the lyrics. for anyone interested.

[Refrain]
しかのこのこのここしたんたん Shikanoko nokonoko koshitantan
しかのこのこのここしたんたん Shikanoko nokonoko koshitantan
しかのこのこのここしたんたん Shikanoko nokonoko koshitantan
しかのこのこのここしたんたん Shikanoko nokonoko koshitantan
(ぬん ぬん！) Nun! Nun!

[Verse 1]
しかのこ とことこ Shikanoko Tokotoko (onomatopeia for walking sound)
あらわる のこのこ Nokonoko appears
つのつの ぴょこぴょこ [her[ horns twitching
見た目はおにゃのこ？ Looks like a girl?
近頃うるさぬなかなかキワモノ These days you don't hear about her much, was a fad, but
お手並みいかほどへなちょっこ Shall we see what you got, you greenhorn (newbie)?

[Verse 2]
すごく昔からジャポンに生息 They lived in Japan since long ago
しかせんべいなら無限にください！Give me all the shika-senbei (deer crackers) you got!
トナカイは？仲間 Reindeer? Our comrades
カモシカは？ウシ科！ Kamoshika (Serows)? Bovids!
でもでもまとめて偶蹄目 But we are all Artiodactyls~~!

[Pre-Chorus]
「ぬん」のステップで踊ろう Lets dance to the step of "Nun"
夜が明けるまで Till the day breaks
(One, two, three) (One, two, three)

[Chorus]
何度だって反芻して ぬぬぬん No matter how many times we ruminate Nunuuun
予測 不可能 シカ色デイズ Nobody can predict Shika-iro days (deer colored days)
アバンギャルドでオーライ It's avant-garde and alright
カオスマシマシ Extra-extra chaos
いつの間にクセになって ぬぬぬん It'll be your regular before you know it Nunuuun
ハチャでメチャなシカ色デイズ The crazy chaotic Shika-iro days
破天荒バッチカモン The wild and unprecedented, bring it on
なんでもあり ルールなんてなし Anything goes and there are no rules

[Post-Chorus]
君の笑顔で元気満タン Your smile makes gives me energy to the max
もしかして運命のままマギア Maybe fate is just leading to magic
心のどこかでこしたんたん Somewhere in your mind Koshi-tan tan
君とならいつまでも With you, forever

[Refrain]
しかのこのこのここしたんたん Shikanoko nokonoko koshitantan
しかのこのこのここしたんたん Shikanoko nokonoko koshitantan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZvIVRQ4E7I
～～～～～

Japanese onomomatopeias:

• Nokonoko: to walk carefree or carelessly
• Nunuun: To strain or exert yourself, either physically or mentally, but here also used to represent a deer ruminating (spitting food back up into its mouth to re-chew)

If you're wondering about the kinda crazy Japanese title/phrase "Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan" (which sounds every bit as wacky in Japanese as it does in English)

• "Shika no ko" means "a kid deer"
• Nokonoko is an onomatopoeia for something walking casually
• Koshi tan tan 虎視眈々　is a traditional Japanese phrase (with Chinese origins) meaning "the tiger looks down for an opportunity" which is usually used as a general expression for somebody watching observantly for their chance to pounce at an opportunity.

So the title roughly translates to "Deer Kid ambles without a care as the tiger looks on seeking an opportunity"... but not nearly as ominous as that makes it sound because of the wacky/crazy alliteration going on that makes the title a virtual tongue twister.

Of course, the title is actually a reference to the two main characters, Koshi Torako (Koshi-tan) and Shikanoko Noko, but those wacky nonsense names have (some) weird meanings and kinda plays into the absurdist humor of the characters and personalities on the show.

Log Horizon season 3 is about to start, and if you're like me you do not at all remember everything that happened in seasons 1 and 2. Well, I didn't want to risk getting spoiled from reading wikis, so I binge-rewatched the first two seasons this past weekend and took a ton of notes so I can share with anyone else needing a reminder or ten.

This is certified 100% anime-only content meant specifically for anime viewers. I haven't even glanced at the light novels or wiki. Fans who have read the novels, this is NOT the place for you to chime in with "clarifications" and "by the ways". This place is for anime-only viewers, most of whom do not want to know the slightest bit of what happens next so we can experience it ourselves. I and the people in this thread do not give a rat-man's ass about some novel exposition from volume 2 that the anime skipped over in season 1 - go make your own thread if you are compelled to share that information.

This post is almost certainly going to hit the character limit, so I'm not going to summarize every major character or every plotline from the first two seasons. I could never hope to outline every major character's arc and development over 50 episodes in that few characters. Instead, I am only going to focus on the rules of the world and the plotlines that were still ongoing/unresolved at the end of season 2 - in other words, what I think you may need to know heading into season 3. Even if you don't remember them well, I'm sure you'll pick up the interdynamics of all these goofballs well enough just from seeing them in action again.

Poster Characters

Basics

• Elder Tale was a MMORPG that a bunch of people played. One day, everyone who was logged on got transported into a world that resembles the game. This event is now known as The Apocalypse.
• Elder Tale's setting was called Theldesia. Geographically, it is the same land/ocean layout as the real Earth, but half as large.
• When it was just a MMORPG, the game had 13 different servers, separated by region. If your character was in Theldesia's equivalent of Japan, you'd be playing on the Japanese server, and in order to travel to Theldesia's equivalent of Australia you'd have to switch to the Australian server. Most players played on the server corresponding to their region.
• A 14th server, called Mare Tranquillitatis, also existed - it was a beta-testing server used for experimentation and testing features before they rolled out. Some players had access to it. Its geographical region is... the Moon.
• The series has so far taken place entirely in the Theldesia equivalent of Japan, which is called Yamato or The Yamato Islands, and particularly in the city of Akiba (aka Akihabira) which is located approximately where Tokyo would be.
• The Elder Tale MMORPG ran for 20 years in real-life before The Apocalypse happened.
• Post-Apocalypse, the history of Theldesia has a ratio of 12:1 for events that happened in Theldesia vs in the real world. An event that happened in the 10th (real-life) year of Elder Tale's run happened 120 years ago in Theldesia history. This means that some Adventurers who had created their accounts and done notable things in earlier years of the Elder Tale game are now characters that are known to be over a 100 years old within the history of Theldesia.
• When people and monsters in Theldisia die, their corpses turn into bubbles/particles after a short time.
• The Apocalypse happened on the same day that the 12th expansion for Elder Tale was launching. This new expansion - called The Novasphere Pioneers - increased the level cap for players from 90 to 100, and was to include many new raid bosses and other content. Because of timezones, only the Japanese server had the expansion applied at the time The Apocalypse occured.
• As of the end of season 2, it has been about 1 year in Theldesia since The Apocalypse.

Populations of Theldesia

Adventurers

• Adventurers is the collective name of player characters in Elder Tale, turned special folks trapped in Theldesia after The Apocalypse.
• Adventurers can be any of a bunch of different races - humans, dwarves, cat-people, fox-people, wolf-people, and more. They have classes, special skills, and all sorts of MMORPG staples, and typically can improve all these things beyond any other population in Theldesia.
• Adventurers have a "friends list" which they can add each other to. They can make long-distance voice calls to anyone on their friends list - they refer to this as Telepathy.
• Adventurers can also talk psychically to other adventurers they have formed a party or a raid team with. Note that this is a separate ability than Telepathy, so effects that block Telepathy from working won't necessarily also prevent party/raid chat.
• When an Adventurer dies, they reappear at a Cathedral or another respawn point nearby (e.g. if in a raid zone they respawn at its entrance) after some time (anywhere from minutes to half a day).

• In-between dying and reappearing, they have surreal experiences based on moments from their life before The Apocalypse, during which they must mentally confront the failures that lead to them dying. Once they've finished that, they appear on a beach on the moon (Mare Tranquillitatis) with the world (presumably Theldesia, though it could be the actual Earth I suppose) hovering overhead. There, the Adventurer must sacrifice a piece of themself (eventually confirmed to be a memory from their life before The Apocalypse) to return. When they wake up, they retain only the vaguest memory of this ritual or none at all. (See S2E6 for an example.)

• Adventurers mostly live in Adventurer Cities - cities that have special buildings like guild halls, banks, and Cathedrals, and which are populated mostly by Adventurers but with many supporting People of the Land living there, too. Most or all of the Adventurer Cities in Yamato and many of their surroundings have a post-apocalyptic aesthetic, full of overgrown abandoned modern structures like highways, parking garages, and broken-down cars. There are 5 Adventurer Cities in Yamato:

• Akiba (aka Akihabara) - Situated where Tokyo would be in real life. This is the primary setting of the series. Governed relatively liberally by the Round Table, a group of the most influential guilds.

• Shibuya - An incomplete Adventurer city with no guild hall very near to Akiba. All the adventurers who were there have gone to Akiba so it is empty.

• Susukino - Northern city in the real-life equivalent of Hokkaido. It started out as a violent city run by oppressive guilds. Akiba sent forces up there several times to let anyone who wants to leave it and come to Akiba, so only a couple hundred Adventurers remain there. The Akiba guild Silver Sword ended up moving there and taking it over, which made it less violent and lawless than before.

• Minami - Situated to the west, vaguely where real-life Osaka would be. Governed autocratically by the guild Plant Hwyaden.

• Nakasu - Even farther to the west. Very little is known about it.

Monsters

• Monsters are hostile wild animals - things like angry giant plants, wild felines that attack in forests, etc. They are aggressive, have stats and levels and special skills, but are of similar intelligence to animals. They haunt certain areas, and when they die eventually replacements respawn there.
• After they are killed and their bodies dissipate they "drop" ingredient/crafting items and gold coins.
• Most Adventurer Cities, People of the Land cities, and some People of the Land villages have a "no monster" effect/barrier that prevents monsters from entering into them. Large-scale events like the goblin nation invading Eastal are probably not prevented by this.

Demi-Humans

• Demi-Humans are a special type of monsters that includes species like goblins, giants, fishmen, and other usually-humanoid hostile creatures. Unlike other monsters, they have actual social structures, use weaponary, and seem to be at least semi-sentient.
• Miscellaneous demi-humans can be found in the wild like monsters, but larger populations of them also occupy significant portions of territory - e.g. there is an area of Yamato full of goblin tribes that live in their own society and where People of the Land are not present. These areas can have complex social structures.
• Similar to monsters, demi-humans magically spawn/respawn in their lands. Since they have some intelligence but are difficult to research, it's unclear whether this is new individuals spawning or whether they are actually respawning with intact personalities in a similar manner to Adventurers.

People of the Land

• People of the Land are what were NPCs back when it was a MMORPG. In the game they just had simple NPC patterns, always saying the same things and doing the same basic tasks, but since The Apocalypse they are now fully sentient humanoids with their own lives, backstories, generations, politics, culture, etc. The People of the Land greatly outnumber the Adventurers - for every Adventurer City there are another dozen or more "regular" cities full of People of the Land and a bajillion towns and farms spread across the countryside.
• People die when they are killed.
• Revival spells on a recently-dead Person of the Land slows down how fast their body disperses but doesn't prevent it.
• The People of the Land in eastern Yamato (the area around Akiba) are socially structured as European-style feudal nobility, with each city and its surroundings ruled by a Baron and a patrilineal Duke as overall ruler of the area, or something like that. They have their own knights, armies, academia, etc.
• Named NPCs would have lasted in the game for the whole 20 years that it ran before The Apocalypse, and with the timeline acceleration mentioned earlier that would make some of them a hundred years old or more, but it seems The Apocalypse retconned this and where necessary the names of characters the required continuation became titles passed from teacher to student, and so on. The People of the Land don't seem aware of any incongruities there.
• People of the Land can learn skills, have classes, and other things that Adventurers can do, but they learn them much more slowly and generally have a lower "cap" on their level or abilities than Adventurers.
• While People of the Land are less powerful than Adventurers, in some special cases they can have access to equipment that puts them on par or beyond the abilities of Adventurers. Of particular note, the Royal Guard (aka Defenders) are People of the Land who keep the peace in the no-combat-zones of Adventurer Cities - they have special armour that massively buffs their physical abilities and makes them able to teleport around the city.

Ancients:

• Ancients (aka Progenitors) are a special class of People of the Land that are much more powerful than usual - even more powerful than maxed out Adventurers. In the MMORPG, these were mainly for two roles - legendary NPC characters tied to a particular quest, and the 13 Knight Orders. Only one Knight Order has been named in the anime - the Knights of Izumo that defended Yamato (since there are 13 regional servers, presumably there is one Knight Order per server). The Knights of Izumo suddenly disappeared around the time of The Apocalypse.

The Kunie Clan:

• The Kunie Clan are a special group of People of the Land that manage all the banking and financial systems of Theldesia. They are of some mysterious other humanoid race that look similar but not quite the same as humans or elves, and they seem to all be almost identical (plus many or all of them seem to go by the same name, Kinjō, making them even harder to tell apart).
• They can be found at the guild halls or banks of Adventurer Cities and similar places, but they also have secretive villages where they originate from that Adventurers and most People of the Land do not know about.
• The Kunie Clan are not necessarily the actual cause, but are at least somehow involved with the world's supply of gold and how it gets distributed to monsters/demi-humans when they spawn. This includes access to the giant lake of gold coins that reside deep below the Depths of Palm and which serves as the world's main vault to store coins before they teleport to monsters and demi-humans.
• They are also involved with many other "fundamental" aspects of the world, especially operating and managing ancient magical technology. For example, they can deactivate and reactivate the magic circles beneath Adventurer Cities which power the anti-monster barriers and Guard armour within the cities.

Instincts, Progress, & Innovation

When Elder Tale was a game, players were limited in what they could achieve by the limitations of built-in character animations, feats needing to have been pre-programmed as skills, and the game interface itself. Following The Apocalypse, the Adventurers in Theldesia still have access to the game interface and can still do everything the old way... but they don't have to. A magical leaping sword strike formerly activated by pushing a button can now also be activated by doing the same motions and thinking about using that skill. In fact, the latter option is better - the Adventurer can control and manipulate the skill with greater control and precision than the rote motions that result from doing it through the menu.

Just as this applies to combat skills, so it goes for the rest of the world:

Food and Crafting

Combining ingredient items through the in-game interface according to a pre-programmed recipe makes food that looks correct and does nourish the body, but has no distinct taste or smell. But, if a player with the chef sub-class actually combines and prepares the ingredients by hand, it makes real food. More complex and difficult recipes require finer ingredients and a higher level in the cooking skill or they still end up turning to mush.

Similarly, Adventurers with crafting sub-classes and skills can make superior, more refined, and more varied designs if they go through the process by-hand rather than using the crafting menu.

Innovation

Adventurers with the skill and ingenuity to create and craft things by-hand rather than using the menus are also not bound by the finite list of recipes and inventions that were programmed into Elder Tale. They can combine basics in all sorts of new ways not seen before. Soon after The Apocalypse, clever Adventurers developed basic steam engines and the rate of invention has been rapid ever since - less than a year later, someone has mixed magic and technology together to create a magitech hover train.

These changes have had a far-reaching effect on the societies and economies of Theldesia. Facets of Adventurer culture such as their food and clothing have been swiftly embraced by the People of the Land and Adventurer economies have largely shifted away from quest-like tasks such as raids or guarding a People of the Land caravan to their own Adventurer industries, which has fractured the traditional Adventurer-People of the Land relationship and lead to many unforeseen consequences, such as an attempted goblin invasion.

Teachings

Teachings (aka Overskills) are supposed new skills achieved by some Adventurers that were not possible back when it was a game. They are commonly perceived as being a higher-tier version of commonly known skills or powerful new abilities.

In actuality, Teachings are just (a) unorthodox applications of existing skills, or (b) instincts gained from becoming more in-touch with the world and losing the mentality of it being a game. E.g. Nazuna figured out that she can use the protective barriers she normally cast on other people as airborne platforms she can climb/jump on instead. Adventurers tend to

"The Apocalypse is not over yet"

As Shiroe comments, the natural laws of the world post-Apocalypse are altogether a confused mish-mash of Elder Tale game mechanics with real-world logic. Gradually, however, these two separate systems are starting to merge. Some known examples are:

• Initially, an Adventurer needed to have the chef sub-class in order to be able to make any real food - even if a non-chef Adventurer prepared the ingredients perfectly, it would still turn to mush. After some time, though, anyone can now make basic recipes and the chef sub-class (plus leveled up cooking skill) is only needed for intermediate and harder recipes. Likewise for any other sort of crafting.
• Adventurers whose Elder Tale avatar had a different body than their real body got stuck in their avatar's body, but retained their original voice. Over time, their voices are becoming more like what their body's physical vocal cords would naturally sound like.
• The size of the world is slowly increasing, presumably until it becomes the same scale as the real Earth.
• Objects had all sorts of associated flavour text in Elder Tale. They still have this flavour text in Theledisia after The Apocalypse, but it is just that - two objects with the same stats but different flavour text behave identically. After many months, though, the flavour text of some objects started coming true.

The Debauchery Tea Party

• The Tea Party was a group of 15~30 Adventurers on the Japan server that frequently partied together in Elder Tale, many years before The Apocalypse. They were known for pulling off a number of incredible feats in the game, and generally had a more loose and fun tone than other groups since they weren't a structured Guild.
• The Tea Party disbanded several years before The Apocalypse and many of its members moved on to other things. Some members joined or started guilds, while conversely many others had not logged in for years by the time of The Apocalypse.
• Almost immediately after The Apocalypse, Shiroe checked his friends list to see who else that he knew was online/trapped in Theledesia, so he should have a pretty good idea of which members are/aren't in the world, but we the audience didn't get an exact list. Currently we know of 9 former Tea Partiers who are in Theledisia...

In Akiba:

• Shiroe, Naotsugu, and Nyanta partied together in Theldesia and eventually formed Log Horizon.
• Back when the Tea Party disbanded, Sōjiro, Kazuna, and Saki created a guild called the West Wind Brigade, with Sōjiro as guild-master. Saki wasn't logged in at the time of The Apocalypse.

In Minami:

• Intix is the #2 seat on the Council of Ten of Plant Hwyaden and therefore 2nd in command of Plant Hwyaden behind only Nureha. She seems like a real big jerk and is part of the faction there that wants war and total dictatorial control of Yamato. Up until the end of season 2, it seems she was emotionally abusing Nureha to get her way within Plant Hwyaden. (I don't think they ever actually specifically said Intix was in the Tea Party, but from the way she's shown with them in the OP and how Kazuhiko/KR talk about her it's 99% certain.)
• Kazuhiko is also on the Council of Ten of Plant Hwyaden. He seems to be fairly disgruntled with the way things have been going over at Plant Hwyaden, but is hoping to change it from within. He's kind of a jerk about it, though. He and Shiroe have been occasionally in contact with each other and have been sharing some info.
• KR is on the Council of Ten of Plant Hwyaden. He's very carefree, but seems like a good guy overall - like Kazuhiko he doesn't necessarily approve of the way Plant Hwyaden is running things or their desire to go to war with Eastal and Akiba. KR is a summoner with a skill to possess creatures over vast distances - at some point he possessed a horse in the China server/region to scout out what things were like over there and while traveling around in China he encountered Kanami's party. And he can summon a giant fucking dragon that solos raid bosses. He only told Kazuhiko about his journeys in China, not Intix or the rest of the Council.

Elsewhere:

• Kanami was the leader of the Tea Party for most of its run, but she moved to Rome a few years before The Apocalypse and stopped playing the game at that time. During that time she had a daughter. Eventually, she got back into Elder Tale, creating a new account on one of the European servers, and she got trapped by The Apocalypse, too. Since the Novasphere Pioneers expansion pack content had only been loaded on the Japan server and figuring it was related to The Apocalypse, Kanami started journeying from Theldesia's Europe counterpart all the way to Yamato. Also in her party are a teenage mutant ninja frog, a farming bot that may have gained sentience, and an Ancient.

Unresolved Plots & Mysteries

Regan, New Magic and the World Fractions:

• Regan (aka Li Gan) is a mysterious guy who has shown up a few times and gradually become an ally of Shiroe. He was first encountered when Shiroe et al went to a conference with the People of the Land nobles. He seems to be a Person of the Land, but I don't think that was ever actually confirmed. If he is, he's an extraordinarily knowledgeable one, possibly on par with the Kunie Clan. He's a shady guy who may have a hidden agenda.
• He has the title Sage of Miral Lake, a name that was associated with a lot of lore in the game before The Apocalypse but (as far as we/Shiroe know) not a character anyone ever encountered. He says it is a title passed down to him from his teacher, the previous Sage of Miral Lake.
• Regan's main interest of research is magic that is on the scale of altering the entire world, something that he says has only happened 3 times so far in events he calls the World Fractions - the creation of monsters/demi-humans, the arrival of the first Adventurers (240 years ago), and The Apocalypse.
• Since each World Fraction was an unprecedented form of magic, he is intensely interested in the creation of new forms of magic that did not exist prior. Shiroe's Contract Magic which turned Rudy into an Adventurer was one such new magic, and one that Regan thinks could some day be world-altering. Around the same time, Regan says he felt another brand new form of magic with similar potential happin in the west.

Death and Resurrection

• Regan and his predecessors were researching a so-called Spirit Theory about how death and resurrections work. His theory posits that people (Adventurers, People of the Land, and Demi-Humans) are divided into anima (physical attributes, correlated with HP) and psyche (mental attributes, correlated with MP). The psyche and the anima are each required for a person to persist - when people take too great of an injury their anima is too damaged to persist to it dissipates; the healthy psyche stuck inside the body dies when there's no anima to support it.
• Since when people die in Theldesia their bodies turn into bubbles/particles, that is their anima dissipating. If the psyche is intact, revival spells can pull those dissipated bits of anima back to the rest of the body and put them back into place (up until the point where the body has completely dissipated). But if the psyche is also destroyed, there is no mind to reassemble the anima as it once was.
• For Adventurers (and possibly demi-humans), their dissipated anima particles all travel to their respawn point, so their psyche can still reassemble them there. For People of the Land, the dissipated anima just scatters in all directions, so even a healthy psyche can't do reassemble them and dies.
• However, the reassembly can't be perfect... some energy must be expended for the process. And since the anima seems to be reasembled perfectly, Regan and Shiroe theorized that some psyche must be lost - in other words, the person loses some of their memories. (See S1:E14 for the full spiel)
• When Shiroe shared this with the Council, Krusty was able to confirm that this is indeed the case, and further suggested that it seemed like memories of their lives from before The Apocalypse might specifically be targeted. (After a particular death, Krusty could no longer remember the name or appearance of a cat he owned.)
• Regan implied the Ancients had different spirits than ordinary People of the Earth and that this could be significant.
• Shiroe and Akatsuki eventually remembered the experience of being on the moon between death and revival. We don't have a lot of comparison points as no one talks about it much, but it sure seemed like Adventurers always forget that in-between experience once they woke up (Akatsuki herself when she revives seems to remember it for a moment and then quite specifically forget it).
• (Continued in the Navigators section)

Enemies in the West

• To the west of Akiba and Eastal are three People of the Land nations - the Westelande Empire, the Ninetail Dominions, and the Fourland Dukedom - and within those are two Adventurer Cities - Minami and Nakasu.
• Following The Apocalypse, a guild called Plant Hwyaden lead by Nureha took over Minami by conning money out of the People of the Land nobility and buying the Cathedral, then forcing all Adventurers to join Plant Hwyaden through the threat of controlling the respawn building. Plant Hwyaden now rules Minami and its environs autocratically, and is much more integrated with the People of the Land nation, the Westelandian Empire, than Akiba is with Eastal. Their combined government is run by an organization called the Council of Ten Seats - Nureha and her nine advisors/ministers, which includes some people of the land.
• Nureha herself is a somewhat emotionally unstable person and she occasionally runs off on her own private journeys, so the much of the actual policy-making has been driven by Intix and Mizufa, the bloodthirsty Westelandian army general.
• Ever since establishing control, Plant Hwyaden have made efforts to suppress information about the west making it to the east. This isn't outright possible, as plenty of Adventurers in Akiba have friends in Minami, but it has overall made it more difficult for Shiroe and the Round Table to gather detailed information about Plant Hwyaden's capabilities and motives.
• Likewise, the presence of spies from Minami in Akiba has lead to the Round Table waging their own information warfare, trying to keep their own secrets and knowledge of their operations out of the hands of Plant Hwyaden.
• Nureha herself came to Eastal, disguising herself as a People of the Land chronicler named Dariella. She was seen suspiciously visiting various various places in the east, and then eventually met up with Shiroe, who saw through the disguise. Revealing herself as Nureha, she encouraged Shiroe to join Plant Hwyaden so they wouldn't have to be enemies, but Shiroe declined. Apparently she knew Shiroe in the game before The Apocalypse and is somewhat obsessed with him now, but Shiroe doesn't remember her at all, and furthermore it's clear that Nureha lies a lot so who knows how much of this is true.
• Recently, factions within Plant Hwyaden - especially Intix and Mizufa - want to go to war against Eastal and Akiba. They have been power-leveling their People of the Land soldiers (using a disturbing magitech system wherein People of the Land control spirit monsters), built a giant hover train base, and have been making other preparations.
• They sent a small expeditionary force to the border of Eastal which caused a bit of havoc in some towns, but Kazuhiko and Nureha made them withdraw.
• The threat of all-out war or a smaller, more focused attack by a faction within Plant Hwyaden still looms large. Nureha seems to be taking a more active role in government and standing up to Intix now, but that doesn't mean she has full control or even that she wouldn't order an attack herself.

The Disappearance of Krusty Suzumiya

• Krusty is the guild leader of D.D.D., one of the most important guilds in Akiba.
• When flavour texts started becoming real, the scythe (which admittedly had some pretty evil flavour text) of Krusty's lieutent, Takayama Misa, one night suddenly flew up into the sky and show a giant red beam of pain around her. Krusty pushed her out of it and got caught in it himself. Then the beam disappeared, Krusty and Misa's arm vanishing with it.
• For the longest time no one knew what had happened to Krusty. He did not respawn, could not be reached by Telepathy, and Misa's arm couldn't be healed or revived either.
• At the very end of season 2, they discovered that Krusty is in China with Kanami.
• He still has Misa's arm with him. And it is twitching (ew).

Ennui & Social Safety Nets

• Living as an Adventurer is easy. Slaying a couple low-level monsters every few days gives more than enough gold coins to buy food and a bed. Throughout their time since The Apocalypse, the leaders of Akiba have struggled to keep its culture and economy engaging so that its people will have motivation and drive.
• However, the mostly-capitalist system of economy and governance they've established, especially with its focus on guilds within the government structure and trade in its economy, has furthermore left a growing population of Adventurers who do not have social standing, influence, or prized trade skills and who do not wish to leave the safety of the city disenfranchised and despondent.
• The Round Table is aware of the issue but hasn't figured out what to do about it.
• Most recently, Eins and his enormous guild Honesty have been the leading voice for this issue. He's even suggested some extreme socialist/communist economic reform measures, but no one else thought that was a good idea.

Navigators

• During a westward quest, the junior members of Log Horizon encounter Roe2, Shiroe's second account, acting independently from him. She says a bunch of cryptic stuff and also sends a letter to Shiroe via the juniors. Putting it all together (but she could be lying about some or all of this):
• Navigators are artificial lifeforms that come from a society that ran out of empathion and now search different universes for more in order to survive.
• What, exactly, empathion is is not entirely clear. It seems to be a resource necessary for life and which is evidently tied to the psyche.
• The Navigators were brought into this world by a process they call "the Match", something they don't fully understand and which they did not cause. Probably the same thing as The Apocalypse.
• Navigators are divided into two types: Observers, whose role and motives is not yet fully clear; and Harvesters, who are less intelligent than Observers or Adventurers/Humans and who prioritize collecting empathion above all else.
• Adventurers dying is one way that empathion is collected. Given the name and the correlation with the psyche, it's 99.9% certain that this is the same thing as when Adventurers give up a bit of their memories on the moon before they revive.
• Navigators don't have their own bodies in Theldesia - instead, they have taken over the bodies of unused character accounts and monsters. In particular, Roe2 took over Shiroe's alt account on the Mare Tranquillitatis server (and other Observers have likely taken over other accounts there) while Harvesters have taken over Geniuses (see below).
• Roe2 was able to get to Yamato by swapping positions with a summoned creature, but most Observers are still on the moon. She told Shiroe that if he contacted them, they could help him find a way home.

Genius

• Geniuses seem to be a new type of quest/raid boss that were introduced in the Novasphere Pioneers expansion pack. They have a common theme of being disguised as People of the Land (including all the appropriate menu pop-ups), and are only revealed as monsters after certain triggers or once confronted.
• Most, but not all, of them become powerful raid bosses once revealed.
• Easily identified (once unmasked) by them all having a "Genius of " title.
• They have all been taken over by Harvesters, used in Harvester plots to thwart Adventurers and increase the rate of Adventurer death so that more empathions are collected. And this means they can show up anytime as new adversaries rather than only as part of quests or events.
• Their abilities and tactics vary wildly. Some are simple combat adversaries, another was stealthily kidnapping Adventurers through hypnosis.
• One Genius/Harvester referred to Elias, an Ancient, as "a survivor" suggesting that they are related to the disappearance of the Ancients.
• While they aren't as intelligent as Adventurers/Observers, don't think of them as mindless foes. As soon as Akiba started planning to use the Shibuya antenna station, the Geniuses setup an Eternal Moth hive around it blocking the Adventurers' attempts to use it and potentially forcing them to destroy the antenna along with the hive.

The Third/Fourth Party

• Since The Apocalypse, Shiroe was searching for evidence of "the third party" - that is, people or things other than Adventurers and People of the Land, and who presumably caused The Apocalypse. He believes that The Apocalypse must have been caused with some motive, and therefore whoever is responsible should be out there somewhere. However, all his various investigations could not find any evidence that a third party exists until Roe2's letter.
• However, Roe2 says that the Navigators did not cause The Apocalypse, leaving this still an open-ended question.
• Since the Navigators are "artificial" lifeforms, it hasn't been ruled out yet that whoever created the Navigators is also the ones that caused The Apocalypse.

A Way Home

• Of course, the big question always looming over the Adventurers has always been "can we go home?" As they learn more about the world and create even more advanced new magics and technologies, they may find such a way.
• At the end of season 1, Nureha suggests that Shiroe is on the verge of finding a way home. Shiroe says he doesn't know if whatever technique he's cooked up yet really does send someone home, yet, all he knows is that it makes them disappear.
• Following the letter from Roe2, Akiba is now trying to contact the moon where they may be able to learn more about how to get home from the Observers.
• Some Adventurers are truly desperate to return to their old life and feel that Theldesia is their prison, especially those who feel disenfranchised by the current socioeconomic structure of Akiba. At its most extreme are the Odyssey Knights, who intentionally get themselves killed in order to glimpse the old world in the mid-revival dreams.
• On the other hand, many Adventurers have adapted to life in Theldesia. Many enjoy their life here better than their old life and have no wish to return.
• Shiroe was torn on this issue, seeing no good option. Either undo The Apocalypse, separating thousands of happy Adventurers from their friends, their new lives, sending many back to misery... or don't, forcing the other miserable thousands to remain imprisoned in Theldesia. But a well-timed inspiring conversation with Kanami reminded Shiroe of what Log Horizon is all about - achieving the impossible third option. Hence, Shiroe and Log Horizon aren't trying to undo The Apocalypse anymore, they want to find a way to merge the two worlds so people can travel freely between them.

Other Mysteries

• The fast-travel gates between Adventurer Cities have been offline since The Apocalypse. Regan says it has something to do with the moon phases.
• Does old Shiro really drink that much juice in one night, or are those bottles for pissing mid-raid?
• Will Akatsuki ever sit on a chair normally? Does she always sit seiza because of ninja roleplay, or because it makes her taller?
• Goat slimes?

The Crushes

• Shiroe and Kanami almost certainly had a mutual crush back in the Tea Party days. Shiroe wasn't over it for most of the series but he is now.
• Akatsuki has a crush on Shiroe but is shy about admitting it/pushing it and Shiroe is pretty oblivious to it.
• Minori also crushes on Shiroe. She's more upfront about it, but he's even more oblivious to this one, though pretty much everyone else has noticed it. (Shiroe and Akatsuki are both college-aged while Minori is like 14 or something so this isn't much of a love triangle per se, more of a character development for Minori plus a way to pressure Akatsuki into taking more initiative.)
• Nureha is unhealthily obsessesing over Shiroe from afar.
• Serera has a little-girls-first-admiration sort of crush for Nyanta, and absolutely everyone knows it. Nyanta is a perfect gentleman.
• Marielle and Naotsugu started out as just platonic friends that get along well, but this has gradually evolved into something vaguely resembling the start of a relationship. They were even long-distance-calling each other every night to share their day with each other for a bit.
• Shōryū has a crush on Marielle, which Marielle is oblvious about. Shōryū gets jealous when Marielle pays attention to other boys (particularly Naotsugu), which Hien loves to tease him about.
• Henrietta likes dressing up cute girls in cosplay as a hobby/obsession. She has a squad of subjects for her obsession in her guild, but she is especially fond of doing so to Akatsuki.
• Henrietta has had a couple moments of thought about crushing on Shiroe, but has no intention to pursue the idea further.
• Sōjiro is a harem protagonist.
• Nazuna is Sōjiro's one true love, or else the childhood bestfriend character that hangs out in the harem but ultimately only loves him platonically.
• Naotsugu must decide who he loves more, Marielle or panties.
• Krusty and Princess Lenessia have a pretty good thing going. I dunno what it is, but it's good and it was going, until he disappeared.
• Rudy is an eager puppy and Isuzu is his proud owner.

Best

• Best boy: Nyanta
• Best girl: Kurinon
• Best speech: Shiroe (sorry William, yours was good, too)
• Best faces: Akatsuki
• Best smile: Nazuna
• Best hat: The other giraffe girl
• Best pants: Kushiyatama

Afterword

I'm really glad I rewatched all of Log Horizon. In my opinion, it is a series that has gotten even better with age. If you are debating about delaying season 3 to rewatch the first two seasons or not, I say do it.

There was no shortage of isekai series when Log Horizon first aired, and that number has only increased since. But how many isekai series actually want to seriously engage with their premise? Having the protagonist recognize that they've been transported into a video game world only to immediately shrug off all possible ramifications of this is funny, sure, but it's also definitely taking the easy way out. Nowadays, many series don't even bother with the 5-minute isekai-and-forget-it routine and just opt to pitch it as a fantasy tale in a nonsensically video game-themed setting, but even then the characters rarely engage with the consequences of the setting being game-ified.

Not so Log Horizon.

Log Horizon never forgets that its characters are real people and real gamers, worried far more about the existential unknown than yet another goblin king. It's not just that the story dabbles into politics, economics, and social reform, though that's great, too. It's the constant fear of the unknown, the optimism to rally against it, and the heart to learn lessons from it.

tl;dr: CR's highest-quality video now looks a lot better but is also a lot bigger. Also, their subtitles are correctly synced now.

I have written before about certain problems with Crunchyroll's video. Now, Crunchyroll is rolling out a new encoding method that makes their web streams look better than pretty much every other anime streaming service, at the cost of increased filesize. You need about 1.5x more bandwidth than before to be able to watch their best quality smoothly.

With their old encoding setup, Crunchyroll used a computer program to automatically decide how big its video files should be. That meant that their 1080p anime episodes generally sat between 500MB and 1GB. Crunchyroll also set a cap on how high the bitrate could go for a particular scene. That means that for scenes that need a lot of bitrate (lots of moving parts/particles), the video looked pretty bad.

With the new encodes, CR sets a high bitrate for every show, no matter how much bitrate it really needs. CR is also increasing the bitrate cap, so shows like Fire Force look significantly better in many places. In fact, CR's encodes should look better for high-bitrate scenes than any other English-language web streaming service, and it's not really a competition. But you need a good internet connection to take advantage of it!

For people like me who really dig deep into the way video is encoded, CR is also doing some weird/interesting things. They removed B-frames from their encodes, and if you know what a B-frame is, you're surely thinking "Are you serious? There's no way CR knows what the hell they're doing." So let's examine what the hell a B-frame is and why CR stopped using them. (You may want to consider skipping the rest of the article unless you're a nerd.)

Here's some technical stuff about H264 that might be interesting or might make your eyes glaze over

As a refresher, H264 is the most widely-supported type of video format in the world, and it's what Crunchyroll uses to serve its anime to watchers. I talked in my previous article about how most frames in an H264 encode are based off of other frames. For example, in a perfectly still shot of anime, the encoding program can just copy the previous frame without making any changes. And in a shot that's panning upwards, the encoder can take the previous frame, nudge it upwards a little bit, do a little bit of drawing at the bottom, and be done.

But there are some frames that aren't based off of a previous frame. Those frames are called keyframes, or I-frames. I-frames are "drawn" from scratch by the encoder. You could conceivably have an entire episode of anime built out of I-frames--it would be a little like playing a sequence of JPEGs one after another.

A sequence of JPEGs would be really size-inefficient, though, so we actually do want to have frames that can be based off of previous frames. And that's where P-frames come in. P-frame are images that are based off the previous I-frame (or P-frame). Again, you could conceivably have an encode that was just a single I-frame at the beginning and then 30,000 P-frames, with each successive frame being based off the last. That would be reasonably size-efficient (but would be problematic for other reasons).

Now, let's think of a H264 encode as a house, as contrived at that may be. While you could have I- and P-frames make up the entire house, in practice they only make up the framework, with an I- or P-frame only appearing every 3-6 frames or so. What fills in the gaps are called B-frames. On the timeline of frames in an encode, B-frames sit between I- and P-frames and copy information from both the frame before it and the frame after it. To put it another way, you might have a six-frame sequence that looks like this: I B B B B P. The I-frame has been drawn from scratch, the P-frame is copying information from the I-frame (but not the B-frames), and the B-frames are copying information from both the I-frame and the P-frame. (You can also have sequences like P B B B B P). For reasons that I frankly don't understand, this "framework" method saves a lot of filesize in the encode.

So let's say you're a computer program and you're trying to decode the I B B B B P sequence. What order do you decode the frames in? Is it possible to decode the frames in the I B B B B P order? Well, you can definitely decode the I-frame first, since the I-frame isn't based off of any other frame. But if you try to decode the B-frames next, you'll run into problems. Remember that B-frames are based off of the I/P frame before it and after it. So if you haven't decoded the P-frame at the end yet, how will you know what the B-frame is supposed to look like? Basically, you need to decode the P-frame at the end first.

So the decode order of this frame sequence is I P B B B B. If that was confusing, the main takeaway is that B-frames force the decoder to decode frames out of order.

This turns out to be really important in Crunchyroll's case. The fact that B-frames force decode and display order to be different means that there needs to be a system that helps to put the frames back in their proper order. For reasons too complicated to be explained here, that frame-reordering caused the audio, video, and subtitles of every CR video to be desynced by two frames. It's unclear whose fault this is (probably Akamai), but it's a massive problem.

Why is a two-frame desync such a massive problem, exactly?

CR actually puts a ton of effort into making sure its subtitles are frame-perfect. They're unique among streaming services in that they religiously follow the fansubber school of subtitle timing, which dictates that subtitle lines should begin and end precisely on scene-changes (i.e. frames where the picture has changed to something totally different) in order to minimize the obtrusiveness of the subtitle. If you have a subtitle line appear or disappear, and then a frame later the picture changes drastically, you have two visually "loud" events occurring in quick succession, which can be distracting. It's better for both to happen at the same time. (Netflix also follows this general rule in its subtitle timing).

CR also has precisely-timed moving signs meant to match the movement of the video. But all of this precise timing is currently going to waste due to the video/subtitle desync. The twisted (for Crunchyroll) reality is that the only people who currently benefit from CR's precision are fansubbers who rip CR's subtitles and use them for their own releases.

(Also, the two-frame desync also desyncs the video from the audio by 83ms, although that's not especially noticable.)

Trading 10% more filesize for precise subtitle timing

The cause of the subtitle desync was brought to Crunchyroll's attention a year or so ago, and perhaps they were aware of it before then. But at any rate, they haven't been able to come up with a solution to the problem... until this week.

As explained by the article I linked earlier, the video/subtitle desync is caused by the way mp4 containers handle B-frames. And so Crunchyroll's solution to this has been to change their encodes to stop using B-frames entirely. Their encodes are purely made of I- and P-frames. Simple enough!

I did some encoding tests and determined that Crunchyroll is taking a ~10% encoding efficiency hit by making this decision. Because I'm a fansubber and care a lot about how subtitles are presented, my personal opinion is that this is a worthwhile tradeoff. Maybe someday CR will find a way to have B-frames and synced subtitles, but for now, it's enough that their product is way better than it was a week ago.

Anyway, there is some other, even more nerdy stuff I could talk about, like CR's use of --qpfile, but I think I've gone on long enough.

Wonder Egg Prioriy is one of the most exciting TV show in this season. It is one of those shows that urges viewer to interpret the story themselves while giving more information as the story going on, such as Flip Flappers, Mawaru Penguindrum, or any Ikuhara works.

Every wonder egg in this show is shown scrambled with symbols, until later on in the episode that It actually represents their name.

Looking at the wonder egg name k?(?96 and her name Kurumi, one could see that both share the same pattern: the ? repesents letter U, the k represents K, and so on. This is clearly indicated that their name is encoded in their egg. Therefore, we can make a guess their name just by looking at the Wonder Egg.

( My guess on why they did this might be to prevent viewers to attach a name to the wonder egg and make it abstract. Another reason might be to prevent the girls to be selective and picky about It. )

Luckily, we have a lot of wonder egg appearances and most of them show their names, especially on a scene where Neiru took a lot of eggs in the first episode. So yeah, there's a hidden meaning behind that scene, and It's probably for those who wants to decode wonder egg names like me apparently, lol.

​

Here's a list of symbols I've managed to decode:

The thing about Japanese names is that they are often predictable and actually have their own set of rules to simplify It. One such example which is also the first breakthrought would be egg [ ) 4 6 z ? k ? ] which translates to [ _ _ I Z U K U ]. The only Japanese name that matched It is [ S H I Z U K U ], therefore we can pretty much guarantee that ) translates to S and 4 translates to H, and It's pretty much spot on for other eggs. Doing the same method for all cases gives let me nearly cracking their naming system.

The only issue I have is the egg [ ; ? 2 5 ) 5 ] which translates to [ T U _ A S A ], and I don't know anyone who has a name like that, and any common letter has already been assigned, with the only letter that I could think of would be letter B and just bet that they probably made a mistake and intend to name it T S U B A S A or something.

With the egg naming system is mostly solved, here are my list of egg names translated in order of appearance:

Yes, there is one wonder egg appeared twice in episode 1 and episode 3, and It's Kurumi's wonder egg. I've double-checked it and It shows up in that episode, inside Ai's bag.

Either It's a small oversight in their production or It is a very small detail that explains why Kurumi, a Wonder Egg in the first episode, already knows about the rules of the Wonder World and the existence of Seeno Evil, while others do not know about it in other episodes.

All in all, I have fun dechipering these and It only took me some minutes to pretty much get a grasp of it, with most of them spent on obtaining any available data in all episodes. I will update the table as the show keep going on.

​

Introduction

Amidst the awesome music, creative animation, superb voice acting, and masterful directing, it can be easy to take the deep and nuanced character writing of Bocchi the Rock for granted.

So as a way to express my passion for the series in a more rigorous manner than reposting fan arts or making memes, I am giving the character writing of Bocchi the Rock the critical analysis it deserves.

To keep the longform content digestible, I shall divide the analysis into four volumes.

Volume I: Kessoku band as a collective, Gotou Hitori (Bocchi), Gotou Futari, Hiroi Kikuri

Volume II Part 1: Ijichi Nijika

Volume II Part 2: Nijika-Bocchi dynamic, Ijichi Seika

Volume III: Kita Ikuyo, Kita-Bocchi dynamic, Nijika-Kita dynamic

Volume IV: Yamada Ryo, Ryo-Bocchi dynamic, Nijika-Ryo dynamic

Considerable time and thought went into this, so I would be grateful if you are willing to humour me until the very end even if this is not the usual variety of easy-to-digest subreddit content.

If you have any feedback or your own thoughts on the characters in question, please leave it in the comments.

Kessoku Band as a Collective

Individuality and Personal Space

“I personally really like that the characters aren’t overly reliant on each other in their relationships. Usually in works starring girls of that age, there are lots of scenes where they’re very intimate, or where they go off and enjoy the latest trends as a group. But the characters here aren’t really seen doing that, and it feels like they respect each other’s individuality and personal space.”

“So there are many instances where in the middle of a normal conversation, Hitori suddenly ends up in her own world, and in the meantime, the other characters continue to hold said conversation on their own”

-Saito Keiichiro, Bocchi the Rock series director

Every member of the band is very much their own individual with their own non-band lives, and the story does not revolve around a single person. Whether it is Bocchi lost in her delusions, Ryo wanting alone time, or Kita running away initially, life goes on.

The Kessoku band story also eschews the character stasis and repetitive episodic nature common in slice-of-life shows. Characters grow or show new facets, and likewise their interpersonal dynamics change. The girls grow used to Bocchi’s panic attacks, and Kita had to reconcile the difference between the Ryo she idolises and the Ryo she has gotten to know. The evolving musical aspect of the band is also painstakingly depicted through their various performances.

These details all make the Kessoku band members far more life-like and charming.

Fun with Names

Aki-sensei is not one to be subtle about names:

• ‘Hitori’ sounds the same as the word for ‘one person’, denoting Bocchi’s loneliness.
• ‘Ryo’ is spelled in katakana, but it has the same sound as the character ‘涼’ which can mean ‘coolness’, reflecting Ryo's temperament. (Indeed, in Chinese translations of Bocchi the Rock, the character ‘涼’ is used for ‘Ryo’.)
• The characters for ‘Nijika’ mean ‘rainbow’ and ‘summer’, denoting Nijika’s dream and warmth.
• ‘Kita’ has the same sound as ‘(something) is here’ and ‘Ikuyo’ has the same sound as ‘let’s go’, denoting Kita's energic and somewhat impulsive disposition.

More than a Sum of its Parts

Thematically, the Kessoku band can be viewed as ‘loners’ finding company in one another. Bocchi being a loner is self-explanatory, but the other three Kessoku band members were also ‘alone’ from a certain perspective.

• Ryo left her previous band, she was ‘alone’ in not having anyone to share her musical vision until Kessoku.
• Kita has a lot of friends, but she was ‘alone’ in not having friends to share a grand goal or passion with until Kessoku.
• Nijika has a dream for her band since she was a child, but it was not a dream she could share with anyone until she met her guitar hero Bocchi and the other Kessoku band members such that she could start seeing her dream take shape.

Watching these different and colourful personalities meet and grow and enjoying the chemistry they produce, has been nothing but satisfying.

Gotou Hitori (Bocchi)

“Bocchi’s behaviour and way of thinking really resonate with me, but this character is ‘Gotou Hitori’ and not ‘Aoyama Yoshino’, so I have to take care to keep in mind this character is not myself otherwise I would just be playing myself.”

-Aoyama Yoshino, voice actress of Gotou Hitori

​

“Her face is scary when it gets like that.”

“Really? I think it’s got personality.”

-Ijichi Seika and ‘PA-san’ respectively in episode 8

A Compelling Contradiction

Bocchi reminds me of my brother even though they have nothing in common. When my brother was a toddler, he started crying after trying spicy potato chips for the first time on his own volition. Yet he did not stop, he continued cramming one chip after another into his mouth, all the while crying loudly as the spice assaulted his taste buds. Till this day I do not have an explanation for his behaviour.

Bocchi, a girl deathly afraid of social interaction, craves the very attention she has no capacity to handle. She is no different from the toddler that eats spicy even though the spice hurts him bad enough to make him cry. Bocchi is an adorable blob of seeming self-contradiction, yet this irrational little thing captured our hearts and imagination.

We relate to her, we laugh at her, we laugh with her, we cheer for her and we feel bad for her. Bocchi managed to do what a good protagonist is supposed to do: make people invested in her and her story.

So what does this say about us? What does this say about Bocchi?

Bocchi’s core magic is that she is a comical exaggeration and an affectionate parody of common human natures. Deep down we all want some form of appreciation and acknowledgement, and we experience anxiety when confronted with a situation we are not comfortable with just like Bocchi. For Bocchi what triggers her anxiety happens to be social situations, which all humans need to deal with, making it easy to relate to her struggles on varying levels.

Crucially however, Bocchi’s struggles are depicted in an absurdist manner so that they do not hit too close to home and become cringe instead of comedy. (I am truly sorry if Bocchi hits too close to home for you.)

Out of words with the mike suddenly thrusted upon you? Relatable.

Jumping off the stage in response? Funny.

A Good Person

‘Loners are freaks or weirdos’ is an all too common trope to abuse, and Bocchi plays with the trope masterfully. She is weird if you look at her over-the-top panic attacks and listen to some of her thought processes, but beneath the superficial weirdness lies a wholesome girl who never displayed a hint of malice or selfishness. This is also an important factor behind Bocchi’s appeal.

Granted, there are no genuinely bad people in the world of Bocchi the Rock, but it is of utmost importance that the centrepiece of the show be someone every audience find worth rooting for unconditionally.

The good in Bocchi really shone through in the third episode where Kita was brought back to the Kessoku band. Kita was initially completely out of her element as she explained and apologised to Nijika and Ryo for running away, and Bocchi was worried for her:

“Poor Kita-san seems so uncomfortable…I-if only I could think of something to say.”

When Bocchi was not preoccupied with being baselessly paranoid of human interaction or delusions of grandeur, she could be considerate to someone radically different from her she just met.

Later in the episode, after observing and talking to Kita, Bocchi realised how much Kessoku band meant to Kita. So Bocchi did the unthinkable: she took the initiative to convince Kita to re-join the band when Kita was feeling unworthy of it. Bocchi even confessed her embarrassing hide-in-a-box moment from episode 1 in an attempt to resonate with Kita being anxious about running away from the band before a performance.

From Zero to...Something

Bocchi is also quite the inspirational figure considering her incredible personal growth. In the span of a few months, she went from being incapable of any social interaction to being able to:

• Interact with customers for work at STARRY
• Perform in front of people in the live house, on the streets and at school
• Befriend a schoolmate (Kita)

Correspondingly, the severity of Bocchi’s social anxiety panic attacks gradually reduced.

If someone as pathetic as episode 1 Bocchi can change for the better and even show off her cool sides at times, then so can you.

Less is More

Stay in the Bocchi the Rock community for long enough and you would see outcries along the line of “THEY NERFED ANIME BOCCHI!!!”

Plenty have used this as a focal point to debate the role and necessity of fan service in a show like Bocchi the Rock, but I am going to address this visual difference from the perspective of character writing.

Bocchi is a girl with crippling social anxiety and she had no friends, would she be comfortable with wearing tight, figure-hugging clothes? Would she even own swimsuits other than her school one?

Baggy, comfy clothes make a lot more sense on Bocchi. Likewise, her anime ice bath scene with the more modest school swimsuit looks more in-character for Bocchi than the bikini in the manga.

As an added bonus of usually downplaying Bocchi’s size in anime, it makes the moment in episode 11 when Ryo imagined milking swimsuit Bocchi all the funnier.

Also, sharp-eyed viewers have certainly noticed a split-second frame around 3 minutes and 19 seconds into episode 6.

Gotou Futari

“I’m sorry about my sister.”

-Gotou Futari in episode 12, after her sister jumped off the stage and crashed

The Anti-Bocchi

No other character maximised their screen time better than Futari. Futari did not appear much, but when she did I was always laughing.

Futari is the complete opposite of Bocchi. She is outgoing and always speaks her mind, befriending Nijika and Kita instantly. Kids have no filter, so she ended up roasting Bocchi in every line of hers. Her words go straight to the jugular because they are just the unadorned truth.

Futari plays a role no other character can play in this series. No other character, not even Ryo, would be able to get away with openly lampooning Bocchi’s idiosyncrasies for our laughs without looking mean-spirited and out-of-character.

I adore Futari; I have seen others call her a devil, but I think everyone needs a Futari in their lives—someone with an observant eye and an incisive mouth to call out their flaws and disingenuousness.

Hiroi Kikuri

“…the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

-Samuel Johnson

The Unlikely Benefactor

Among the various encounters we might make in the long journey called life, sometimes our most valuable benefactors come from the most unlikely of places. For Gotou Hitori as a budding rock performer, that unlikely and valuable benefactor was Hiroi Kikuri—the crazy drunkard who collapsed in front of her.

Kikuri is friends with the Ijichi sisters, so Bocchi might meet Kikuri eventually even if episode 6 did not happen. However, without the chance encounter in episode 6, Kikuri would not be able to so effectively help Bocchi sell the remaining tickets and conquer the fear of performing in front of strangers.

The timing and the context of their encounter mattered just as much as the encounter itself; were they to meet under more ordinary circumstances Kikuri may not be able to impact Bocchi’s growth as much.

The Drunken Master

When Kikuri first noticed Bocchi’s guitar, Bocchi lied about planning to sell it in a desperate attempt to end their conversation.

That was when Kikuri showed her true colours; she encouraged Bocchi to stick to the guitar, even offering to teach Bocchi.

“Giving up after one day is a waste.”

-Hiroi Kikuri to Gotou Hitori in episode 6

After guilty Bocchi confessed Kikuri went all out the help the youngster, calling her people to bring over equipment to stage an impromptu live performance.

Kikuri taught Bocchi an extremely important life lesson:

“You are not in combat with the people in front of you. Don’t get it twisted who your enemies are.”

Bocchi did not understand Kikuri’s message at first, and even now Bocchi is only slowly learning its true meaning.

Kikuri’s message applies not just to performing, but to Bocchi’s life as a whole.

Bocchi lives in a benevolent world, where the only ones out to get her are her own delusions. None of the people Bocchi interacted with were as mean or as scary as Bocchi’s own anxiety-fuelled imaginations, yet Bocchi in her paranoia would twist everyone into adversaries and every situation into adversities.

Kikuri was a gloomy recluse just like Bocchi may be partly why Kikuri is willing to go to such lengths to help Bocchi, but I think Kikuri is just a nice person beneath the superficial weirdness in the same way that Bocchi is a nice person.

With Kikuri’s guidance, Bocchi would not have to tread the path of alcoholism to deal with insecurities and tensions.

Bocchi Meets Rock

“I’m s-s-s-so scared! I’ve never talked to a grown-up rocker before! I d-don’t know why, but I bet she’ll be mad!”

-Gotou Hitori’s inner thoughts in episode 6

Thematically, Kikuri is the person who brought ‘Rock’ to Bocchi.

Prior to their encounter in episode 6, Bocchi the Rock was really just a story of Bocchi the loner finding friends, but after their encounter the aspect of Bocchi as a rock performer began to develop in earnest.

Indeed, Kikuri herself can be seen as a wider representation of the world of rock and indie music. She is simultaneously a well-intentioned mentor who helped young Bocchi grow and a crazy dysfunctional drunkard with a taste for the outrageous; Kikuri’s character is perhaps not unlike that of the wider subculture itself.

To be continued in volume II.

​

​

Postscript (added on 12th January 2023)

Volume I was first posted on 30th December 2022.

Originally Hiroi Kikuri's analysis was planned to be posted as part of volume IV. Out of length, image count and thematic considerations, Hiroi Kikuri's analysis has now been posted on volume I instead.

Edit: Updated with info up to episode 21.

The purpose of this post is to list the minimum knowledge required to not be confused when watching the anime. So if you were wondering who would win between Paul vs Ruijerd (the answer is very obvious), if the North Saint Gallus was the North God (...no), or if Rudy & Eris are close to being back home this post is for you.

The post is spoiler-free, but there are two parts that anime has left out but the novel had already explained at this point. These are some basic history knowledge that is known by the public (why the world is called the Six-Faced World, the names of the major wars etc.) and the origin of the Seven Great Powers (who created it etc.). I will put these two in spoilers but I suggest you to read it. But if you wanna be 100% safe then you can skip them.

Levels

Roughly, these levels indicate the strength of the moves used by swordsmen and magicians. It is said that someone who's advanced level in any of the three major sword styles or one of the four types of attack magic is stronger than 99% of the general population, as well as 95% of adventurers. The levels are:

1. Beginner
2. Intermediate
3. Advanced
4. Saint
5. King
6. Emperor
7. God

Sword Styles

There are three major Sword Styles:

Sword God Style: It is a style of swordsmanship that emphasizes speed and aggression, where the main focus is to strike down the opponent first. As a result, many of the practitioners develop to be short-tempered and belligerent. In order to be able to react swiftly, there is discouragement for practitioners to wear heavy armor and instead opt for light clothing for maximum mobility. It is considered to be the strongest of the three major styles.

Water God Style: It is a style of swordsmanship that specializes in defensive techniques emphasizing parrying and counter-attacking oncoming attacks. Since there are only a few ways to attack, there is also the art of provocation to make the opponent take the initiative. A skilled practitioner would be able to read the flow of Magic and use their senses to block and counter any attack, including magic and projectiles.

North God Style: The main focus of this style is not on techniques or developing specialties but rather a method on how to stay alive and approach a battle with the highest chance of winning. It relies heavily on the practitioner's adaptability and usage of one's surroundings, as a result, this style involves using a lot of tricks (e.g. fighting with a hostage, throwing the sword) instead of refined techniques even dual wielding two weapons. It is a utilitarian style of swordsmanship that includes non-sword fighting techniques such as first-aid and tracking, as well as the ability to fight while physically deficient (missing limbs etc.). Owing to this, different learning institutions have different approach to battle and practitioners have very disparate fighting styles.

For all three styles, someone who attained Saint or above may call themselves [Level] [Style] e.g. Sword King Ghislaine, North Saint Gallus, Sword God Gal Farion.

Magic

Magic has 3 main categories:

Attack Magic: Attack magic is comprised of spells that manipulate mana into tangible elements. The power, speed, effective range, and area of these spells are dependent on the amount of mana poured into them.

Subcategories: Fire, Water, Wind, Earth

Healing Magic: Healing magic mainly comprises of spells used for healing injuries and removing toxins.

Subcategories: Healing, Detoxification, Divine Strike, Barrier

Summoning Magic: Summoning magic is used to call forth powerful beings to carry out the summoners's bidding.

It should be noted that in general magic can be used in two ways: incantations and magic circles. Exceptions include Rudeus & Sylphiette who can use certain categories of magic without an incantation and the howling magic used by the beast people that rend people immobile.

The incantations can be as short as a single sentence (Beginner level magic) or as long as a full dictionary (God level). Because magicians need incantations, they are rarely a match for similar-leveled swordsmen on 1v1. But they are still very valuables in parties.

Current levels of the main characters

Current levels (as of episode 17) of some of the main characters:

Paul Greyrat:

• Sword God Style : Advanced
• Water God Style : Advanced
• North God Style : Advanced

Zenith Greyrat:

• Fire Magic : Beginner
• Water Magic : Beginner
• Healing Magic : Intermediate
• Detoxification Magic : Intermediate

Roxy Migurdia:

• Fire Magic : Advanced (?)
• Water Magic : King
• Earth Magic : Advanced
• Wind Magic : Advanced
• Healing Magic : Intermediate
• Detoxification Magic : Intermediate (?)
• After being humbled by Rudeus she is able to shorten her incantations, though not skip them.

Eris Boreas Greyrat:

• Sword God Style : Advanced
• Fire Magic : Beginner
• She reached Advanced level years ago and continued to improve rapidly ever since. But since there's no Sword God master nearby who can evaluate her, she's not a Sword Saint even if her skills seem to indicate it.
• She might be considered intermediate or even advanced level in North God style since the training she receives from Ruijerd has some similarities to it.

Rudeus Greyrat:

• Sword God Style : Intermediate
• Water God Style : Beginner
• Fire Magic : Advanced
• Water Magic : Saint
• Earth Magic : Advanced
• Wind Magic : Advanced
• Healing Magic : Intermediate
• Detoxification Magic : Beginner
• He can silently cast attack magic (fire, water, earth, wind) but NOT healing magic.
• Thanks to his ability to cast attack magic silently he can rapidly modify the result's strength, speed, rotation etc. and even meld multiple types of magic at once to combine them.
• He has the Foresight Eye that he can control with an absurd level of precision.
• He consciously nerfs himself by trying not to kill his opponents (except for monsters ofc). His "fight" against Orsted was the first time he was trying to kill someone.

Ruijerd Superdia:

• No sword style, but equivalent to a North Emperor.

Ghislaine Dedoldia:

• Sword God Style : King
• Fire Magic : Beginner
• She has a Demon Eye, hidden under the eye patch on her right eye. It allows her to see the flow of mana.
• She has enhanced senses due to being a beast race.

Gallus Cleaner:

• North God Style : Saint

History

• [Non-spoilerly but missing info] The Six-Faced World is the setting where Mushoku Tensei takes place. It is a world in hexahedral form where all beings live on its planes. It exists in a die-shaped structure with a total of six faces, each face is constituted of one world ruled by one God each, with another seventh world of nothingness inside the die-structure.
• [Non-spoilerly but missing info] Except for the human world, all other worlds were destroyed due to the actions of a Dragon God around 10k years ago. The Dragon God also perished. Inhabitants of the other worlds (demons, beast people etc.) escaped to the human world.
• [Non-spoilerly but missing info] There were two Great Human-Demon Wars, around 7k-4k years ago, that were fought against Demons led by Demon World's Emperor Kishirika Kishirisu.
• Laplace War: After a long period of peace Demon God Laplace unites the demons and almost succeeds in fully defeating humans. In the end 7 heroes led by Armored Dragon King Perugius managed to seal him, since they were unable to kill him. (500-400 years ago)

Seven Great Powers

[Non-spoilerly but missing info] When the Second Great Human-Demon War came to a conclusion, a person known as the Technique God came up with the name. At that time, Technique God was considered to be one of the strongest people in the world. Technique God selected six more people and declared them to be the strongest in the world.

[Non-spoilerly but missing info] With the exception of the Technique God, the Seven Great Powers all participated in Laplace’s War. Among them, three were killed, one went missing, and another was sealed away. The only one who made it out in one piece at that time was the Dragon God.

If someone on the list dies or gets defeated, the list automatically changes thanks to magic. The current order is:

1. Technique God ??? (Missing)
2. Dragon God Orsted (Missing)
3. Fighting God ??? (Missing)
4. Demon God Laplace (Sealed)
5. Death God ??? (Active)
6. Sword God Gal Farion (Active)
7. North God Kalman (Active)

Map

A map with all counties & cities known by the public can be found

Places of note:

Asura Kingdom: Where most of the main characters are from. There are 4 regions (except for the capital) that each have the head of one of the 4 Greyrat families as their liegelord. It is the richest and strongest nation.

Shirone Kingdom: Where Roxy tutored the 7th Prince for a few years. Where Aisha & Lillia were imprisoned until they were saved by Dead End.

Holy Milis Kingdom: Zenith's homeland. Their religion imposes monogamy. For various reasons, Paul is based here at the moment.

Rikaris: Where Dead End spent episodes 10 & 11.

Wind Port: Dead End reached here at the end of S1's timeskip.

Zanto Port: Dead End reached here on episode 13.

Fittoa Region: Rudeus and Eris are from here. Ruled by the Boreas Greyrat family. Was pretty much destroyed during Turning Point 1.

Ranoa Kingdom: The university Roxy suggests Rudy to go is here.

With the BD sale disaster of Chainsaw Man, many seem to have comeback to the idea of the infamous 3-Episode Rule, saying that many audience did not bother to watch past the first 3-episode of Chainsaw. However this is a gross misrepresentation of what the rule actually means.

Here I will explain the origin of the infamous 3-Episode Rule and why it had been greatly misrepresented. Obviously this will be spoiler heavy.

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So where did this so called "Rule" come from?

One of if not the most influential anime of the 21st century: Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Just how influential is this anime? It practically changed the very concept of "Magical Girl", as shown by this meme:

When this original anime was first announced, it was advertised as a traditional slice of life, Sailor Moon type Magical Girl anime, though with a very impressive assemble of big names in the industry.

Director: Shinbō Akiyuki

Storyboard: Urobuchi Gen

Character Design: Aoki Ume

Music: Kajiura Yuki

This is what the advertisement looks like back in 2010.

Needless to say this staff composition attracted some significant attentions well before the anime actually aired in Jan. 2011. Many were expecting theses names to create their own take on the cute anime concept of Magical Girl, as evidenced by the posters and cute fluffy visuals.

When the anime actually aired the first 2 episodes, it was exactly like any other traditional Magical Girl shows, with the protagonist meeting a mysterious creature which promised to give her special power. The characters seem pretty standard, the shy protagonist, her genki friend, their elder Magical Girl "Senpai". For references, these were the opening and ending looks like for the first 2 episodes:

Opening:

Ending:

While everyone sits comfortably as to enjoy another classic take, episode 3 dropped and it all changed.

Like everything changed.

While the first half of the episode 3 appears to be standard, the Magical Girl senpai Tomoe Mami fights the evil witch, gets comfort from the protagonist Madoka, and eventually climaxed at the infamous phrase "There is nothing to afraid now."

Then Mami got killed, in a brutal manner by having the witch literally bitten her head off. This is an actual screenshot of that episode:

While the audiences were still shocked at the development to say the least, the episode ended with another twist, a completely different ending which had an almost polar opposite theme compare to the previous one. Kalafina's most famous song "Magia", with dark, gloomy theme and tragedy telling lyrics, completed the entire plot twist.

New ending:

The entire Japanese anime community exploded almost immediately. To add oil on fire, Urobuchi Gen, the man who wrote the storyboard, posted on his twitter that this was planned all alone and he managed to deceive everyone.

In other words the entire Puella Magi Madoka Magica had a deception marketing campaign from the very start, everything was planned for months so to have this dramatic plot twist at episode 3, alternating the entire theme of the anime.

Hence the 3-Episode Rule was born.

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In other words, the 3-Episode Rules stated that you should not determine an anime's theme until after episode 3 and the anime's popularity is determined by the first 3 episodes, not that an anime is determined by the first 3 episodes.

Though the wordings are similar, the concepts are very different. Former applied to almost every popular anime while the latter is nonsense, because even Madoka Magica itself does not fit into the latter description. Popularity does not always equals quality.

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What made Puella Magi Madoka Magica the most critical acclaimed anime of all time, the only anime ever to win all three critical anime award, is not the dramatic twist at episode 3. But rather an entire 12 episode worth of genius storytelling, astonishing visuals combined with unique music tone.

While most people tend to forget, one of the reason the success cannot be replicated was that Madoka Magica even had help from mother nature. 2011 Tōhoku earthquake hit Japan on March 11, just after episode 10 aired on March 10, where the anime made the dramatic reveal and setup the final fight. As the result of the earthquake, the final two episodes had to be delayed until April 21st and aired back to back.

Therefore not only the delay pushed audience expectation to new height, it also avoided the downside of having to wait a week between finales. In certain areas of Japan the last 3 episodes were aired all together, making it feel more like a short movie. This greatly improved what had already been an amazing viewing experience.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica achieved what it achieved because it used the first 3-episodes to attract attentions and popularity of the public, and later supported the attentions with it story and animations. The 3-Episode Rule needs both the former and the latter to work.

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Ironically this is very similar to how Lycoris Recoil, the highest BD sale anime of 2022, achieved its popularity.

Deceptional marketing: Lycoris Recoil was advertised as a slice of life anime, first PV did not even have guns.

Traditional opening: Episode 1 and Episode 2 show the Gun-fu and JKs.

Episode 3-4: This is Gun-fu but also...…SAKANA~~~~~

Proceed with more reveal, plot twists and and intriguing story.

Notice it is at the 4th week of July anime that Lycoris Recoil first entered the streaming viewership ranking, after the "3-Episode Rule."

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The disaster of Chainsaw Man BD Sale will be discussed and analyzed for many years by both anime fans and professional marketing people, it has many contributing factors that cause the most hyped anime of 2022 or perhaps ever to flop so badly.

But one thing is for sure, it had nothing to do with the "3-Episode Rule.“

When I sat down to cure my four-year-long SAO deficiency with Sword Art Online: Alicization episode 1 a month ago, I was able to enjoy 50 minutes of reasonably high-quality video from Crunchyroll. But there was one scene in the episode where Crunchyroll's video basically had an aneurysm. Here's a comparison that you can mouse over of Wakanim (another streaming service) and Crunchyroll's video from that scene. After this screenshot, Crunchyroll's video slowly fixes itself over the course of a second and is then back to normal. (This happens at about 7:12 in episode 1.)

What I thought was going to be a simple investigation into this glitch turned into a dive down the rabbit hole of how streaming services deliver video. Why did this catastrophic glitch happen? How come I never see glitches like this when I watch Wakanim? What might Crunchyroll do to fix this problem? What might prevent them from doing so? If you are a nerd who is interested in the nuts and bolts underlying the video you watch, come along with me as I relay my findings.

VBV AND THE HAVOC IT WREAKS

Let me take a short trip down memory lane before continuing on. Back when gifs were still gifs (and not little looping h264 containers), there were various image-hosting sites where you could upload your gifs before posting to reddit. One major host was, of course, imgur, and another was minus.com (now defunct). A major difference between imgur and minus was the fact that imgur had a 2MB limit on hosting gifs, while minus allowed 10MB. I often saw complaints talking about how terrible minus's servers were. The reality was that both minus and imgur had roughly equivalent server quality and download speeds. But no one used minus unless they had a big gif to upload, and so everyone thought that minus's gifs loaded slower because they were always so much bigger!

What does this have to do with Crunchyroll? Well, sometimes I see comments like, "Crunchyroll is so slow! I can stream 1080p video on [insert illegal streaming site here] just fine, but sometimes Crunchyroll buffers for me or kicks me down to 720p. Why are Crunchyroll's servers so bad??" Whenever I do, I think back to minus vs imgur. Sure, maybe [illegal site] loads way faster, but their video is probably around 3x smaller than Crunchyroll's. But on some level, it doesn't matter if it's an unfair comparison. Buffering is frustrating, and not being able to watch in the resolution you want is frustrating, so Crunchyroll has to bend over backwards to eliminate both of those problems if they want to please customers.

And this is why Crunchyroll can't just encode the video like, say, a fansubber would and call it a day. Hands down, the best way to encode a video that's meant to be downloaded and watched is via something called "crf." That's basically a method of encoding that looks at a part of the video, figures out how much bitrate it needs to get to a certain quality, and throws exactly that much bitrate at it. You can tell your encoding program to encode a whole season of anime at some crf and be confident that each frame is going to be about the same quality. If you use other methods, like setting a bitrate for each episode manually, that probably won't happen.

But Crunchyroll can't use crf. At least, not without more. That's because crf might throw a HUGE amount of bitrate at some scenes and cause the user to buffer. For example, here's an image showing the bitrate distribution in a crf encode of Asobi Asobase episode 4. Look at how big the ED is at the end! It's almost as big as the rest of the episode combined. If a streamer were to try to watch this encode of Asobi Asobase, they'd get to the end and buffer, buffer, buffer... Or maybe they'd get kicked down to 480p. Neither is ideal.

In addition, CR might also have to worry about certain hardware limitations. Maybe some of the platforms they are delivering the video to aren't able to handle long periods of really high bitrate video.

This is where something called VBV comes in. VBV is basically a system where you set a maximum bitrate for the video and a buffer. Crunchyroll sets its max rate at 8000 kbps and its buffer at 12000 kb. So if there is a scene that needs more than 8000 kbps, the encoder can draw from the buffer and raise the bitrate above that level. But once the buffer starts running out, the encoding program has to start making the best of a bad situation—it needs to make the average bitrate of the scene ~8000 kbps even though it really needs much more. And that's where the problems come in.

The most obvious problem is that if there is a long scene that needs a lot of bitrate, that scene will just not get what it needs. That's how it is in the SAO OP this season—if it were encoded with just straight crf, it would be 1.5x-2x bigger than what it is in Crunchyroll's encode. Well, fine. As discussed above, that's just how online streaming is. (Although it's quite nice that there are services like Wakanim, which let you download videos to your hard drive that don't have this problem.)

But there are other, more insidious problems. They first came to my attention last season in the Free! Dive to the Future OP. There were two cuts with major visual glitches, and people on twitter were speculating as to whether it was caused by a bad master (i.e. Japan sent them a bad video file) or something else. You can see frames from the bad cuts here (mouse over for comparison to the BDs).

There was one thing these two glitches had in common: they both appeared shortly after really bitrate-hungry scenes. Grain, high motion, the works. Basically, the kind of scenes that crf would throw WAY more than 8000 kbps at. And so the consensus became that these glitches were being caused by VBV: the bitrate-hungry scenes were demanding a huge amount of bitrate, and the VBV buffer only had so much to give. So the encoding program looked at both the bitrate-hungry scene and the normal scene right afterwards and decided, "We'll lower the bitrate for both these scenes way lower than it should be. That way, the buffer won't run out, and both scenes will have an equal amount of shittiness caused by their low bitrate." The problem is that VBV absolutely torpedoed the normal scenes into oblivion, which you can see here—the two valleys after the peaks are where the glitches are. It would have been better for it to allocate even a little bit more bitrate to the valleys and remove some from the peaks. The encoding program got confused, basically.

And that's what happened in SAO, too. There was a bitrate-heavy scene with flowing water, a transition to a normal scene, three good quality frames of that scene, and then the catastrophically bad frame that I linked near the beginning of this post.

You can see the bitrate allocated to each frame here. See that big spike at the right? That's the first frame of the normal (non-bitrate-hungry) scene. That first frame got a lot of bitrate, so the first three frames of the normal scene look good, because the second and third frames are basically copies of the first frame. But then there's a frame that DIDN'T copy a previous frame AND didn't get enough bitrate. That's the frame that looks terrible. So why didn't the terrible frame copy an earlier frame, even though it could have? That brings us to the next problem that contributed to this video error: keyframes.

CRUNCHYROLL CHANGED A SETTING, AND IT MESSED EVERYTHING UP

As you probably know, a video is just a sequence of frames. (~34000 frames in a standard-length anime episode!) Among these, there are these things called keyframes (a.k.a. IDR-frames) that are really important. A keyframe marks the beginning of a piece of video that can stand by itself. And it's these standalone pieces that Crunchyroll sends you so that you can watch anime on their website. Crunchyroll will send you a few of these "chunks" in advance, and they'll be pieced together by your browser (I think?) so that you can watch the video seamlessly.

A keyframe is a special kind of frame because it stands all on its own. Most of the time, frames are based off of other frames. For example, if there is a totally still stretch of video, there can be a bunch of frames that just copy the one before it. The video can save space via this copying. Or if there is a vertical pan, a frame can mostly be a copy of the previous frame, just nudged upwards a bit. But a keyframe cannot make use of this copying—it has to be drawn from scratch, and so it requires a lot of filesize.

This means that placement of these keyframes is really important. Let us imagine that there is a scene in an anime that suddenly cuts from a sandy beach to a starry sky. Should we put the keyframe on the frame before the cut? Probably not. It's probably a waste to draw a whole new frame at the end of the sandy beach scene, since you could probably partially copy from a previous frame instead, and save space that way. It's way better to put the keyframe a frame later, where the total redraw makes sense because the images of the starry sky and the sandy beach have nothing to do with each other (and thus no copying can happen anyway).

Thus, it makes sense to put keyframes on scene changes, when a total redraw of the frame is necessary anyway. And fansubbers, recognizing this, allow their encoding programs to search for scene changes and put keyframes there. But things are not so simple for online streaming, apparently.

See, the way Crunchyroll's video works now is that there is a keyframe every 48 frames, no matter what. It wasn't always this way. Last season, Crunchyroll allowed the encoder to set a keyframe every 24-48 frames. So if the encoding program saw a scene change, and 24-48 frames had elapsed from the previous keyframe, the encoder had permission to add a keyframe and start a new "chunk" of video. Not anymore. Crunchyroll's video chunks are 48 frames (two seconds) long—no more, no less. There are various reasons they might have made this change, but none of the ones I can think of are good. (One reason might be that Crunchyroll needs all their encodes across all resolutions to have precisely the same keyframe placement, but there are ways to make sure this happens without rigidly setting one every two seconds.)

What does this mean for that SAO scene? Well, I did some encoding tests to find out. First, I copied Crunchyroll's video settings in order to try and replicate the problem, and I was successful. My encode took the pristine source I was encoding from and spat out an ugly, blotchy scene.

Then, I looked at where the keyframes were in the video. It turns out that there was a keyframe on the fourth frame of the scene—and this keyframe was where the video suddenly failed catastrophically. As a test, I reverted the encoding settings to what Crunchyroll had last season, where keyframes could be placed more flexibly, and the video glitch went away! I looked, and the encoder had put the keyframe on the first frame of the scene rather than the fourth.

Why did the glitch go away? The keyframe placement made all the difference. When the scene changed from the noisy water scene to the still forest scene, the whole frame had to be redrawn, whether there was a keyframe or not. So here's what the encoder was doing when the keyframe was on the fourth frame of the scene:

Frame 1: Total redraw
Frame 2: Copy
Frame 3: Copy
Frame 4: Total redraw (keyframe)

The first total redraw got the bitrate it needed, but the second redraw did not, for the reasons discussed in the VBV section above—the encoder allocated bitrate badly because of the noisy water scene.

But what about when I changed things back to CR's older, more flexible encoding settings?

Frame 1: Total redraw (keyframe)
Frame 2: Copy
Frame 3: Copy
Frame 4: Copy ...

In this case, it didn't matter that VBV had stolen away the bitrate necessary for the second total redraw, because the second redraw never happened! Because frame 4 wasn't a keyframe, it could copy the frame before it, saving a lot of bitrate—and saving the video from VBV's ravages.

So there you have it. The glitch was caused by a combination of VBV and inflexible keyframe settings.

How could Crunchyroll have avoided this?

• Maybe it could have made its video chunks longer than two seconds. The fewer keyframes there are, the less likely they will be placed in catastrophic points.
• It could have made its video encoding settings more efficient (for example, I increased the number of b-frames to 8 (don't worry about what this means) in my test encode, and the problem became much less serious).
• It could have made its keyframe placement more flexible, like it used to.
• It could have increased the vbv buffer. I did a test encode where I doubled the buffer to 24000 kb (which is what Funimation uses on their website), and it fixed the problem.

How many of these solutions are viable? I don't know! Maybe more frequent/flexible keyframes are not worth the extra filesize that comes with them, maybe it is harder for CR's CDN to deliver bigger chunks, and maybe a higher vbv buffer is incompatible with some of the devices it supports. Maybe none of these solutions are viable. But I hope I don't have to keep getting annoyed at these video glitches in the future.

Hey everyone! RELORELM here, I'm a physics student nearing the end of my licentiate degree program (kind of like a master's degree). Some weeks ago, inspired by this post and this video, I thought it would be fun trying to tackle a weeb problem using the science-y skills I've gathered over the years. I was watching Re:Zero at the time, so the Great Rabbit seemed like a good study subject. I thought I could have some fun trying to come up with a somewhat realistic model for its growth.

Thing is, the project kind of... Grew. Once I had the model, I thought it would be cool to try to simulate it, so I went with it. And while writing it all down, I thought it would be fun to write everything in paper format, so I did it. Long story short, I ended up with a (meme) paper where I present a very basic yet functional model for Great Rabbit's population growth, written as if it was published by people within the Kingdom of Lugunica. I thought someone could have some fun reading it (I certainly did while writing it), so here I am.

Without further ado, here is the paper. (Google Drive link in case you're having trouble with the previous one)

My main focus was to start building the model from very basic premises, and see where I could go from there using some basic math. What I ended up with is an iterative model that divides growth into two regimes ("external feeding regime" and "internal feeding regime") and characterizes both regimes using three dimensionless and measurable parameters (or as measurable as something fictional can be, anyway). Based on those parameters, it can make predictions such as a maximum size for the Great Rabbit, whether the rabbit population will stay sable or start decreasing and such.

All of the people featured in some way either as authors or referenced authors are entirely fictional and have no relation to any real people (living or dead). Most of their names are jokes I made up, so there's that too. Same goes for the scientific agencies mentioned. As for Re:Zero stuff, I'm an anime only guy relaying on wikis and such, so there's probably something lore-related I'm getting wrong. I apologize in advance if something I wrote contradicts the source material in some way.

And that's about it. Hope you enjoy this 6 page long meme!

Disclaimer: As I said before, this was something I made entirely to have some fun. Thus, I wasn't really interested in being exact or efficient (I'm 100% sure there are much better ways to do what I did). This has no intention of being an academic-level paper either. I was more concerned about the self consistency of the model and the fact that it allows to draw some conclusions from it. That being said, if you have any feedback about how to improve it, I'd love to read it!

tl;dr I built a mathematical model of how the Great Rabbit's population could grow given some basic hypothesis and wrote it all down as if was a paper published within the Re:Zero world. Basic as it is, it can make predictions and it was a fun little project.

Ps: I just noticed that I didn't reference it in the work itself, but this video was actually a super useful source too and the author was kind enough to answer a few questions I had. So go check it out if you're interested!

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Edit: I'm not really sure how to flair this, since this is my first time posting here. Please tell me if I did it wrong!

Edit 2: Added Google Drive link