Anime

One for the shotacons? — First Impressions

Anime
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It’s good to see that [deep breath] Tensei shitara Dainana Ouji Datta node, Kimama ni Majutsu wo Kiwamemasu the anime is as horny for its protagonist as the manga version is:

Prince Lloyd is a black haired ten year old boy with big blue eyes and a shiny tights, dressed in short shorts

As the seventh prince and much younger then his brothers, prince Lloyd is not in line for the throne, which is a good thing because it means he can read and study magic. It turns out he’s the reincarnation of a commoner who tried to dabble in magic and got burned to death by a nobleman for his efforts and now as a prince he has all the time in the world to practise. He even didn’t mind being burned to death as his love for magic was so strong. Reborn, he now he has unlimited magical power, so much power even the demon sealed in the castle’s forbidden library is no match for him.

Prince Lloyd in baths urrounded by maids

Very much another ‘reincarnated protagonist gains ultimate power from his past life’ series, with some minor tweaks. The most obvious being the whole shotacon thing here. All the maids for one are almost as horny for him as the series itself is. From the manga it’s all treated as comedy rather than anything more serious, but if you dislike series that are iffy on informed consent, this may cross the line too much. As an adaptation it’s well done, with some actually good looking animation in places, including the sword fight between Lloyd and the head maid, as well as the bath scene when he’s squirming to get out of her grip.

Power as paperwork

Anime, Manga
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Here is something I’ve seen a million times before in anime and manga: the conscientious ruler buried in the paperwork they have to finish off personally:

A prince at his desk, huge piles of paperwork piled up besides him while his assistant tells him off

This is taken from *deep breath* Gyakkou Shita Akuyaku Reijou wa, Naze ka Maryoku wo Ushinattanode Shinsou no Reijou ni Narimasu, one of those series where the title gives you the story synopsis: “The Villainess Who Traveled Back in Time Inexplicably Lost Her Magic, so She Went Into Seclusion” and was drawn by Sakamoto Bin. It triggered me, because why is the ruler at their desk diligently doing paperwork such a well used image in the first place? Because it makes little sense for a king or emperor to do the work that could’ve been also done by some middle ranking bureaucrat. Yet here we are again, the “good prince” being kept by his duty from visiting the heroine by never ending bureaucracy. Why is this such an enduring image?

It may just be that Japanese business and government alike is incredibly bureaucratic in structure, terribly fond of paperwork for the sake of paperwork. Even though this wouldn’t make sense in a medieval kingdom to have this bureaucracy in the first place, ti may just be a question of the writer (subconsciously) projecting their own society’s peculiarities onto their creation. Or, like so much else in anime & manga, the writer imitating other writers, just like every city in isekai forms a perfectly round circle. Just one more cliche that everybody understands even if its wrong.

(Hi yes, it has been a month and a half since the last post. That’s what you get when you have a new, huge house to explore and decorate. Hopefully somewhat more regular posting will resume from now on.)

Just utterly boring — Toaru Ossan no VRMMO Katsudouki — First Impressions

Anime
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Even out of context this is a terrible, cliched “joke” but in context it doesn’t even make sense:

Showing a slender girl: make sure you don't say words like flat or smoot or cutting board around her

Because this is a player in a virtual reality MMO game! She designed this character herself! Why would she be bothered by the fact she doesn’t have breasts when she choose not to? (Heck, why assume she’s actually the same gender as her character?)

It’s the perfect example of how lazy this series is and how little it and its original creator ever thought about its videogame setting. I’ve read the manga version of this until I got bored of it and never ever got the sense that this was indeed a game you could play. Let alone have fun playing it. Playing a VRMMO casually with a focus on crafting rather than combat is not inherently a bad idea for a series, but you have to have some energy and thought behind it to make it worthwhile. Reading a manga where every other chapter is the protagonist inventing another new crafting method is one thing. As an anime series it’s just dull.

In nothing of what Toaru Ossan no VRMMO Katsudouki does is there any hint that the author thought about what it would be like to play a game this way. Why would our hero be the only one to play this way? Why would anybody else care that he does, or even know how he plays? Why is this world so underpopulated in the first place? It all feels ripped off from other, better stories. If you want a series about virtual reality gaming with some actual impact, go watch Shangri-La Frontier instead.

What you get when you pay your translators $80 per episode

Anime, Lost in Translation
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The quality of the subtitles for the Yuzuki-san Chi no Yonkyoudai series was so bad, even the ANN reviewers took notice:

The entire episode is nigh-unintelligible thanks to what is almost undoubtedly unedited machine translation. On the lighter end of things, there’s almost no proper punctuation. Four out of five sentences end without a period. Later in the episode, there are sections where two versions of a subtitle will appear side by side for reasons I cannot even figure out. I’m pretty sure every line in the subtitle script was fed individually through a translation program – because every line starts with a capitalized letter, regardless of whether it’s a new sentence.

Girl asks a moody looking boy: What's the matter? I'm in a bad mood early in the morning.

The examples given are indeed egregious, but I want to focus on some less obvious mistakes, mistakes you can find in other anime as well. In the screenshot above, the translator has confused who is the subject of the sentence. When watching, it’s clear that she’s talking about him, not herself. Even if not clear from the scene itself, it should be clear from the preceeding ones, which saw him getting upset by his brothers not trusting him to do house work. It’s the sort of error you can make when you only have the to be translated text to go by, not the actual footage. An editor should’ve caught this, but how well if at all is any subtitling edited at Crunchyroll these days?

Guy complaining about his homework being copied: 'Just arrived and copied other people's notes as if nothing had happened'

Here the tense is obviously wrong: it’s should be copying, not copied, as they’re still doing it. Ending on “as if nothing had happened” is also weird, a bit of a cliche translation of “atarimae darou”, more literal, as if it’s obvious or the most normal thing in the world to do. It does get the gist of what he’s saying, but it’s slightly awkward and lazy.

Two lines of subtitles saying roughly the same thing, one with a typo

Watching through the rest of the episode it all gets so bad that it completely ruins the show. I cannot believe any human looked at this and thought it was good enough to release. You wouldn’t tolerate this reading a scanlated manga, let alone from a paid for service. The one thing Crunchyroll offers other than a convenient place to watch anime at and they fuck it up like this. Hope you weren’tlooking forward to this show.