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snakedevour · 3 years

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my thoughts on chapter 81 ahead, fellas. it feels like it’s been a while since i analyzed a chapter drop but in my defense they only release once a month and 80.5 didn’t give me a lot of meat to bite into.

nyanyway -- here’s kkg 81. this chapter brings the focus back onto yumeko a little bit, showing us again how she plays, how she thinks, and how she challenges the people around her. basically, for me, this chapter was the whole buffet after several chapters of scraps.

SPOILERS BELOW.

i made a post maybe a week or so ago at this point mentioning that i wanted to talk about how yumeko’s friendliness is “impersonal” despite being genuine and how that feeds into her ( for lack of better words ). and i’m still going to do that and it’ll be in a separate post from this one but this chapter gave me some ammunition in regards to that thought.

the thing that makes yumeko difficult to navigate in terms of interacting with her is that she challenges the conventional definition of “kind” and in a way kind of forces you to delineate between that and “friendly”.

yumeko is a cocktail with two major components:

1. she is friendly 2. she is powerful

and when you have a friendly powerful person it’s easy to fall into the trap tsubomi has here, in which you feel that because you side with someone friendly and powerful you’re inherently under their protection.

and in a lot of storytellings that’d typically be true... but yumeko is awfully atypical. recall tsubomi’s commentary from chapter 63:

so long as we frame “friendly” as something that inherently goes hand-in-hand with “good” i think we set ourselves up to misunderstand yumeko’s personality. yumeko is friendly but she is not altruistic. yumeko does not “save” people; every time that it seems that she has it’s because they “won” it from her -- yumeko has never been benevolent for benevolence’s sake.

by a lot of standard definitions, i’d argue that she’s not even a good person.

it’s really nice to be reminded of that weird layer of nuance. we’re also reminded of something that might have gotten overshadowed by her comparative calmness lately and the housepet drama from the last few chapters --

more than just wantonly putting herself at risk, yumeko is obsessed with simultaneously imposing high antes on other people.

let’s briefly throw all the way back to chapter 16 just to get that in her own words:

i kind of want to say that yumeko has sadomasochistic tendencies but that’s probably for another post another day.

anyway, this takes us back to today and chapter 81, where tsubomi goes on to notice the folly in her own thinking:

paired with her thoughts from chapter 63 this says a lot.

“would yumeko bother helping me if I’m not taking any risk?”

i’m pretty sure the answer is no.

this really just sort of further cements my original opinion that yumeko definitely operates on some sort of metric of “earning” what one has. if you’re interested in my thought piece on that subject it’s right over here.

i really like where tsubomi’s train of thought is going here. up until now we’ve seen yumeko’s cutthroat mentality mostly as applied to herself and an opposing player. we’ve seen her drive the stakes high with yuriko, with sayaka, with miyo and miri and so on.

this is what i mean when i say yumeko’s friendliness has an element of uncanny valley to it. you can argue that we’ve seen yumeko drag people into gambling alongside her ( like itsuki ), but we haven’t really seen it in this kind of light where it’s leveraged against her willingness to help people.

so +1 to chapter 81 for re-highlighting this fact about yumeko.

moving along, tsubomi is having these thoughts in the first place because terano came by and pointed out to her that she’s an “extra”, and per the logistics of the game yumeko only really needs suzui’s cooperation to win. then we cut to this short set-up scene where yumeko tells the gang ( and us ) the plan for this turn:

this gets tsubomi thinking. because yumeko is donating to suzui, she’ll have 0 points which means if tsubomi challenges her, she’ll win and thereby fulfill the requirements of her life plan to “knock either yumeko or terano out of the election”. tsubomi we’ve seen in past games though is still kind of coming into her own individuality, and is very much used to just taking orders. on top of that, she still feels indebted to yumeko for pushing her to play against kiwatari during the debt swap indian poker.

another thing i commented about in the past was the “human” qualities and motivations of the characters. tsubomi is a real highlight of this chapter because she reminds us of that quality too, because terano’s remarks spark what i think is a very organic conflict in her thoughts:

“i don’t want to be a housepet” vs “i don’t want to betray the girl i’m indebted to”

“i want to live as a person” vs “i want to keep a good conscience”

it’s the portrayal of internal struggles like these that make me angy at the sexualization in this series because these really show that it just isn’t needed. kawamoto absolutely knows what he’s writing and it’s not like he’s writing it poorly so its like...what gives.

not to make this about yumeko again but she does seem to get pretty meta here. i’m pretty certain that she knows what tsubomi is thinking here and i’ll also go as far as to suggest that she might have even set up the play this way to test tsubomi’s mettle. i’ll get into that here in a moment though :)

i say yumeko has an idea of what’s going through tsubomi’s mind here just because her question is very telling -- “have you made your decision?” -- yumeko definitely knows that some sort of choice has been imposed onto tsubomi, and tsubomi’s mentioning of her lack of guidance this turn also implies that yumeko is leaving her to fend for herself. which i think is something yumeko will always do. we’ve established that she’s not altruistic in the slightest...i don’t think yumeko is at all interested in people who lack the will to help themselves, regardless of how pitiable their circumstances.

i know suzui is supposed to be the audience-proxy but idk my guys... i think tsubomi is shaping up to be the better conduit through which we see yumeko’s real colors.

also, more of yumeko giving us some insight into her values and how she thinks... but @ naomura why did you draw her doing this. yumeko you look SILLY but ily anyway

“only a choice at the end of agony can move your heart” -- yumeko’s starting to give me vibes of someone who’s apathetic unless the ante is driven wildly high hence why she does it but i need at least one more backstory drop before i speak more on that one. just saying it’d line up with a few things tho

moving on, it follows that tsubomi ultimately decides to challenge yumeko because that’s the logical thing to do if she wants to look out for herself. plus some commentary from terano about how it’s all according to keikaku.

anyway, i really enjoyed this next sequence because it throws back to yumeko even more. it reminds us that while yumeko loves taking on huge risks, that doesn’t mean she plays to lose. it’s been a while since we’ve seen yumeko engage in a setup like this so it was great to see that kawamoto still remember what kind of gambler she is:

i actually really love terano but i do enjoy seeing yumeko consistently trip her up. it really upholds yumeko’s role as a dark horse.

anyway, remember how i said yumeko probably set this play up to see what tsubomi would do? this is where we can circle back to that because we see, in fact, that yumeko did not donate her points to suzui like she said she would.

yumeko is such a convoluted character that you can get caught up on one aspect of her character to the point of forgetting another. in recent chapters we’ve seen her in a supporting role: supporting mary, seemingly helping tsubomi... but thanks chapter 81 for reminding us that yumeko is a gambler before she’s anything else and can and will set up other players. this also kind of raises a mild albeit interesting moral quandary: i think it’s pretty safe to say that this was manipulative on yumeko’s part, but it could also be argued that this is a gamble and she read far enough ahead and just acted accordingly. i think that ambiguity is the point.

and that’s the jist chapter 81, and tbh i really enjoyed it. it felt like i was back in ye olden days of yore where kkg was yumeko’s misadventures. for a while there it felt like they were like “ok we’ve established she’s a really good gambler we must shine the spotlight elsewhere now” -- which is fair, don’t get me wrong. knowing the rest of the -bamis is really important to the plot. it’s just nice to see yumeko back in action proper again 🥺

#the kkg deep dive #kakegurui spoilers #are there typos in this? probably #i'll scan it over again later but my brain cells are fried for now #but 81 was Really Good #the whole buffet #long post /

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dazeandhaze · 4 years

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What is the kagerou project?

This post is for those who are interested in interacting with my muses Kido, Kano, and Konoha, but maybe don’t know enough about the series to really know where to start plotting wise. I’ll be linking this post to their abouts (when I make them) and I welcome any questions you might have on it!

First off, the Kagerou project is originally a set of vocaloid songs / videos that later got translated to a manga, novels, and an anime. It’s a story told achronlogically, meaning pretty much out of order and not straight forward at all - another reason I wanted to make this post so newcomers don’t feel confused. That and all the mediums help tell the full story - so unless you’ve taken in all of them it’s hard to piece together the story from start to finish, and there is still a lot of details we don’t know. The kagerou project isn’t perfect but it’s a good story overall.

The actual story / character info will be below the cut cause this is gonna be a super long post.

Also if you get weirded out by snakes it’s probably not the best idea to read this - there’s no pictures but the word ‘snake’ comes up ALOT. Also please don’t read this if Suicide is a trigger for you, as that is something that I will be mentioning a few times aswell.

MAJOR CHARACTERS

First off I’ll introduce the characters / what their powers are and then explain the songs then the story and how the powers are significant and how the characters play into the story as a whole.

Azami - the medusa. Creator of the abilities.

The Mekakushi Dan - the ‘blindfold’ gang. It started as a childhood fantasy but Kido, Kano, and Seto kept the group name after Ayano’s death. Kano was the one that came up with the name.

Ayano Takeyama - Number 0, Foster older sister to Kido, Kano, and Seto. Has the snake of favoring eyes. She is able to project her feelings and memories onto others.

Tsubomi Kido - Number 1, technically the leader. Has the snake of Concealing eyes. She can make herself effectively invisible and unable to be perceived by others as long as she doesn’t touch anyone. She can use this ability on other people, and any sound they make while the ability is active is unheard of by others.

Kousuke Seto - Number 2. Has the snake of Stealing eyes. He can read people’s minds and when used to its full potential, he can read a person's memories.This ability also lets him understand the thoughts of animals, though they can still not understand him.

Shuuya Kano - Number 3. Has the snake of Deceiving eyes. It allows him to change what people perceive him as. He can change his appearance to impersonate other people and even animals. He can only use this ability on himself and not others.

Marry Kozakura - Number 4. Has two ‘eye’ abilities technically, Locking Eyes and Combining eyes. Locking eyes she inherited from her mother Shion and her grandmother Azami. It allows her to temporarily stop the movement of whoever meets her gaze. She is not able to turn people into stone, but it can paralyze them for a short amount of time. The Snake of Combining Eyes can combine and therefore control all snakes. It was directly given to her by Azami when she died and entered the Kagerou Daze. This ability causes her to automatically obtain a snake after its owner has died and also allows her to take a snake directly from them.Combining Eyes also passively causes the other snakes (and thus their owners) to be drawn towards its owner.

Momo Kisaragi - Number 5. She has the snake of Drawing Eyes. This ability can draw peoples' attention to herself regardless of their preferences in tastes or interests. She is also able to tell where a person's attention is drawn to.

Ene / Takene Enomoto - Number 6. She has the Snake of opening eyes. This allows her to to split her consciousness from her body, which then can reside in electronic devices (such as a cellphone) as a cyber-being. After regaining her body as Takane, she is still able to send herself to other electronic devices as Ene, but doing so causes her body to lose consciousness.

Shintaro Kisaragi - Number 7. Has the snake of Retaining eyes. This allows him to remember everything he sees. When his ability is fully activated, he is able to remember the events of past routes and speak with the Snake of Retaining Eyes.

Hibiya Amamiya - Number 8. Has the snake of Focusing Eyes.This has the power to perceive objects and details that are far away from an aerial view.

Konoha / Haurka Kokonose - Number 9. Has the snake of Awakening Eyes. This gives him the power to remake his body into one that he finds to be his "ideal" - as Haruka was physically weak and sickly, this meant for him to become supernaturally strong. He can also heal from even fatal injuries with this ability, which looks like multiple black snakes wrapping around his body when activated.

Hiyori Asahina - Number 10. Depending on the route she will have the snake of Focusing Eyes instead of Hibiya. 9/10 times though it is Hibiya. Just mentioning this fact for technicalities sake.

The Snake of Clearing eyes - the story’s main antagonist. This ability can interfere with and stop the use of other eye abilities completely. It normally possesses either Ayano’s father or Hibiya depending on the route. In every route it will always possess Konoha towards the end - as he is the strongest member and none of the others in the Dan can stand a chance against him. (if you see me reblog a black haired konoha, it’s him being possessed by this ability)

SONGS

As mentioned before, this started off as a set of vocaloid songs. So I will list SOME of the songs below - there’s over 33 songs related to the kagerou project but these are ones with MVs (or at least fan made ones) that have the main characters as the focus.

Shinigami Record - Azami Song

Jinzou Enemy - Ene and Shintaro song

Mekakushi Code - Kido’s song

Headphone Actor - Takene song

Imagination Forest - Mary song

Kagerou Daze / Heat Haze Days - Hiyori and Hibuya song

Konoha’s state of the world - Konoha song ft Hiyori and Hibuya

Yobanashi Deceive - Kano song

Shouen Brave - Seto song

Kisaragi Attention - Momo Song

Ayano’s theory of Happiness - Ayano song

Yuukei Yesterday - Takene and Haruka song

Children Record - everyone is here lmao serves more like an opening if anything

Moon Viewing Recital - Momo and Hibuya song

Outer Science - Clearing eyes song / The Bad ending

Lost time memory - Shintaro song

Summer time record - everyone is here but there is a focus on Haruka / the good ending

Additional memory - Ayano in the daze song

Never lost world - kido post story song

THE STORY

the first thing to know about the kagerou project story is that it is a time loop story. Each medium contains its own loop (or in the manga’s case, multiple), which is why someone has to consume all the mediums to really get the full story. Some character details or interactions only happen in one route / loop. I’ll be going over what people are most likely to find out through google searches / the easiest medium (the music or anime) but will mention other routes here and there for context. Generally most routes we know of follow most of the same story beats but some differ dramatically - and I don’t want to confuse people.

For the overall story though - it starts with Azami. She is the medusa, but not in the traditional greek myth sense. It is just what humans started referring to her as thanks to her snake-like features. Truthfully she doesn’t know entirely what she is, she was born at the beginning, and lasted through the ages with not even a physical form until she met two beings - humans and a snake. The humans tried to kill her on first sight while the snake was kind and explained what the humans were to Azami. Her physical form ended up being a mix of these two species, hence humans calling her a medusa. (pictured below is azami from the novels)

Overtime she tried to interact with humans but they always shunned her and tried to kill her until one day she met an albino man named Tsukihiko. I will skip over the specifics but she ends up falling in love with him and building a family with him. They were both considered ‘monsters’ by society and thus made a perfect pair. They even had a daughter, Shion.

Now it’s important to note that during this time she made her abilities. considered ‘eye’ abilities or ‘snakes’, Azami had the ability to create almost sentient forces within her to help her solve problems. For example, the ‘favoring eyes’ ability was created so she could properly show her emotions to her infant daughter, pass on all the love that she had onto Shion in a way she would understand even as a baby.

However after Shion was born, after creating these abilities, she realized that both Tsukihiko and Shion were going to out live her and die. She had lived thousands, maybe even millions, of years by now and hadn’t aged a day - but her husband obviously had. In this fear a new power was born, the snake of clearing eyes. It offered a solution to Azami, for them to create an entirely new world where death and time didn’t exist, where she could simply be happy with her family. She does this, and tells her husband and child they would leave the world together. They agree, but Tsukihiko wants to officially marry Azami before they leave the world. She allows him to go back to his old home to get wedding rings and someone to marry them officially, but doesn’t return. What does return are humans, out to kill Azami and her daughter. Azami defeats the men with ease but believes now her husband is all but dead. In her grief, she escapes to the world she made - the Kagerou Daze - and leaves her child behind.Tsukihiko manages to return, escaping from the confinement the other humans had put him in, and knows once he finds his daughter alone that his wife left the world. They are not upset with her, and continue to live out their days in their home in the forest.

Tsukihiko eventually dies of old age and Shion grows up. Shion has her own daughter called Mary, who is a quarter medusa. Shion is extremely protective of her daughter after the events of her own childhood, and tells Mary never to leave the house. However being the fun loving child she was, Mary disobeyed her mother once. It wasn’t long after she was found by humans who were proceeding to beat her to death when her mother found her. They were both about to die at the hands of these humans when Azami decided to intervene.

She wasn’t gone completely, she had been watching over her daughter and grandaughter from the Daze. Knowing what was about to happen to her family, she issued a command to the world to take in the two people dying and bring them up into the world. The date? August 15th.When the two arrived in the world they were dead. The world brought them back to life but they couldn’t leave back to the ‘real’ world without a new lifeforce. Azami, wanting her daughter to live, gave her the core of her power - the snake of combining eyes, also known as the ‘queen snake’. But Shion wanted her own daughter to live, and passed it onto Mary. Mary was able to return to the real world, but had no memory of the Daze or what her mother and grandmother had done for her - she was now alone.

The combining eyes was the core of Azami’s power, and without it she could no longer control the Kagerou Daze. She couldn’t tell the world to stop bringing people into it, to stop giving them powers,and to stop returning people to the real world. This was the mistake that costs the main character’s so much grief.

Each of the members of the mekakushi dan (besides Shintaro) died on the day of August 15th. The Kagerou Daze, still fulfilling its order, took them and whoever they were with at the time up into the world, and if they resonated with one of Azami’s abilities, gave them the snake before putting them back out into the real world - the snake/ eye ability being their new life force and the reason they’re alive.

Kido died in a fire with her sister, and got the snake of concealing eyes. Seto drowned with his dog and got the snake of stealing eyes. Kano died in a robbery with his mother and got the snake of Decieving eyes. Momo also drowned and got the drawing eyes ability. Takene was poisoned and got the opening eyes ability. Haruka had a heart attack and got the awakening eyes ability. Hibuya and Hiyori were in a traffic accident and depending on the route - one of them gets the Focusing eyes. As stated above, 9/10 times it’s Hibuya, Hiyori only gets it in the manga route/loop.

Ayano is a special case. She committed suicide with the goal in mind to go to the Kagerou Daze. She stays in the daze with her eye ability for a reason which I’ll get to later.

Now Shintaro does have an eye ability of his own, however it was NOT one of Azami’s abilities. I will also get to this later.

Kido, Kano, and Seto all end up being orphaned around the same time and ended up in the same orphanage. Forced into the same room together as they were the ‘strange’ kids. They were all adopted by the Tateyama family, Ayano’s family, who were researching the Medusa aka Azami. they took these kids in for their research but also genuinely cared about them. With the help of Ayano - the three children come to be not so scared of their abilities and learn to like humanity again. The hoodies the three wear were gifts from their foster parents and Ayano to hide their eyes - as when their abilities were being used / went out of control, their eyes turned red.

One August 15th, Ayano’s parents were involved in a mudslide. They went to the Daze, and her father returned with the snake of clearing eyes. This wasn’t apparent to Ayano or any of the children at first, but Ayano soon found out that her father planned to kill her two friends at school (Haruka and Takene, who have pre existing health conditions and were in his ‘special education’ class) on August 15th so that they would go to the daze and get more snakes.

She found the clearing eyes wanted all the snakes in the real world for some reason, and thus on August 15th, she committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the school building, going into the daze and holding one of the eye abilities hostage by never returning from the daze. The clearing eyes still continued with his plan, Takene and Haruka died that day as well and got their respective powers. Haruka and Takene were strange cases though, they didn’t die with another person. Instead the clearing eyes tricked the world of the Kagerou Daze, getting it to recognize the mind and body as two different entities. So Takene’s body was left in the Daze while her mind returned to the real world as ‘Ene’, and could only exist within cyberspace. Haruka’s mind was left in the Daze and the perfect, healthy, body that he wanted returned to the real world as Konoha, who had no memories and seemingly little personality.

But left the only one of their friend group, Shintaro, alive with all of his friends having died on the same day. He became a shut in, and for two years did not leave his home. The story officially ‘starts’ with Shintaro and Ene. Ene pretending she did not know Shintaro at all, found his computer during the two year timespan and proceeded to make his life hell, but also give him company within those two lonely years.

It’s important to note that Ene is crucial to Shintaro’s overall development. In some loops, her presence wasn’t enough and he ends up committing suicide out of grief. But emotions and lessons learned are kept throughout the loops, and eventually Ene came to realize that she had to help Shintaro no matter what.

Anyways, in a series of unfortunate events, Shintaro ends up needing to leave his house to go shopping as August 14th is a part of the obon holiday in Japan and he couldn’t survive one day without his precious computer being operational. On his one outing in two years - he ends up being wrapped into a robbery / terrorist attack on a shopping center and meets the rest of the Mekakushi dan (at this moment, only Kido, Seto, Kano, Mary, and Shintaro’s sister Momo). They help diffuse the situation at the shopping center and Shintaro ends up passing out (just due to nerves or he actually gets grazed by a bullet, depends on the loop), and brought back to the Mekakushi Dan hideout aka their apartment. It’s here he learns about the eye abilities, how his sister has one, and the exact events after this differ from loop to loop. Either way Shintaro becomes a sort of ‘unofficial’ member of the Dan and spends time with them over the next few days as he tries to wrap his head around the mysterious powers of the Dan and what they mean.

How the Dan ends up recruiting Hibuya and Konoha differs as well, but generally the group comes across the traffic accident that Hibiya and Hiyori were involved in and Konoha being there as well. Sometimes Ene will ask Shintaro to chase after Konoha, recognizing him as Haruka, and then they end up at the hospital and wait for Hibuya to be released / able to have visitors so they can talk to him. At this point in some of the loops, the Dan knows that August 15th is an important day to them, they’re just not sure why.

Hibuya leaves the hospital, determined to find Hiyori - not quite sure what has happened to her but knows she might be dead or lost or looking for him. Momo manages to get Hibuya to calm down and control his new eye ability, just in time for the Dan to be put into trouble.

It should be noted that technically, Azami had only 10 powers. And now with the exception of the power now taken by Ayano, all of those powers are in the real world. Which means it was time for the Clearing eyes to make its move. In the Novel and Anime route, the Dan ends up taking the fight to the Clearing eyes. (Possibly in the manga route aswell, I haven’t finished it).

Regardless, the Clearing eyes objective becomes clear rather quickly - it plans to kill every member of the Mekakushi Dan except for Shintaro (who doesn’t have one of Azami’s powers, but he still dies in some routes just for getting in the way) and Mary (who has the queen snake / snake of combining eyes, which clearing eyes wants). With each member of the Mekakushi Dan that dies, Mary gains their ability and grows closer to a full medusa. When she has five snakes - she can control the Kagerou Daze itself. The Clearing Eyes plans to kill the Mekakushi Dan, possess Mary, and become immortal + have control over the Daze and all of Azami’s abilities.

This is how most routes end. As soon as Mary has five snakes (four or more of her friends die), she has the power to control the Kagerou Daze and she has the world take in the Clearing eyes and thus trapping it there forever. After this she uses her new found powers to rewind time to sometime after her mother’s death but before everything else happened. This is how most routes start.

In the manga route specifically, the only ones alive after Mary has trapped the Clearing Eyes is Ayano (as she didn’t stay in the Daze in this route), Shintaro, and Mary. Everyone else is dead and gone and Mary is about to rewind time. Before she does though, she has Mary do something - give Shintaro an eye ability. Ayano gives up her life so that Mary may make her life force into an ability - the snake of retaining eyes. It is so that Shintaro ‘will never forget the tragedy that occurred here’. Shintaro has the ability to retain everything he sees, even across timelines. This route happens early on in the number of routes, but it’s never told to the audience when exactly it happens.

But, the problem with this is that he doesn’t remember he has an ability, it has to be triggered somehow. But it’s because of this that Shintaro killing himself out of grief in some timelines is so detrimental to the overall story - if Shintaro dies then he can’t activate his power and he can’t help save everyone. So for the story to truly be realized and head towards a good ending, Shintaro can’t die until after he remembers his ability.

In the novel route, only Seto, Mary, and Hibiya are alive after the confrontation with the Clearing eyes, and they live out their lives for almost two years before Mary decides to rewind time. Hibiya is able to contact the people who died and are now stuck in the Kagerous daze (death doesn’t exist there, so people are ‘alive’ there but trapped forever) and they all collectively make the decision to turn back time. Shintaro even comments that they’ve probably done this dozens, or maybe even hundreds or thousands of times by that point.

In the Anime route is when Shintaro remembers his ability. He remembers this due to something he knows but he shouldn’t have known. While he was friends with Ayano in school, he never knew that her siblings that she spoke about were Kido, Kano, and Seto. Yet while at the Mekakushi Dan apartment, he finds a picture with them all in it - and somehow knows that it’s the truth despite being surprised to find it out. This one event was enough for him to get things rolling and eventually remember his ability. He ends up killing himself and going to the Daze to see Ayano.

This is also shown in Route 1 of the lost time memory music video. He gets shot trying to protect Konoha (who was getting possessed by the clearing eyes, and thus tried to kill himself so that he wouldn’t hurt his friends), and he appears in the Daze to speak to Ayano and bring her back to the real world. The combination of Shintaro’s Retaining eyes, and Ayano’s favoring eyes, is enough to help get Mary to calm down. Ayano’s ability also lets her put the memories of others into other people, so she helps Shintaro show Mary that everything will be fine and that no matter what happened in every other route, they all love and care for her. This was enough to get her to calm down and for her to take everyone up into the Kagerou Daze, not just the clearing eyes.

Once trapped there, the Clearing eyes had nowhere to go and also was tricked by Konoha and Haruka into becoming the new snake / life force for Hiyori so that she could come back to life. I should note here that it is possible for those with snakes to sort of come and go from the Kagerou Daze as they please - people in the daze just can’t leave without a snake, so Mary also returns the snakes to those who had died up until this point so that they could leave the kagerou daze afterwards. Haruka is able to get back into his body after Konoha willingly gives it over, Takene gets her body back, and they are all able to have a few moments with those that they had died with to get some closure.

They then leave the daze together, and are able to continue on with their lives. (also shown in sumertime record)

Again, I skipped over ALOT here. But this is overall the major plot points of the kagerou project.

The Kagerou project is about dealing with loss, about looking forward to the future, about learning that you don’t have to deal with everything alone - there is always someone willing to help you. It’s about overcoming fear and despair, and learning to take a step forward. There is a lot of death and sadness in this story but there’s also a lot of goofy fun moments too - to remind us that even dark moments have a little light in them.

#suicide tw #snakes tw #this is over 4000 words so i hope it's worth it wheezes #i hope it's not too confusing either the kagerou project is a mess but i love it #tsubomi kido  ➼ headcanon #shuuya kano  ➼  headcanon #kousuke seto  ➼ headcanon #konoha ➼ headcanon

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eyedelater · 7 years

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notes (translation and otherwise) on chapters 100.12 and 100.13

basically i typed these up the day of translation for the respective chapters but never published them because i was feeling weird about them but i figured i’d put them out there anyway

translation notes marked with a * at the front so you can read only those if you want. overall this is pretty long and kind of nonsensical

for 100.12

*the "brother you can earnestly compete with" is the same phrase that i translated last chapter as "serious conflict," as in "there's never been a serious conflict between us," and i can't decide whether i translated it too strongly and then too weakly or vice versa but basically the meaning of the phrase (honki de butsukariau) is like, “seriously clash.” yeah, clash is the best word, isn’t it. it’s got all the right connotations, like bouncing off each other and general conflict but not necessarily a destructive fight and also not necessarily a friendly competition. yeah i should’ve said clash both times, huh. do you ever have regrets

*i was right about the sound effect at the end of 100.11 being a flash, sort of..? it was a precursor to this first panel's sound effect, which is "PIGIIIIN" which is an unusual sound effect, or at least, one i haven't really seen before. i mean it's entirely possible to just invent a one-off sound effect for any particular situation, you know? but in this case the sound effect appears to describe the phenomenon of ritsu being utterly immobilized by ???% in an instant

i was wrong about the percentage meter being mob's :0

raise your hand if you lost your shit after doing a double- or triple-take between the omake title and the omake itself and finally realizing what it was

i still need to sort out exactly how ritsu's interpretation of ???% and my ???% hypothesis work out, but i've been too busy playing psychonauts... plus i'm sure we will continue to better understand the nature of ???% as this chapter progresses. [[edit: psychonauts was good, and i’m probably going to reserve judgment on ???% until we get the full story, since there’s no point in speculating when your speculations will be addressed a week later]]

for 100.13:

*well, i had a lot of decisions to make in this chapter... which i guess actually just means i was slightly confused/ambivalent a lot. it comes with the territory of not actually being that good at japanese. i've said this before, right? it's on my about page. so don't let it come as a surprise to anyone that i'm not that good at japanese. i mean i'm not terrible, i have a solid handle on it. it's just that my approach to translation is more like decrypting a cipher as accurately as possible and then phrasing it in a way that captures both the meaning and the feeling. i try really hard, but i know i couldn’t be a professional translator without further education. that’s why i never claimed/aimed to be the best or only translator of this series. but i do still believe my work is accurate.

*anyway, starting on the first page. ritsu says "wakatta... wakatta yo..." and wakatta just means "understood" and the "yo" adds emphasis, but we don't quite have any emphasis-adding particle in english, so i changed the latter to "i get it" to make it sound more insistent. even though i really try not to translate the same phrase two different ways, especially not in direct sequence like that. but at first i translated it as "i get it... / i get it, okay..." and that sounded way too whiny, so i thought the better way to phrase it would be to do what i did. i think ritsu feels bad about causing distress to ???% and is saying, like, "i know it feels bad, but i had to do it." (<< interpretation, not a translation)

*when ritsu says "right...?" i was thinking about translating that as "don't you think...?" (what he actually says is just "nee...?" which is just a call for confirmation basically) and while i do think "don't you think...?" would've been the cuter translation, i went with "right...?" because it has the same number of syllables as the raw line and maintaining brevity is important to me sometimes.

*thanks again to femoralynn for hand-drawing the "STOP!!!" on the third page~ i think it makes a big difference. in the raws it was also hand-drawn and it said "TOMAREEE" which means... "STOP," but in english there's no good way to add more letters to "stop" to indicate you're stretching out the pronunciation, so i added three exclamation points in order to convey the intensity and desperation of the line. even though i usually try my best to stick with the punctuation offered in canon without adding or removing any.

*translating newscasters is an ordeal because they use hella kanji but i think i got the majority of it down... the only bit i'm not very confident on is the speech bubble to the right of tsubomi's face, but like, i don't think it will have a huge bearing on the story, and i'm pretty sure it's close enough. i've said before that i'm not going for archive quality, and i'm not going to go back and fix little mistakes unless they're really annoying or really important to understanding the story (like the mistakes i fixed last week).

*i hope it's clear in the "the government has claimed that no official agencies are involved in this matter" line that they're saying that no official agencies are responsible for causing this disaster, and what they're NOT saying is that there's no government agency investigating it. because like. surely there is. like, joseph works for the government, and he dropped touichirou on it, so the government is doing Something.

*yes, ???% uses "boku" pronouns. an established fact, but just a reminder to the curious who forgot or didn’t know in the first place.

*oh, i might've mentioned this in previous translation notes, but whenever i put "power" in quotes like that, it's because it's in quotes in the raws. whenever it's Not in quotes (like in ritsu's "innermost power" line), i don't put it in quotes. i'm not yet sure about the significance of this, because although mob seems to use "power" in quotes consistently, he's not the only one who does it, and yet, not everyone does it. hmm.

i guess i’ve unconsciously switched to using “he” pronouns for ???% sometimes in my meta. this is probably exactly what ???% wants...!

*now about the confusion that led me to post the chapter an hour late. on page 8 of the chapter (labeled page 149 in the bottom right corner), you'll notice that the four speech bubbles in the last two panels have no tails to indicate the speaker. tailless speech bubbles are my mortal enemy, as both a translator and a comics reader in general, and if you're someone who makes comics or ever will, i strongly urge you to add tails to your speech bubbles no matter what (and if the speaker is offscreen, do the thing where you make an inverse tail in the speech bub by taking out a wedge). so basically, i rely heavily on context and got confused about who is speaking in the last two lines of this page. of course, i was also confused by the grammar to a degree, otherwise i wouldn't have had to rely on context in this case. anyway, at first, i thought it was ???% saying, "if you do that, you'll disappear. i live freely." the first line makes sense in a way, telling mob that he'd disappear if ???% disappeared, but the second line seems like a non sequitur, and i couldn't really make sense of it. then i thought, oh, it's mob talking from offscreen, and he's saying, "if only you would disappear. then i could live freely." that's a very reasonable sentiment for mob to express, and it would make sense as mob elaborating on the line that came directly before those two lines... but then, on the next page, it seemed strange for mob to be saying his fifth line in a row. it seemed like it should be more of a back and forth than just mob talking at ???%. and note that i had poor femoralynn typeset all these confused iterations as i thought of them at like 11:25 this morning. sorry again for that. but anyway i finally realized that ???% really IS the one talking in those last two lines (no thanks to the tailless speech bubbles, again), and he's responding to mob's request to go away by suggesting that mob should be the one to go away, since he's the fake one. and finally that makes perfect sense with the lines surrounding it. i don't know why it took me so long to understand that... but the speech bubbles definitely had something to do with it. remember, kids, if you put dialogue in your comics but don't indicate who is speaking, the reader doesn't know either! unless they're the only one on the page, like when mob was yelling into the void inside his own head.

it doesn’t help that in japanese, they often leave the subject (and sometimes the object) out of the sentence entirely and leave it to me to interpret who is doing a verb to what/whom. because in english, you can’t just leave the subject out of a sentence. (e.g. “korosu” is just the verb “to kill” but if you say “korosu” to someone, you’re essentially saying “i’ll kill you.” notice how i had to add the subject [i] and the object [you] even though the literal translation would be nothing but the verb “kill.” so if i see a speech bubble that says “korosu” and it doesn’t have a tail to indicate who is saying it, i Literally Cannot Know who is threatening to kill whom or what, except by using context to make an educated guess. you see why this is a problem? and naturally they do this with tons of verbs completely unrelated to killing, i just thought of “korosu” first because bakugou katsuki says it all the time)

(ONE-sensei is usually very good about tailing his speech bubbles. i wonder if the lack of tails was intentional here, meant to further reflect the fact that mob is arguing with himself and that they’re kind of both technically the same speaker. still confusing though)

(oh and for the curious, the raws for the last 3 lines on that page, page 149, were as follows: 「僕の中からいなくなってくれ。」「だったらキミが消えてくれ。」「僕は自由に生きる。」 yeah the "kure" in that second line really threw me off bc i'm a fool and also i translated that same "kure" as "please" for mob but i didn't put "please" in ???%'s line because i couldn't figure out how to put it in there concisely and also it's clear that ???% is being a dick even if he kinda said please. and also because i don't know shit)

(and fuck, if i'm being honest, that "please" probably teleported up to ritsu's "so please... come home..." line, because he didn't actually say please in that line. should i correct it? i feel like a fraud. i just thought the "please" helped convey the sentiment of the line, but in retrospect i could've translated it more accurately without losing the feeling of it.......... what ritsu really says in that line is "dakara... kaettekite ne..." which, if you've watched the one punch man anime, you can only hear as the lyrics to the extremely sappy ending credits song, so maybe that impression of extreme sappiness sapped through into my translation and made me make it sappier than it really was...............)

about how ???% is like "ritsu is my little brother. he was saying that i'm his older brother." i might be wrong in my interpretation (not translation, which is more or less literal, but the interpretation i'm about to give), but i took this to mean something along the lines of "just now, ritsu kept addressing me as his brother. i think that means i am his brother. today i learned that i am ritsu's brother." as opposed to meaning something more like "i'm the one he called 'nii-san,' so i'm his brother and you're not." (plus ???% did not literally say, “he called me nii-san.” i translated that line accurately.) although either way, it seems to indicate that ???% only just recently started noticing (or being able to notice) whom ritsu is addressing as "nii-san;" otherwise, ???% would have known that the other million times ritsu has called someone "nii-san" in his life, it has been directed at mob, not ???%. so even if ???% is suggesting that he is ritsu's only True nii-san, his claim is only based on the last few minutes of ritsu addressing him directly, which would back up my claim that ???% only learned/decided just now that ritsu is his little brother... if any of this makes any sense.

i love how serizawa is like "let's get out of here i'm sure kageyama-kun is fine" and reigen's like "...he's in the tornado isn't he" and seri's like "..........maybe"

and serizawa's new umbrella, which he must have picked out and bought himself specifically to use as his preferred vessel of psychic power, is transparent. is that... a bubble umbrella...?

#mob psycho 100 spoilers #MOB BLOG MOB LOG #very late but oh well

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