Revising Japanese basics and making notes. Breaking down kanji into components mostly just because I really like etymology and partially because I think it will help me remember them.

This review contains spoilers.

Sorawo-chan, are you engaging with first contact with Toriko properly?

Once again these characters spend so long avoiding talking about relationships that when they do it is shocking how open and frank they end up being, not just casually acknowledging the idea of lesbian relationships, but of asexuality and aromanticism and how many people’s wants and needs fit outside of societal norms. And this ends up mirroring the exploration of the Otherside in a way that I didn’t expect, though maybe should have been obvious. The alien consciousness on the other side of the Otherside is unknowable, but so are people. To grow to understand someone else requires you to both understand yourself and inevitably to by changed by them.

I also love Sorawo using 鵼 (Nue), a chimeric monster whose name can be written as a compound of the first character of both of their names, as a name of their relationship. Seems like the kind of dorky shit I would do.

The protagonist of Girls × Vampire is named ルルナ. The scanlation on Mangadex has transliterated her name as Ruruna, while the Kinokuniya USA print has gone with Luluna instead. Only the people doing the German translation at Dokico seems to have noticed that it says Ruluna on the cover art.

illustration of a vampire biting someone, showing blood

The Japanese for “goo morning” is ｢おはようぐーざいます｣

going to a Japanese class with my girlfriend tonight 💙

weebiest thing I’ve ever done: Playing around with a nonsense katakana version of my name that doesn’t actually work as a real transliteration but I think is cute in various ways
キバノアオイメ

Just how many underage girls has she laid her hands on?

I am surprised that the story seems to actually be angling Toriko as a victim of grooming and I am curious where it goes with that.

Very funny that the only thing physically wrong with Sorawo after so many supernatural near-death experiences is that her liver is not in great shape from going out and getting hammered to celebrate every time they survive a trip to the Otherside. She also seems to have some sort of medical condition that causes her mind to fail to comprehend the existence of lesbianism or any information pertaining to it and is too socially awkward to every ask anyone to clarify what they mean by anything.

I had was wondering why the translator decided to use both Luna and Runa for transliterating that character’s name and it looks like in the original novel her name was also written two ways depending how it’s being used, with Luna in the translation standing in for ｢ルナ｣ in katakana and Runa for ｢るな｣ in hiragana. I like to try and get an understanding of little translation tidbits like that even when I can’t read the original text at all. Language is fun!

walking around Copenhagen and saying “wow, just like Japan!” whenever I see a 7-Eleven

Jeg elsker at besøge en コンビニ

Hello! It’s time for me to be normal about Sonic the Hedgehog again. I have been thinking about the Death Egg Robot’s name.

Some background: The final level of Sonic 2 takes place aboard the Death Egg, an Eggman-themed parody of the Death Star. The final boss is a mech modelled after Robotnik himself.

This mech is not named in game but when it was reimagined as the first bossfight of Sonic Generations it was given a not terribly imaginative title: Death Egg Robot.

I don’t like this name and I grew to like it even less as this design got reused in future games and continued to be called “Death Egg Robot” even when it is completely divorced from the context of the Death Egg. It’s the first boss in Green Hill Zone in Sonic Mania and then there are the mass-produced, unmanned, cycloptic Death Egg Robots in Sonic Forces also without any apparent connection to the Death Egg¹.

What got me thinking about this again? The other day I was doing the dishes while listening to a four hour playlist called Epic & Cool Sonic Music Compilation, as is my wont, when the track Battle with Death Queen came on.

The Death Queen is a giant Buzz Bomber, a huge bee robot. The game also features a giant crab robot chase sequence that is identified in the soundtrack as Death Crab.

And it occurred to me: Is the game trying to push “Death” as a general term for a class of giant robots? Is it rebracketing Death Egg Robot as Death Egg Robot?

Perhaps we are meant to take it that, in-universe, it is in fact just the giant, or “Death”, version of an Egg Robo. There are a lot of similarities between the two. The spelling is slightly different in English but in Japanese they are both エッグ(eggu)ロボ(robo).

The Death Egg Robot debuted one game before the Egg Robos, but we could imagine that perhaps in-universe the Egg Robos were around first, just offscreen somewhere. Maybe Eggman is annoyed that Sonic and Tails associate the Death Egg Robot with the Death Egg at all. That’s just yolk folk etymology!

That said, I don’t know how to fit the final boss of Sonic Forces into this framework, which is inexplicably also called Death Egg Robot despite bearing almost no resemblance to the other Death Egg Robots and also having nothing to do with the Death Egg.

And then the real final boss, a giant robot chestburster that smashes its way out of previous phase of the bossfight is also inexplicably titled Death Egg Robot.

I don’t know how to fit this into any understanding of what Death Egg Robot is meant to mean.