Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 10 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translation Notes: On Drama CDs: Part 2

Waaay back in volume 6, I wrote about the When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace drama CD. At the time, I teased the existence of a second drama CD for the series and promised to tell you all about it when volume 10—that is, the volume that said CD was originally packaged with—rolled around. I thought that it would be a section that’d practically write itself: the drama CD, I knew, featured the cast of the anime reprising their roles rather than the cast of the original CD, and between that contrast and the actual story of the CD—whatever that turned out to be—I thought there would be easily enough content to dedicate a whole TL note section to.

Cut to January 2023, when I explained this plan to my editor. “Isn’t the second drama CD also basically a live read of the light novel?” he asked. “If it is, it’s prooobably not gonna make for a full notes section on its own,” I conceded. “Thanks for the heads up on that—will definitely not count on it being a full notes section’s worth of content,” I added. Then I forgot about it entirely for the better part of a year.

Fast forward to sometime around December 2023 or so, when a line earlier on in this volume reminds me of my master plan and I pull up that drama CD that I had obtained and definitely should have listened to months beforehand. I load it up. It starts to play. It immediately strikes me that it sounds...oddly familiar.

It’s basically a live read of the light novel. Specifically, volume 8.

So, so much for that plan! The second drama CD’s still super fun, to be clear—hearing Andou attempt to say “Shakespeare” in a natural English accent is worth the price of admission alone, hearing Chifuyu do a Disney voice is exactly as disturbing as you’d think it would be, and it makes the incredible choice of having Andou constantly screaming chuuni stage-fight nonsense in the background during Tomoyo and Chifuyu’s backstage conversation. The problem, however, is that there’s just no plot to summarize that wasn’t directly covered in volume 8 itself, and as such, there’s not really much for me to write about it beyond “Yeah, it’s pretty good.”

I could speculate that volume 8 was picked as the story to adapt by virtue of it probably having been the most recent volume at the time the anime’s recording wrapped up, but, well, I just did that, and it took all of half a sentence. I was, in other words, stuck—I had a whole notes section to write, and no remaining pieces of Supernatural Battles semi-lost media to write about that I hadn’t already discussed...or were there?

Remember that bit in the third paragraph, where I said that “a line in the volume” reminded me of the drama CDs? The line in question was in chapter 1, where Andou speculated that Kuki and Kudou “could probably sing a mean duet together.” I was vaguely aware of the fact that the Blu-ray release of the anime included bonus CDs with character songs on them, and my Kota Nozomi cheek-o-meter was immediately triggered. Could that line, I wondered, be an oblique reference to an actual character song sung by Kuki’s and Kudou’s voice actors?

I checked, and the answer was no—each of the character songs packed in with the six Blu-ray volumes were duets between Andou and one of the series’ other characters. Kuki, much to my disappointment, wasn’t featured in them at all. That being said, over the course of looking into those songs I discovered something much, much more important: the fact that they weren’t the only things bundled in with those Blu-rays.

Do you remember how, back in volume 5’s TL notes, I reassured you that there weren’t any other pieces of Supernatural Battles media not featured in the novels beyond those two drama CDs, the anime, the manga, and the defunct gacha game? Well, it turns out I was lying. There are more pieces of media from the franchise—Blu-ray pack-ins, and there were actually quite a lot of them. I’m talking production pamphlets, the aforementioned character songs, short stories, and—most shockingly of all—six mini audio dramas, one per character song CD!

So, to sum up: while there wasn’t much to discuss about the second drama CD, in the end, there will be a lot to discuss about the remaining six, not to mention all the other Blu-ray bonus bits! I’ve already obtained a boxed set of the Blu-rays, bonus pack-ins included (thanks once again to my editor, who pointed out a convenient Yahoo! Auctions listing at just the right moment), so you can look forward to a full summary of all that jazz in the TL notes next volume!

As for what to do with the remaining space this volume...hey, is it just me, or do the black-and-white illustrations look a little different this time around?