Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 10 - Chapter SS1

Bonus Translation Notes: On Art (Pay no attention to the strikethrough—it’s fine.)

Obviously, the interior art for this volume was not drawn by 029! Rather, it was drawn by Saito Kengo, who served as animation director and key animator on a solid chunk of episodes from the Supernatural Battles anime. The remaining three volumes in the series will also each feature a new guest artist from Studio TRIGGER to handle the interior illustrations, while 029 will continue drawing the covers and color illustrations.

So, you might be wondering: why the rotating cast of guest artists? Unfortunately, the only answer that I can provide is that a formal explanation has never been given. As I mentioned back in volume 7’s TL note section, where I discussed Kota Nozomi himself, the light novel industry is kind of a black box that takes great care to respect the privacy of those who work in it. That’s perhaps even more true in 029’s case than it is in Nozomi’s—virtually nothing is publicly known about them, and if (as it seems natural to speculate) some circumstances in their life or work schedule prompted the need for the guest artists, that information has never been made public. I can say with reasonable confidence that the lack of clarification was a deliberate choice as well, considering I was able to find instances of both Kota Nozomi and 029 being asked about the situation on Twitter and refraining from replying at all.

Why dedicate a section of these notes to this topic if the only answer available is “nobody knows”? Partially because it seemed like a very natural question for our readers to be wondering about (and at least to me, a formal lack of an answer is more satisfying than an implicit lack of an answer), partially because it once again drives in the point I made previously about the privacy of creators in the light novel industry, and mostly because in the process of searching for an answer, I turned up a few tangentially related fun facts that I just had to share, and then I found an absolute mother lode of information in the form of a thirty-minute Q and A livestream regarding the series that Kota Nozomi did toward the end of 2020, which I will now pivot to talking about! Taaake three!