Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 10 - Chapter SS2

Bonus Translation Notes: On That One Livestream

The livestream in question was the second out of fourteen that Kota Nozomi did from late 2020 to early 2021. It opens with him explaining that he’d wanted the first livestream to be about Supernatural Battles, but he’d thought being so conspicuously eager to talk about his work would make him look ridiculous, prompting him to take a poll about what to talk about instead. He’d assumed that his listeners would surely ask to hear about the series, giving him a valid excuse to talk about it...only for them to vote for him to talk about how he met his wife instead. He’d learned from his mistake for this second broadcast, choosing to talk about Supernatural Battles unilaterally this time around.

Nozomi moves on to discuss the title of the series, which, as it turns out, was directly inspired by the title of My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, as I Expected, a massively successful series of light novels by Watari Wataru that started a few years before Supernatural Battles! Nozomi thought the way that series included “romantic comedy”—its own genre—in its title was a really fresh and cool idea, and he used it as inspiration/paid homage to it by doing the same thing with Supernatural Battles, including both of its primary genres in its title. The title was also inspired by a secondary source: a TV drama (adapted from a novel) called The After-Dinner Mysteries, which was also quite popular at the time. It’s hard to tell in translation, but the Japanese titles of each work (“Inou Battle wa Nichijoukei no Naka de” and “Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato de”) are indeed extremely similar in how they’re structured. He also mentions that although you sometimes see horror stories online about editors naming a series unilaterally without consulting the author, in his case, all of his series’ titles have been collaborative efforts between him and his editors, generally coming down to his decision in the end.

Now, that claim I made in the last paragraph about Supernatural Battles’s title containing two genres is gonna require some clarification! The fact of the matter is that When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace, while a very good title in its own right, doesn’t convey one key element of the Japanese title: the fact that both the “Inou Battle” part and the “Nichijou-kei” part refer to specific genres of media. If one were to translate it while focusing entirely on emphasizing that aspect, it’d look something like “Supernatural Battles in a Slice of Life.” I certainly can’t fault the team who translated the anime and came up with the series’ English title for not conveying that aspect of it—it is, I would argue, a much less essential component of the series’ tone in the anime than it is in the novels—but boy, has it made us go to some extra lengths to make sure that the frequent (very frequent) title drops in the novels land with the weight that they’re supposed to!

Nozomi moves on to share a few tidbits that I’ll breeze over because he already discussed them in previous volumes’ afterwords, mostly revolving around the inspiration for the series on the whole (that being the question of “Who comes up with all those super cool power names that you see all the time in supernatural battle stories?”). He discusses how he focused on taking a tried-and-true light novel approach to the series’ early structure, centering each of the first four novels around one of the four main heroines, then how he jumped the rails and wrote whatever he felt like from volume 5 onward, to the point that before long, not even he knew whether he was writing a rom-com, a supernatural battle story, or a sekaikei story (sekaikei being a genre category used in Japanese fandom circles that’s way, way beyond the scope of a single parenthetical aside to properly define). He notes that when left to his own devices, it’s only a matter of time before any story he writes ends up veering into the realm of metafiction.

Next up, prompted by a viewer’s question, Nozomi explains that the Supernatural Battles anime adaptation was decided upon surprisingly early on in the series’ life span—as he remembers it, he was told about the adaptation somewhere in the vicinity of volume 3 or 4, though he also notes that he might be misremembering that. He carries on to explain that he debuted as a novelist while he was still in college, around the time he was twenty-one and searching for a job (a search he gave up on the instant he learned about his debut), and he attributes that early success entirely to luck.

He also talks about how he wasn’t super involved in the anime’s production. Apparently, there’s a widely held belief that when it comes to light novel adaptations, it’s best for the original author to be either deeply involved or totally uninvolved in the project, with problems tending to arise when authors just sort of half-heartedly participate in the process. Nozomi chose to go the entirely uninvolved route because he felt that rather than trying to make sure that the anime adaptation would be exactly as he envisioned it, it would be better to leave it to the pros and let them make the show into something that Nozomi could never have made on his own.

He goes on to tell an anecdote about a manga series called Maou: Juvenile Remix, which was a very loose adaptation of a novel called Grasshopper by one Isaka Koutarou. It was an adaptation that made the story its own in a big way, and in an interview, Isaka apparently once said that he was entirely uninvolved in the manga and was just enjoying it from the perspective of a fan. Nozomi thought that was a very cool stance to take, so he chose to emulate it when his own work was up for adaptation. He says he only went to one recording session—the first one—when he was specifically invited, and the only piece of input that he gave (when specifically asked) was to nitpick the intonation of “Route of Origin” (and he ultimately ended up regretting ever bringing it up).

Nozomi speculates that if he had chosen to be more involved in the anime, the legendary Hatoko scene might not have turned out the way it did. He expresses his gratitude for how closely that scene stuck to the original novel, and he marvels at the fact that, from what he was told after the fact, Hatoko’s voice actress Hayami Saori really did (as is often rumored) nail the speech in a single take. He notes that the speech scene was one that he’d planned since the very early stages of planning the series, and that he’d had it in mind even as he was writing volume 1. He believes the anime’s staff must have found it as important as he did, since they deliberately rearranged the chronology of the series to put it more toward the end of the season and make it into more of a climactic moment.

Next, he talks about the bonus stories that he wrote for the Blu-ray release of the anime, explaining how he really let himself run loose and write whatever he wanted in them, pulling out all the meta stops without really thinking too much about how it would all fit together since they weren’t technically part of the main series. That, as he explains, would have amusing consequences down the line, but I’ll just go ahead and breeze over that part since I’ll be discussing how that went down in more detail in next volume’s notes. He also mentions that there’s an expectation these days for authors to write at least three or four bonus stories for every volume of their series (as JNC readers in particular are probably well aware), and that in his case, going full meta with them felt like one of the only ways to make that many without inadvertently introducing plot elements that require you to read the bonus stories to understand the main series’ story.

As the livestream draws toward its end, Nozomi talks about how not even he has a clear idea about what genre Supernatural Battles really falls into, when all’s said and done. At the prompting of another viewer question, he talks about how he didn’t have the very ending of the series planned until right up to the last minute, but he does note that he’s happy with how the series’ ending turned out anyway. He feels it’s an ending that only a series like Supernatural Battles could have gotten away with—though, of course, it’ll be another three volumes before that comment gets put into context for all our English-language readers over here!

Finally, Nozomi talks about how he feels that Supernatural Battles was a series that he could only have written in his twenties, and he encourages any aspiring authors who might be listening to write something they could only write at the current moment as well. He says that technique, achievements, and experience all come in due time, and that although as you grow in those areas you’ll be able to write all sorts of stories that you couldn’t before, at the same time, you’ll lose the ability to write the sorts of stories that can only be written by the young and inexperienced. He notes that if technique and experience were all that mattered, the industry would be completely dominated by veteran authors, but in reality, that’s not the case at all. Plenty of total newcomers succeed, while some veterans end up writing series that just don’t catch on. He concludes by encouraging people to not think that they have to build up the skills and experience to write their masterpiece, but rather to do what they can to write their masterpiece in the current moment instead, whatever that happens to be.

Nozomi’s remaining thirteen livestreams don’t seem to be directly related to Supernatural Battles, but some of them do seem like they could potentially be interesting regardless—one of them, for instance, is about how he comes up with plots, and one is about a common pitfall that rom-com light novels tend to run into—so, depending on whether or not I come up with something better between now and volume 12, you may end up hearing more about this topic in a future TL notes section!

Before we move along, though, a lightning round of tidbits that I turned up on Kota Nozomi’s Twitter during my attempt at research! These were all fun facts that he tweeted out while the anime was airing. First up: in the initial plan for Supernatural Battles, the student council president who storms into the literary club’s room was going to be a guy! Nozomi expresses his profound relief that he ended up going with Kudou’s current character instead. Next (somewhat contradicting his claim about having been totally uninvolved in the anime beyond that one intonation comment), he notes he requested the opportunity to personally give the anime-original character Hagiura Naoe her name. Apparently, he disliked the idea of a character in his story having a name he didn’t come up with—which, given the importance ascribed to names in Supernatural Battles on the whole, completely scans in my mind.

He also talks about how episode 4 of the anime includes an anime-original scene that was actually based off a sequence that was cut from the original draft of volume 3! That volume went through some pretty heavy revisions before publication, it seems, and at least one of those cut scenes was worked into the episode (supposedly not at Nozomi’s request). Taking a look at the episode in question, I’m pretty sure that the scene he’s referring to is the one where Hatoko talks with Chifuyu as she helps sew up a ripped seam on Squirrely. I have to wonder how that sequence read when it was part of the novel’s original draft, and why it was cut. Finally, and on a related note, Nozomi shared a fun fact about Squirrely himself: he didn’t exist at all in the series’ original draft! It turns out that 029 independently decided to give Chifuyu a stuffed squirrel when they were coming up with her character design, and Nozomi thought the detail was so cute that he decided to make it canon and write it into the story itself.

And with that, I’m out of fun facts to share for the time being—which is good, because this section has run way longer than it was supposed to! Without further ado, let’s move right along to the pop culture notes!