Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 10 - Chapter SS3

Chapter 1

? When do I get to abandon subtlety and walk around with silver chains wrapped around my arms like a real ancient Egyptian pharaoh...?

In this line, Andou’s half quoting an exchange between Yugi and the Pharaoh in Yu-Gi-Oh!, in which the latter critiques the former’s fashion sense before an outing! The exchange, and the bit that Andou is quoting in particular, seems to have ended up becoming something of a low-key internet meme among the series’s Japanese fanbase. If you’re familiar with Yu-Gi-Oh! from the English dub of the anime and none of this sounds familiar, by the way, that would be because the entire exchange was rewritten from the ground up—this conversation just never happens in that version.

? ...plus Kudou acting as our silver or gold ranger, to put it in Sentai terms.

A typical Super Sentai series opens with five rangers on the team! Red, blue, pink, yellow, and green was the color lineup in the very first Super Sentai series, and that’s arguably the traditional distribution, but black, white, purple, and a few other colors have been featured in various core lineups as well.

Silver and gold rangers, meanwhile, traditionally play a different role: they’re added to the team partway through the series, and they’re often differentiated from the original members with a distinctive visual design. This general archetype is often referred to as “the sixth ranger,” though confusingly enough, sixth rangers aren’t necessarily the actual sixth member of any given Sentai team—take, for instance, Uchu Sentai Kyuranger, which features both the only silver in Sentai history to not be a late addition to the team, as well as a sixth ranger who’s actually the twelfth member to join.

? ...WRYYYYYYYYY!

This is obviously a JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure reference, and we’ve been over Dio’s signature shout at least once in one of these note sections before, so I won’t belabor that point! I’m actually only including it in this notes section because in the original Japanese text of this novel, the noise was written as “URYYYYYYYYYY,” English alphabet and all, which I for one find extremely funny and wanted to share.

? I’d seriously considered trying to pull off the Freak Quick Attack for a moment, but I’d ended up scuttling that idea after I realized how scary it would be to jump for a spike with my eyes closed in real life.

The Freak Quick Attack is the signature volleyball move of two of Haikyu!!’s main characters! It involves one of said characters, an incredibly accurate setter, setting the ball to the other, who jumps for a spike before the ball has even been set and swings for it with his eyes closed, resulting in a freakishly fast and almost unreadable spike. As Andou realizes, this would definitely be a terrible idea to try in real life!

? This is what people mean when they talk about the view from the summit!

And we’re following that last note up immediately with another Haikyu!! reference! “The view from the summit” is both a quote, an episode/volume title, and a core concept from the series that gets called back to regularly.

? If this were one of the more recent Tales games, this would be the bit where we got a super cool cut-in animation!

Given that this volume came out in March of 2015, the most recent Tales of game at the time would have been Zestiria—though considering that game came out just two months before this volume’s publication, it seems much more likely that Andou’s talking about the Tales of Xillia duology, which does indeed feature cool little cut-in animations when characters use special combo attacks.

? ...she could hit a Tezuka Phantom no matter what sport she was playing...

The Tezuka Phantom is a move from Prince of Tennis, used by Tezuka Kunimitsu and associated with the Tezuka Zone, which Andou just barely avoided referencing back during volume 3’s tennis sequence. It, like Crimson Dread, involves manipulating an opponent’s shot to force the ball out of bounds.

? ...there’s always that small part of you that wonders ‘Why doesn’t he open with the Spacium Beam?’ or ‘Why doesn’t he just use the Spirit Bomb at the start of the fight?’...

Dragon Ball’s Spirit Bomb is almost certainly known to most of our readers, but the Spacium Beam is quite a bit more obscure from an English-speaking perspective! Not so for the Japanese audience, though, since it’s one of the signature moves of the original Ultraman, an incredibly popular tokusatsu superhero. When I say “incredibly popular,” I really do mean it—the pop-culture significance of Ultraman as a franchise cannot be overstated, and in a Japanese context, the Spacium Beam isn’t overshadowed by the Spirit Bomb in any sense of the phrase.

? ...the eyes of a girl who was, at most, a single step away from succumbing to the Dark Side.

Although it may be one step removed from the source material in the sense that the Japanese internet has co-opted the English words “dark side” in a somewhat memetic manner, I am nonetheless pleased to report that, at least in terms of the phrase’s origins, this is, in fact, a Star Wars reference.