Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 12 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translation Notes: On Manga

My initial premise for this penultimate translation notes section was to go over all the little bits and pieces of material I’d thought up in the past that weren’t quite substantial enough to turn into a full essay. It was a good idea, in theory, and I decided to start out by writing about the Supernatural Battles manga adaptation, which I’d promised to cover all the way back in volume five and just never got around to...but by the time I’d finished writing about the manga, I realized that I’d already used up almost all the space that I had available for essay purposes.

Sooo, whoops! Guess we’re only talking about the manga this time! In my defense, we have almost eight pages’ worth of media references to go over after this, so space is kind of at a premium. Also, the Supernatural Battles manga really is deserving of a section devoted to it exclusively, since as it turns out, it actually kinda rules!

The Supernatural Battles manga was drawn by Kurose Kousuke (who would go on to draw the manga adaptation of Goblin Slayer, which is still running as of the writing of this section). It was four volumes long, with each volume covering the events of one of the first four volumes of the original light novels. It’s a very straightforward adaptation compared to the anime, as it doesn’t shuffle the order of events so heavily and it adapts a lot of the novels’ jokes in a much more direct fashion (volume four, for instance, commits to the The Heart gag so fully it not only dedicates a full page to the gag itself, it also does a 1:1 pastiche of the BLEACH page that led up to it).

The only point where the manga’s adaptation goes off the rails is in its final chapter, which features a manga-original ending that is both somewhat similar to and yet totally distinct from the anime’s original ending! It also features the one major point of timeline reorganization that the anime does: Tomoyo passing the writing contest’s first round and going to a café with Andou is relocated from midway through volume 3 to the end of volume 4.

The scene proceeds more or less exactly how it does in the novels until one of the café’s workers gives Tomoyo a strange pin shaped like an infinity sign. After that, things diverge! Instead of meeting Tamaki (who, tragically, is cut from this version of the story once again), Andou and Tomoyo find themselves trapped in an empty city, walking along a street that seems to be looping infinitely upon itself. They fail to find a way out, and Andou eventually realizes that the pin Tomoyo received must be the cause of the problem. The pin’s made of metal, however, and the two of them fail to find a way to break it, causing Andou to very nearly use Dark and Dark of the End to melt it...only for Tomoyo, who finds herself worried about how much Andou’s behavior resembles Kiryuu’s, to intervene and stop him.

The sequence ends in a manner that’s once again evocative of the anime: the mastermind behind the incident (who was also aided by information from Sagami) is confronted by Kiryuu, who deletes her with a black hole. Andou and Tomoyo find themselves waking up on a park bench (or rather, being woken up by Hitomi and Umeko) with no memory of what happened beyond a vague sense that they’d had a strange dream.

So, what is it that makes the manga so special? In short: its commitment to the bit. The art goes super friggin’ hard when it comes to how it depicts Andou’s chuuni fantasies. The chuuni-riffic light novel synopsis that Andou contributes to a story relay back in volume one, for instance, gets a full five pages dedicated to it, drawn to look like the exact sort of chuuni sci-fi that inspired the sequence in the first place. By the same token, the series knows when to get silly as well, often pivoting from perfectly deadpan depictions of chuuni excess to silly faces and ridiculous reactions on a dime. All together, it strikes an exquisite balance between portraying Andou how he thinks he looks and portraying Andou how he actually looks.

It’s very important to note that the Supernatural Battles manga started in 2013, over a year before the anime began airing, and ended in early 2015, just a couple months after the anime finished. In other words, if the manga’s depiction of the events of volumes one through four was influenced by the anime at all, it could only have happened toward the very end of its run, and even that seems pretty unlikely. On the flip side, it’s immediately clear that the anime wasn’t adapted from—or even inspired by—the manga, making this a relatively uncommon case in which a light novel got two very creative adaptations that played around with a lot of visual humor completely independently of each other.

Now, the bad news is that the Supernatural Battles manga has never been fully translated into English, and will almost certainly never be picked up officially (much to my dismay, since I really wanna work on it). The good news, however, is that since it adapts the novels so directly, having them available means that you more or less have a functional translation to follow along with on hand! Physical copies are neither expensive nor rare, if you’re at all acquainted with importing manga from Japan (I highly recommend Mandarake if you live in the United States), and the art alone is so well executed that I would definitely give it a solid recommendation to any fan of the series, translated or not.

And with that, it’s time to get to the references...or it would be, if it weren’t for the fact that there’s one other topic that I really do need to address in this section. In previous essays, I’ve speculated that there isn’t any Supernatural Battles bonus content remaining that I haven’t already discussed, and that the Blu-ray bonus stories that made up this volume were the only actual short stories that had been written. It is my profound displeasure to inform you that I was dead wrong.

There were bonus stories released as sales bonuses for earlier volumes, and there were probably quite a lot of them! The good news is that they seem to have been pretty insubstantial—I’ve managed to get my hands on about a half dozen of them, and topics range from “Andou tells Tomoyo about how he jumped into a conversation thinking it was about Jojo’s, only for it to have been about actual bands instead” to things like “Hatoko nitpicks a comedy show for a page straight,” “Chifuyu sleep talks her way through an extremely surreal dream,” and “Sayumi explains the concept of phantom vibration syndrome to Andou (who just thinks the name’s hella cool).” They’re all just two pages long and consist almost exclusively of dialogue, so you’re really not missing much by missing them.

Nevertheless, the fact that there is an indeterminable amount of written Supernatural Battles content out there that I will probably never get my hands on and will definitely never be allowed to translate is knowledge that will torture me till the end of my days. The light novel industry’s disrespect for media preservation is a curse, and we all suffer under its malevolent influence.

Anyway, let’s identify some media references!

Chapter 1

🜂 I’d wanted to be the one who chose which napkin to take and set the standard for the rest of the world.

We’re kicking things off right with a Jojo’s reference! This line is a shout-out to a famous and heavily memed speech by United States president Funny Valentine (no, really) in Jojo’s Part 7: Steel Ball Run. In short, Funny explains how the standards of society are set by single individuals through an extended, somewhat tortured metaphor: if society is a dining table, then the first person to choose whether to take the napkin on their right or their left would, in doing so, determine which napkin everyone else at the table must take in turn.

🜂 ...doubling down on the pressure like I was the protagonist of one of those games where you play as a huge creep who exploits women.

In the original version of this line, Andou directly refers to “kichiku games,” a subgenre of bishoujo game characterized by abusive protagonists and/or the torture and humiliation of their characters. The genre lacks a commonly used English name, leading to our choice to describe the games that fall into it rather than citing its less than accessible Japanese name.

🜂 The Solid Vision system then caused the card to materialize in physical form...in the fantasy that flashed through my mind’s eye, anyway.

The Solid Vision system is, of course, the holographic technology in Yu-Gi-Oh! that allows the card games to be portrayed in a much more visually interesting fashion! Whether or not Solid Vision holograms are, y’know, solid is generally somewhat less than clear.

🜂 I guess it was a little like how in the early stages of the manga, the game— Actually, y’know what? Forget I said anything.

The early instances of Duel Monsters in the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga are, to put it nicely, notoriously rules-light! To put it more bluntly, it’s pretty evident that the rules were made up as the story went along in much the same way that Andou and Tomoyo make up rules over the course of their own card game.

🜂 “SEKAI NO OW—”

Sekai no Owari is the name of an incredibly popular Japanese band! Their name really is written using the English alphabet, and they really do have a big enough fanbase to make Tomoyo’s panicked reaction come across as pretty reasonable.

🜂 “You’re saying it’s a God Card?!”

It probably goes without saying at this point that this is another Yu-Gi-Oh! shout-out! The God Cards are incredibly overpowered and plot-significant cards from the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga/anime that have indeed been printed as pack-ins for other products, which have never been legal to play in any format. That being said, there are versions of the god cards that are actually tournament legal, though they’re significantly toned down compared to their original versions.

🜂 Quit my-turn-never-ends-ing me!

One last Yu-Gi-Oh! gag for the road! We’ve been over this one before (several times, in fact) thanks to Hajime referencing it on a couple occasions, but for good measure, it’s a reference to an infamous scene from the anime in which Yami Yugi brutally overkills an opponent over the course of a single, comedically extended turn.

Chapter 2

🜂 I prided myself on having a nature as focused and aggressive as that of Andy, the right pectoral muscle...

Andy is a character—kind of—from Yowamushi Pedal, a bicycle racing manga by Watanabe Wataru! Andy is very literally the right pec of Izumida Touichiro, a muscle-obsessed bicyclist who, well, names and talks to his pecs. The left one is called Frank, by the way, making the pecs a shout-out to Andy and Fränk Schleck, a pair of real-world bicycle racers.

🜂 This, I figured, must have been how Yugi-boy felt when he realized that Pegasus was controlling him through subliminal messages.

And we’re right back to Yu-Gi-Oh! again! Yugi’s first encounter with Pegasus involves the two of them playing a card game, despite Pegasus only being present in the form of a prerecorded video tape. Eventually, Yugi realizes that the tape has frames spliced into it that have been planting subliminal messages into his mind, tricking him into playing particular cards without even realizing why.

🜂 Take a page out of Shenron’s book, Chifuyu!

Shenron, the wish-granting dragon summoned by the Dragon Balls, has a number of rules regarding the sort of wishes that he can grant! Some of the rules—like not being able to resurrect the same person more than once—are very specific, but the dragon also shoots down wishes on occasion for much less well-defined reasons, allowing what it can and cannot make happen to be more or less dictated by storytelling convenience.

🜂 I knelt on the ground, agonizing like Bank Director Ohwada trying to force himself to bow down to Hanzawa Naoki.

This one is a deep, deep cut by English-speaking standards, but ironically it’s probably one of the more accessible references from a mainstream Japanese perspective! Andou is referring to a scene from a TV drama called Hanzawa Naoki, which was record-breakingly popular when it first aired in Japan. The story revolves around the titular character as he works his way up the corporate ladder in the Japanese banking industry, and it deals with the toxicity and unethical dealings that are all too common in that business.

The scene that Andou is referring to occurs at the end of the first season, and it involves Ohwada—a bank director who set Hanzawa up as a scapegoat—losing a bet that he’d made with him. The stakes of that bet involved Ohwada bowing down to Hanzawa, which he does with great, great reluctance, physically straining against it every step of the way. Frankly, it’s kind of incredible how hard Ohwada’s actor sells the fact that this man does not want to be bowing down under any circumstances.

🜂 You just can’t use “world” in the name of a power that lets you stop time anymore.

...On account of The World, DIO’s time-stopping power from Jojo’s! It really is just that iconic.

🜂 In short: this is less of a dungeon crawl than it is one of those escape rooms that’ve been all the rage lately! Like, the really big ones that companies will rent out the Tokyo Dome to set up as promotional events.

Escape rooms really were all the rage in Japan when this volume came out, and they’re still a pretty big thing to this day! That being said, while the sort of small-scale, small-business escape rooms that can be found all over America are very much a thing in Japan, the ones that Andou is referring to here are (to the best of my knowledge) a pretty uniquely Japanese take on the concept.

In short, somewhere along the way, somebody came up with the idea of promoting media by setting up escape rooms themed around it. Popular manga getting escape room experiences was a pretty huge thing for quite some time, not to mention video game franchises—I myself got the chance to go through an escape room themed around Resident Evil 7 around the time it was released. They really do rent out the Tokyo Dome for them sometimes too! As recently as January 2024, an escape room themed around—incredibly—a radio comedy show was held there, and in December 2023, there was actually a Sekai no Owari-themed escape room at the Tokyo Dome, if you can believe it.

🜂 It was such a swarm of Bs that part of me wanted to ask if Chifuyu had awakened to some kind of insect-whispering power.

This is one of those gags that took quite a bit of localization to make work on a basic level! In Japanese, Chifuyu’s “puzzle” uses the Japanese character た, read “ta,” with the clue being a drawing of a tanuki (on account of the fact that “ta nuki” roughly translates to “without the tas”).

So, if there weren’t any Bs in the original text, what was the insect power line like? Simple: it was a Fist of the North Star reference. As in, Andou really does just say “What is this, Fist of the North Star?!” The joke is that Kenshiro, the protagonist of the series, shouts “Atatatatatatatata” when he unleashes a flurry of punches upon his foes. Considering both that using “ta” as is would have felt very unnatural in an English context and that Fist of the North Star is far less well-known outside of Japan and would have required a degree of explanation in its own right, we chose to spin Andou’s comment in a more generally chuuni direction and go with a version of the puzzle that would come across as the sort of thing that a very lazy person might actually make up in English.

🜂 Forget the Four Witches Technique—this would call for the Multi-Form Attack!

The Four Witches Technique and the Multi-Form Attack are both special moves used by Tien Shinhan in Dragon Ball! The former causes the user to sprout an extra pair of arms from their back, while the latter causes the user to split into four copies of themself.

🜂 Word was still out on whether it was wrong to pick up girls in a dungeon, but I could say with confidence that a dungeon without anyone to talk to was wrong in its own right.

This line is a very direct reference to Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, a light novel series by Oomori Fujino! A common struggle in translation, incidentally, is that it can be very difficult to pack all the nuance of a Japanese title into an English version that comes across as sufficiently, well, title-like. Sometimes there’s no choice but to read specificity into a title that was more broad or vague in the original Japanese, and sometimes that can cause issues when a nuance that had to be brushed past in the English title suddenly becomes important in the text of the series itself.

I’ve discussed how this phenomenon has caused issues with Supernatural Battles’ many title drops in previous TL notes sections, and Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? falls into a somewhat similar category, where the official English release chose—by necessity, I should note, as I very much do not intend this as criticism—to take the title in a specific direction where the Japanese version can be interpreted a little more broadly. Specifically, the verb translated as “to pick up” in the English title absolutely has that nuance in certain contexts, but can also simply mean “to meet” in others...which is unambiguously the context that Andou is using it in when he says “It is absolutely not wrong to want to meet people in a dungeon” in the Japanese version of this line. Having him say “It is absolutely not wrong to try to pick up girls in a dungeon” would have been wildly inappropriate, given the context of the scene, and so some adjustments had to be made in order to keep the reference intact. I have to say: this is the first time that I’ve struggled to translate a line in a novel on account of the official English title for a completely different series!

Chapter 3

🜂 I could muster neither an “Objection!” nor a “No! That’s wrong!”

Oh hey, we did these two back in volume 6! Just as a refresher: “Objection!” is in reference to the Ace Attorney franchise, while “No! That’s wrong!” is in reference to Danganronpa. Both are interjections that characters shout out during trials right before they pick holes in the opposing side’s argument.

🜂 I’d seen her reading books on business, history books, autobiographies of celebrities, manga by Tezuka Osamu...the list went on and on.

Tezuka Osamu was, without question, one of the most influential artists in the history of manga. Being the creator of Astro Boy, Black Jack, Phoenix, and countless other iconic series, his presence in the field really can’t be overstated. As such, when Andou says, “Sayumi reads Tezuka manga,” he’s more or less saying, “Sayumi reads legendary classics of the medium.” The fact that Tezuka’s works range from extremely serious historical dramas to extremely silly works of schlock fiction only reinforces Andou’s point that she reads a huge variety of books, as well.

🜂 Just on a gut level, ‘center’ seems the most promising...but no, we can’t! Hikaru no Go already has dibs on ‘center of heaven’!

Hikaru no Go is a manga written by Hotta Yumi and drawn by Obata Takeshi, and “center of heaven” is a real piece of Go terminology! The term is also sometimes rendered as “origin of heaven,” but we couldn’t bring up the word “origin” during the part of the chapter where Andou is trying to call it to mind.

Chapter 4

🜂 Like, it worked for Flazzard and Todoroki Shoto because they were all about having the opposing elements of fire and ice packed into one person.

Todoroki Shoto, a character from Horikoshi Kohei’s My Hero Academia who has the power to create fire and ice, is probably already known to most of our readers. Flazzard, on the other hand, is significantly more obscure in the English-speaking anime and manga fandom! He’s an antagonist from Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai, a manga spinoff of the Dragon Quest video game franchise written by Sanjo Riku and drawn by Inada Koji that’s only had a fifth of its volumes published in English to date (despite being one of the best-selling manga of all time thanks to its popularity in Japan). Flazzard’s design and power set are remarkably similar to Todoroki’s, with the right side of his body being ice-themed and the left side fire-themed, though unlike Todoroki, his appearance is overtly monstrous.

🜂 Sure, I might’ve made like the mothers of the protagonists in a certain basketball manga and a certain other sumo manga, apologizing to my flame for not having been able to make it hotter, but that didn’t mean it’d bothered me at all!

The two manga in question are Hinata Takeshi’s Ahiru no Sora and Kawada’s Hinomaru Sumo! Both feature short protagonists who are put at a disadvantage in their chosen sports thanks to their stature, and both really do feature scenes where their mothers apologize for the fact that they didn’t end up taller.

🜂 There’s a certain well-known anime quote turned internet meme that goes “Even an idiot can write a masterpiece novel if they spend twenty years working on it,” but was that really true?

The quote in question comes from a character named Straight Cougar—no, really—from s-CRY-ed, an anime produced by studio Sunrise! When not busy pontificating on the nature of speed and having one of the most incredible names of all time, Straight Cougar can be found using his super power, Radical Good Speed—again, really—to turn cars into much faster cars. It’s really no wonder that this guy ended up getting memed by the Japanese internet, frankly.

🜂 The best thing about words written in the English alphabet is that they can end up looking super friggin’ cool when you turn them into acronyms. Take D4C, for instance, or IWGP.

D4C stands for “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” which is both an AC/DC song as well as a Stand in Jojo’s Part 7 (which has yet to be released in English as of this writing, hence the Stand’s current lack of an established official, copyright-safe English name). IWGP, meanwhile, is short for Ikebukuro West Gate Park, which is both an actual landmark in real-world Ikebukuro as well as the name of a series of mystery novels which were adapted into an extremely popular TV drama (and a generally less impactful anime some twenty years later).

🜂 Next thing you know, Hatoko would be telling me I nicknamed her Jugemu Jugemu.

“Jugemu Jugemu” is the beginning of a comically long name that plays a central role in a rakugo story called, well, “Jugemu.” The story bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the picture book Tikki Tikki Tembo (I’m convinced it must have been the inspiration thereof, but I can’t find any solid evidence to back that claim up), though our readers are probably more likely to be familiar with it from a certain Fullmetal Alchemist gag or the ending song of Joshiraku.

🜂 Like, she was a fan of this one show that had comedians try to make a particular member of a live audience laugh...

In the original text, Andou refers to the show in question by name rather than describing it! The show is called Iromonea, and it’s a comedy game show in which contestants have to make five randomly chosen audience members laugh in sequence within a time limit, with a prize of a million yen on the line. It’s another of those cultural touchstones that a Japanese reader would know instantly, but which never established any sort of presence outside of the country.

🜂 It’s-a-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go-go! Whoa-whoa! Whoa-whoa!

As Andou alludes to later on in the chapter, these are the lyrics—if you can really call them that—to the entrance music for contestants in the M-1 Grand Prix! You can listen to it yourself by running a search for “M-1グランプリ 登場曲” on Youtube, if you’re curious.

Chapter 5

🜂 ...a blinding effulgence would herald its metamorphosis into a legendary sword known as ‘Á Bao A Qu, the tower’s blade of certain victory.’

Á Bao A Qu is either a legendary creature that watches over an equally legendary tower or a space station in Mobile Suit Gundam! It seems safe to say that the Gundam station was named after the creature, so the point’s a little moot, but it’s equally easy for me to imagine Hajime having pulled the name from either source.

🜂 Gevanni duplicated it overnight...not.

This line—the “not” aside—was lifted from one of Death Note’s final chapters! In that instance, of course, the notebook being duplicated overnight was significantly more important than Hajime’s personal cringe compilation. It’s also worth noting that this line, like so many, has turned into something of a meme on the Japanese internet.

Chapter 6

🜂 In Prince of Tennis terms, I felt like I’d just gone up against Ibu Shinji and Captain Yukimura, one after the other.

Ibu Shinji and Seiichi Yukimura are both Prince of Tennis characters (surprise surprise) whose opponents end up injured or debilitated over the course of the series, with one of Ibu’s moves causing his opponent to suffer an eye injury and Yukimura’s playstyle straight up giving his opponent a case of the yips (which is almost certainly where Andou learned that word).

🜂 We’re basically standing in a blank canvas! It’s like we’re in BLEACH!

BLEACH is somewhat notorious for the fact that its backgrounds often, well, aren’t! Tite Kubo makes use of pure white backgrounds and featureless voids so often that he and his series have become rather notorious for it. This is, incidentally, a rare instance in which both the Japanese and English-speaking fandoms picked the same aspect of a series to meme about.

🜂 Only when the power name ends up getting used as a code name for someone, like Weather Report or Accelerator!

Accelerator is the name of an antagonist turned supporting character from Kamachi Kazuma’s light novel series A Certain Magical Index, while Weather Report is a character from Jojo’s Part 6! Both characters are, as Andou describes, named after their own powers, and while Weather Report’s birth name is eventually revealed, Accelerator’s has never been explicitly stated.

🜂 Quite—a pen name of much the same kind as Ashirogi Muto.

Ashirogi Muto is the pen name taken on by the protagonists of Bakuman., who form a two-person manga team that is indeed somewhat similar to how Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee wrote as Ellery Queen!

🜂 Do your delayed comebacks get passed down through the generations like the Spirit Wave Style or One For All?!

The Spirit Wave Style is a technique from Yu Yu Hakusho that gets passed down through the generations and is eventually inherited by the series protagonist! One For All, from My Hero Academia, is also passed down from generation to generation, but it’s a full-blown superpower (or Quirk, to use the series’s terminology) rather than a technique.

🜂 Characters who are all about calling out other characters’ nonsense are a big thing, sure, but the only time I’ve ever seen a character who’s specifically known for playing along before firing off a delayed comeback was in Psycho Logical.

Psycho Logical is part of Zaregoto, a series of novels by Nisio Isin! It does indeed feature a character named Oogaki Shito who is known for the extremely specific form of comedic quip that Hatoko named herself after.

Side Story: Umeko’s Fate

🜂 Or maybe I should’ve just straight up ripped off Hiruma and said ‘I’d do everything I possibly could to stop the world from ending’ after all...?

The Hiruma in question in this line is Hiruma Yoichi, a character from Eyeshield 21, an American football manga written by Inagaki Riichiro and illustrated by Murata Yusuke! The line Andou’s quoting seems to have come from a Q and A section with the series’ various characters, and amusingly, Andou very slightly misquotes it (though in a way that doesn’t have any real impact on the line’s overall meaning).

Afterword

🜂 There are a few gags that were subtly altered to work better in the novel format, but I didn’t make any truly major revisions.

This is, in fact, true! Or at least, I have confirmed one instance where the novel-form version of a story had a definite addition relative to the original bonus booklet release. I didn’t have time to read through all of the booklets I’ve gotten my hands on in their entirety, but I did check out a few passages I had suspicions about and managed to track one clear alteration down. Specifically, the section of Tomoyo’s story in which Tomoyo calls Andou out on the fact that bonus stories often get compiled and released as full volumes—from “just because it’s a bonus story...” to “...okay again, you know?”—was, hilariously, added into the full volume version. I would bet money that the line where Andou promises to petition the illustrators to draw his accidental chest-grope with Hatoko was a novel-edition original as well, but I unfortunately haven’t been able to acquire a copy of Hatoko’s bonus booklet (those things are really hard to get ahold of these days) and couldn’t confirm it for sure.

And, that’s (finally) it for the references this time! See you in the final volume!

-Tristan Hill