Chapter 1:
? I was buying an eroge this time.
“Eroge” is a piece of Japanese slang that’s been fairly widely adopted by the English fanbase for the works it refers to! They are, simply put, pornographic video games. Most often (but not exclusively) the term refers to visual novels, which is another term that’s somewhat disputed. Broadly speaking, visual novels are games with an unusually high amount of story and an unusually small amount of gameplay. In any case, we made the call to keep the term as-is, largely because even if Sagami were a native English speaker, he would absolutely still be the sort of person to lean into niche jargon and call them eroge.
As a side note, an interesting tidbit about this line is that in the anime adaptation of this scene, Sagami claims to have bought a “galge” instead (galge being a term for the same general sort of game, only without the explicitly pornographic connotations). This is just one of many tweaks the adaptation made to the little particulars of the story, which I’ll probably be writing about in more detail in a later TL note section!
? ...he’d raise his hands in the air, shout “People of Earth! Let me give you my hottie energy!” and pull a reverse Spirit Bomb...
This is a reference to the final, climactic fight in the original run of Dragon Ball. The Spirit Bomb is a technique that lets the user gather up the energy of other people to use in a single, massive attack, and the final blow of that final fight is struck with an enormous Spirit Bomb powered by all the people of the Earth at once.
? I’m nothing like that moé-swilling, waifu-wrangling creeper!
“Moé” is a slang term that originated in Japan and made its way into popular use among the English-speaking anime fandom at some point in the late 2000s/early 2010s. The term is notoriously hard to pin down in much the same way as chuuni, but digging into the particulars would be way too ambitious a topic for a single TL note, so I’ll narrow things down to just the most relevant info: in the context Andou is using it here, moé refers to both a character archetype and a genre of media.
The character archetype is probably best described as a sort of complicated form of cuteness. It’s really broad, and characters that aren’t cute in any sort of traditional sense can still be described as moé under the right circumstances, but the sort of moé characters that Sagami is into are almost certainly the sort of characters that populate the casts of eroge (see the first note for this chapter) and slice-of-life anime focusing on exclusively female casts.
That brings us to the genre side of the equation, moé anime! Moé shows are usually slice-of-life adjacent, usually star a cast of exclusively female and predominantly young characters, and tend to focus more on the characters being cute than on any sort of plot progression. The moé genre experienced a massive surge of popularity around the time the term made its way overseas, thanks in no small part to a sequence of mega-popular, moé-heavy anime by Kyoto Animation (K-On being a genre-defining example). Having come out in 2012, this particular volume was released pretty much right at the height of the moé boom, and Sagami being into the genre is entirely unsurprising.
? You’d best watch yourself, Andou, or I’ll Pretty your Cure!
Pretty Cure is a long-running and extremely popular series of magical girl anime. The franchise has a lot of similarities to the Kamen Rider and Super Sentai franchises we discussed last volume, actually—each season is a year long and features an entirely new story with a totally new cast of characters that transform into super-forms to fight monsters.
Though ostensibly targeted toward young girls, Pretty Cure (or Precure, as it’s known to its fans) has a massive fanbase of older viewers, many of whom are male. Sagami being into the show definitely tells us something about him, but it’s more of a “he’s this specific sort of nerd” revelation than anything else. “Male Precure fan” isn’t necessarily a negative archetype in and of itself, although as we’ll see later on in this volume, there are caveats to that claim.
? ...Kiva had this ridiculously cool super-kick called the Darkness Moon Break...
This attack’s name is hilariously edgy for a reason: Kamen Rider Kiva’s theme was horror, and vampires in particular. “Kiva” itself is a somewhat strained pun—it’s both a play on the Japanese word for “fang” and also an abbreviation of, and I’m quoting this directly, “King of Vampire.”
? So, I’ve been thinking it’s about time I take up this wooden sword with ‘Lake Toya’ written on it and learn a special move of my own.
This line plays into and expands upon Andou’s Gintama reference in his previous line! To make a very long story short, Gintama is an extremely long-running action/gag manga with an unusually anarchic sense of humor. The main character, Gintoki, uses a wooden sword with the words “Lake Toya” written on it as his weapon of choice, and a running gag in the series involves a spirit that possesses said sword attempting to force Gintoki to learn a fighting game-style special move.
? If you parody people, they’ll parody you back.
This is very close to a line from Shaman King—“If you hurt people, they’ll hurt you back,” in the original.
? Just like a certain Bankai that had an effective range of up to thirteen kilometers...
This is in reference to Gen Ichimaru’s Bankai, specifically (Bankai being the magic sword superpowers from Bleach).
? I’d put on an act so terrifying nobody would dare to approach me, no matter how badly they wanted to kick my ass!
Yup, it’s another JoJo reference! This one’s a little different, though, in that it’s actually an adapted JoJo reference. In the original text, Andou actually quotes Polnareff—a character from JoJo Part 3—as he describes DIO’s power to stop time. The quote in question has become a meme among the Japanese JoJo fandom, but the English-speaking fandom didn’t make much of anything of the scene at all.
As such, a direct translation would’ve lost the “Andou is being a memelord” aspect of the exchange, and we decided that subbing in a JoJo meme that’s still appropriate to the situation which our readers would be more likely to understand was the way to go. Under those conditions, DIO’s “Oh? You’re approaching me?” seemed to be the perfect fit!
? Now I know how it feels to be the one member of your crew who actually bothers working out...
Andou is most likely referring to Roronoa Zoro, a swordsman from One Piece who takes working out to comical extremes (and is, as Andou notes, the only member of his pirate crew who really ever works out at all).
? Oh, that was a From the Northern Country reference, wasn’t it?
From the Northern Country (or Kita no Kuni Kara) was a Japanese TV drama that aired primarily in the early 1980s. The show revolves around a man who moves from Tokyo to his home prefecture of Hokkaido with his two children following a nasty divorce. The show is reportedly quite the tearjerker, and the scene Andou inadvertently half quotes involves the main character snapping at a waitress in a ramen restaurant (“The kid hasn’t finished eating yet!”) and knocking a bowl out of her hands.
Although this is an incredibly obscure piece of media by the standards of anyone outside of Japan, hilariously, it might very well be one of the most accessible references in the book for the average Japanese person. This is very much mainstream pop culture rather than otaku niche pop culture, which would explain why Sayumi of all people was the one to call out Andou’s non-quote.
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