Chapter 3:
? What are you, a second-generation Pokémon protagonist?
In second-generation Pokémon games (that is, Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal), the player character whites out when all their Pokémon fall unconscious. Contrast with the first-gen games, in which you black out instead.
? As best as I could tell, she was aiming to sound like some kind of gangster.
The entire sequence revolving around Chifuyu’s not-so-successful attempt at putting on a silly accent took some pretty heavy tweaking to make the joke land in English! In Japanese, Chifuyu is not just cycling through accents with genre-fiction connotations, she’s also going through hyperspecific regional accents associated with particular regions of Japan, with the punchline being that Andou can only identify them thanks to having heard them in a specific anime (Sgt. Frog).
The thing is, that joke only lands if the accents themselves are identifiable and if the reader is aware of all the different regional accents that the characters from Sgt. Frog speak with. Lacking that context, the scene comes across as “Chifuyu does an ambiguous accent, then Andou turns around and explains to the reader what part of Japan the accent is supposed to represent.” In short, all humor is lost. Since the core of the joke is “Chifuyu does accents poorly and Andou relates them to media he knows,” tweaking the sources of the accents themselves seemed like an appropriate measure to take!
? Hunter takes manga and movie titles, barely changes them, and puts them in as power names all the time.
Like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Hunter x Hunter is indeed full of this stuff. Examples include superpowers with names that can be read as “Jailhouse Rock” (an Elvis song) and “Shotgun Blues” (A Guns N’ Roses song).
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