Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 2 - Chapter SS5

Chapter 4

? Gear...Two!

This, and the pose that Andou references a line later, are both references to a famous moment in One Piece where the main character, Luffy, unveils a powerful new technique.

? Our friggin’ floor knows how to use its Haki!

Another One Piece reference! Haki is a power in that series that, among other things, is the only consistent means of harming people who have eaten Devil Fruits (one of which gave Luffy his rubber powers).

? Hatoko’s a great card! You don’t even have to Tribute any other monsters to summon her.

Machi’s specifically treating Hatoko like a Yu-Gi-Oh card in this line. In Yu-Gi-Oh, higher-level monsters require you to sacrifice one or more monsters to summon them—hence Andou’s retort about her treating Hatoko like a weakling.

? We’ll simply think up stories on the fly to pass the time, like indolent nobles in the Heian era.”

The Heian era was a period of Japanese history lasting from the late eighth century to the late twelfth century. It’s notable for having been an exceptionally active era for the arts, and it was fairly common for the upper classes to engage in the sort of word games that Sayumi’s alluding to. Poetry was especially prominent in those gatherings, and some of the poems that were written at them are still read and studied to this day.

? Or a fork...but I guess that one’s hero-on-heroine violence, so it’s sorta different.

Andou’s referencing a light novel series called Nyaruko: Crawling with Love in this line. The series, written by Aisora Manta, is an over-the-top parody of the works of H.P. Lovecraft in which all the eldritch abominations from Lovecraft’s stories are portrayed as cute anime waifus who constantly harass the main character. A running gag involves said main character punishing them by sticking them with a fork—hence Andou’s line.

? It’s been a prominent technique as far back as City Hunter.

City Hunter is a classic Jump manga by Hojo Tsukasa that dates back to 1985. The series stars Saeba Ryo, a skilled gunman who works as a sort of mercenary in Tokyo, and Makimura Kaori, the sister of Ryo’s late partner (who was murdered near the beginning of the series). As far as this reference goes, the series’ most noteworthy trait is the running gag of Kaori pulling comically enormous hammers out of nowhere to bludgeon Ryo with whenever he does something perverted. It is, in fact, one of the earliest instances of hammerspace being used as a running gag in the manga world! I can’t say with confidence that it’s the origin of the trope in Japanese media, but there’s no denying that its use was incredibly influential.

? ...or stories with characters who aren’t even human but have powers with names in Spanish or Italian...

While Andou’s first point about people speaking Japanese in other worlds but having English titles is applicable to so many series it’s impossible to pin down any single specific title, the inclusion of Spanish in this line feels pretty targeted at Bleach in specific. The series was well known for pulling the names of its powers from a variety of languages, with Spanish being a clear favorite of the author’s. We’ve actually already seen an example of this in this very volume—see the reference to a power called Pesquisa back in chapter two.

? Is it supposed to be the Gurongi language? Or maybe they’re just mumbling through their lines like the lead actor in Kamen Rider: Blade? Come on, people, we speak Rinto here!

Okay, this is a pretty elaborate one. Andou is referencing two distinct Kamen Rider series—Kamen Rider Kuuga and Kamen Rider Blade—and two distinct Japanese internet memes that revolve around the Kamen Rider franchise.

First off, the references: the Gurongi language is a fictional language spoken by the monsters that serve as Kuuga’s villains. The series took the somewhat cheeky move of having its villains discuss late-game plot elements and twists in that fictional language very early on in the series, trusting that nobody would be able to decipher it until all the reveals had already happened.

The next reference, on the other hand, is also the first of our two internet memes: the “fictional language” spoken by the main character of Kamen Rider Blade. If we’d translated Andou’s second sentence in this block literally, it would’ve come out as simply “Or maybe it’s Ondouru?” This, of course, would have been completely incomprehensible to English readers—not only is “Ondouru” not a commonly known aspect of the series, even among English-speaking Kamen Rider fans, it’s not actually a real aspect of the series at all!

“Ondouru,” as it turns out, is an in-joke within the Japanese Blade fandom. The actor who portrayed the main character in the series was somewhat notorious for his questionable enunciation, and the fandom eventually started acting as if he was speaking an entirely different language. The name “Ondouru” came from a particularly infamous and incomprehensible line of his in an early episode. None of this information is readily available in English online, so not only is it a Kamen Rider deep cut, it’s one that’s impossible to look up without a functional grasp of Japanese. As such, we decided to support the joke with an explanation rather than leave it as is.

Finally, “we speak Rinto here” takes the sequence all the way back to Kuuga again. In Kuuga’s backstory, the Rinto people are an ancient ancestor to humanity who were almost wiped out by the Gurongi. “We speak Rinto here” is a line from the series that Japanese fans ended up using to mean something along the lines of a sarcastic “Say that again, but in English this time.” Unlike Ondouru, the whole Rinto backstory is a known factor to the English Kamen Rider fandom, so we decided to leave it unaltered as a nod to how obsessively detailed Andou’s Kamen Rider deep cuts can get.

? As for my story’s theme...I chose ‘Dazai Osamu’!

Dazai Osamu was an author who lived in the mid-twentieth century. Though not incredibly well-known in the English-speaking world, his works are extremely famous and oft read in Japan. By global standards, No Longer Human is probably his most famous story.

? Y’know how you sometimes see characters in original fiction who are supposed to be the descendants of other people’s famous characters, like Sherlock Holmes or Arsène Lupin?

Trivia time: the original Arsène Lupin stories actually fell victim to copyright issues on account of featuring Sherlock Holmes himself in a cameo appearance! Unfortunately for Maurice Leblanc, he and Arthur Conan Doyle were contemporaries, and Doyle took the appropriation of his most famous character rather poorly. Leblanc’s solution, hysterically, was to continue featuring a suspiciously familiar private detective in his Arsène stories by the name of “Herlock Sholmes.” In short: the hilarity of copyright technicalities hasn’t changed in well over a century, at the absolute least.

? More like watching you from the afterlife and muttering ‘his has been a life of much shame’!

In this line, Tomoyo is quoting a very slightly adapted version of the first line of No Longer Human.

? The most repulsive form of chuuni is to force innocent people who don’t know better to read your cringey backstories, and to use others merely for your own satisfaction!

Tomoyo’s loosely quoting Bruno Bucciarati, a character from JoJo Part 5. The original line occurs after Bucciarati realizes the depths of the part’s primary villain’s depravity (though of course when he says it, he talks about the villain’s evil rather than his chuuni).