Chapter 6
? But I didn’t refuse.
This is an easy one, thank goodness—Hajime is playing off a famous JoJo quote, “But I refuse,” which was said by Kishibe Rohan in Part 4. This is one of the absolute most famous JoJo memes in the Japanese fandom, and if you watch enough anime, you’re sure to eventually see it get referenced in some capacity.
? In the Divine Comedy, Dante claimed that flame burns upward in an effort to climb back to the heavens from whence it came.
While I wasn’t able to pin down any precise, specific passage from The Divine Comedy that Kiryuu’s alluding to in this line, the general concept does mesh pretty well with Dante’s portrayal of cosmology—particularly in Paradiso, which describes a sphere of fire in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, separating it from the spheres of Heaven. The really fun part, though, is that Kiryuu is once again pulling his high-brow literary quotations directly off of Japanese Wikipedia.
What makes this especially funny is that it took me a little while to realize that fact, on account of the quote being very slightly altered: Kiryuu uses 炎 as his kanji for fire, whereas Wikipedia uses the more archaic 焔. This is hysterical because 焔 is a kanji that Andou makes heavy use of (including in the kanji name for Dark and Dark), and I would speculate that the change was made specifically because having Kiryuu invoke the character would feel like having him step into Andou’s chuuni turf. While other volumes in the series use 焔 (or its alternate form 焰, which is used kinda interchangeably with it) to describe fire all over the place, volume 5 uses it precisely once, that being the moment that Kiryuu says the words Dark and Dark.
? If he’d told me he’d pulled a “this is the taste of someone who’s lying” on it...
And, we’re back to JoJo again. This quote refers to a moment in Part 5 where a character named Bruno Bucciarati licks the part’s protagonist’s face and declares that he can taste his lies. In other words, this is a very nerdy way of saying “if he’d told me he’d licked it.”
? His power, apparently, had allowed him to change the shape and structure of metal, State-Alchemist-style.
This one’s a very straightforward reference to the manner in which the alchemists in Fullmetal Alchemist can manipulate the physical structure of objects, leading to some very creative and elaborate transformation-based fight sequences.
That’s all the high-octane nerdery we have for you this time around! Thanks for reading, as always, and I hope to see you again in volume 6 (where Andou will be back at the wheel and the geek jokes will once again be turned up to eleven)!
-Tristan Hill
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