Slayers - Volume 15 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translator/Editor Chat!

[Meg/ED]

Welp, here we are at the end—of part 2, at least. I want to go ahead and clear the air just in case anyone’s confused. This volume was the end of the Slayers novels proper when it was originally written, but fortunately for us, the author has since picked up the mainline story again. So we’ve got more ahead of us!

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, to give people an idea, since there’ll probably be a time dilation effect for any of our readers going from this volume to the more recently published volume 16... this volume came out in the year 2000. I don’t recall if I mentioned this back in my origin story in volume 1, but that means it’s older than my translation career.

[Meg/ED]

Likewise! And volume 16 didn’t come out until 2018, so Slayers fans spent nearly twenty years regarding this as the finale.

[Liz/TL]

That’s why, among other things, I expect we got the cameo from the two final generals as “receptionists” there at the end. Just a last little Easter egg to canonize those designs.

[Meg/ED]

I quite enjoyed that. It was also fun to see Xellos again. And Rubia!

[Liz/TL]

A final Xellos cameo didn’t surprise me too much. Rubia’s reappearance definitely did! That may be because her role is so diminished in the anime, but that’s all the more reason why it was nice to check back in on her here.

[Meg/ED]

It’s not a throwaway appearance either. She has one of the strongest lines in the book (that “never forget” number Lina harks back to in the final showdown with Luke). It’d be easy enough to reduce her role in this storyline to a reminder that Luke had other options, other ways to handle his loss, but I really enjoyed getting her take. She isn’t over what happened to her. She never really will be. It felt like a very frank and genuine look at what living with grief is like.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, and I really like that touch. I understand why the popular thing to do in movies and shows is, like, to have a grieving character give their life in a final moment of redemption or a final noble sacrifice and then find peace. It’s clean, it’s easy, it’s dramatically satisfying. But I treasure those moments in a narrative when we can see someone living with their grief or their guilt and having to work towards redemption or wholeness or just plain survival. And it foreshadows for Lina that after what happens in this volume, that’s what it’s going to be with her. Just surviving. Continuing to live each day. Thankfully she has Gourry with her.

[Meg/ED]

I hope their grape-tasting tour is phenomenal.

[Liz/TL]

Well, actually— No, I’m not going to spoil the mood with foreshadowing again! It was a nice ending for them, and ending what they thought would be the series on another will they/won’t they (you be the judge!) tease was another thing that felt appropriate.

[Meg/ED]

It’s also kind of a fun throwback. Lina considers paying Zephilia a visit all the way back in volume 2, and we’re finally getting back around to that.

[Liz/TL]

True. There’s a lot here that seems designed to come full-circle, especially if you consider volume 2 to be the “real” first volume, with volume 1 (the one written for the contest) being kind of a prologue. Of course, we do get that full-circle with volume 1 as well...

[Meg/ED]

Indeed. I’ve noticed a pattern to my comments on the part 2 volumes along the lines of, “Oh, wow, this sucks—but I totally should have seen it coming because of X, Y, or Z.” And there’s quite a lot of that going on here in the finale as well, but that’s not to say it was predictable. Far from it, actually. I think it was a thoughtful culmination to the buildup we’ve gotten...

Even if it still sucks!!! I didn’t want to lose Luke, but like Gourry says, who are we to argue with the decision he made for himself?

[Liz/TL]

I was about to say Luke’s the kind of “self-sacrifice to achieve redemption” character I was describing above, but when I think about it, he’s really not. He theoretically helps Lina defeat Shabranigdu, but you don’t really get a sense of tragic nobility from it the way you arguably do when Rezo does kind of the same thing.

But still, you get that sort of link between the two Shabranigdu pieces, that the Dark Lord could be defeated by a human because of decisions made by the human hosts—and whatever other flaws humans have, they are capable of resisting the urge to want to take the world down with them. That’s a trait we’re told demons are more or less incapable of by nature. And that gives a ray of hope to the world, that as challenging and painful as it may be, Ceifeed’s plan to purify Shabranigdu through human reincarnations was a wisely chosen one.

[Meg/ED]

It’s interesting to look at both incarnations side by side, and there’s a lot to read into in both cases. There is something of a resigned nobility to Rezo that we catch a brief glimpse of via his true voice toward the end. Luke, meanwhile, we know pretty well after all the time we’ve spent with him, and I gotta say... just reading the change in his voice was deeply unsettling.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, sometimes as translator I can get inside my own head with things and I sort of lose the experience of what a sequence feels like to a reader, but after you do your edits, I read through it again and it frequently feels very fresh. This time, the changes in voice between when he’s Luke and when he’s Shabranigdu were very striking and, quite frankly, upsetting to me.

We discussed this during the editing process, but in Japanese there’s a part deep in the fight sequence where he even switches briefly to the pronoun we typically translate as thee/thou in the spell chants and such. It might be implying he slips into chaos words? But it’s just one sentence, so we decided not to render it that way in English as we thought it might just be confusing to a casual reader. Hopefully the change in tone comes through regardless, but in case it ever becomes a plot point at a later date, now anybody reading this knows that he does that.

[Meg/ED]

To nerd out for a second, I actually had a lot of fun thinking about the timeline of the Slayers universe and how language has probably evolved in the time since the Incarnation War, much less since the legendary fight between Ceipheed and Shabranigdu.

[Liz/TL]

Would you believe— No, I refuse to spoil the mood with foreshadowing again! This is supposed to be a cut-off point! Although... stares blankly in the direction of volume 17

Anyway! Since I translated all these volumes ahead before coming back to clean up and pass the scripts on to you, I did enjoy going through the second time and picking up on all the bits and pieces of foreshadowing for Luke that actually exist in earlier volumes. There’s a lot of stuff that I sort of dismissed as “oh, he’s that kind of character” on a first pass that hits differently when you know where this is going, so I really do recommend anyone who didn’t know about the twist here to reread the arc and pick up on those pieces. Luke’s past as an assassin, his brushes with nihilism, his absurd spellcasting level, even the goofy bit about his natural hair color being red... oh, and of course the author’s afterword regarding the meaning of “Presages of Incarnation” a few books back.

[Meg/ED]

Pity those of us who thought Luke and Mileena were afterthoughts when they first showed up, huh?

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, I also recommend revisiting the storyline if you’re one of those people (like me!) who couldn’t initially get past thinking of them as Zelgadis/Amelia stand-ins on a first readthrough. Once you know where this is going, you know the storyline just wouldn’t make sense with them, and you can appreciate it on its own merits.

[Meg/ED]

We speculated a bit at the beginning of part 2 about what an anime adaptation would’ve been like, and I think we quickly came to the conclusion that it would have taken a lot—and I mean a lot—of gutting to shape it into an ultimately lighthearted romp. I want to double down on that now that we’ve seen the full arc, because you can’t take the hurt out of it. Pain, in all sorts of ways, is the centerpiece of part 2.

Luke tells us in his last words that he just couldn’t let go of his hate, but I think it’s so, so important that’s not where this story ends. There’s a quiet moment for Lina to reflect on what it means to keep going in life, and that only has gravitas because she’s looked tragedy square in the eye several times at this point. It’s a... grounded sort of hope, I suppose.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, and I think that’s where Rubia’s presence in the book is important once again. Earlier I said, “thankfully Lina has Gourry with her” to help her keep going, but I should amend that... because while it’s wonderful to have people in your life that help you ride through pain, a fact of life is that not everybody has that, and that’s okay too. Rubia’s on her own, but she’s surviving nevertheless. She’s living her life with her grief, and she’s going to keep on going, finding the small pleasures, making delicious tea, raising her plants, and enjoying her (apparently extremely exceptional) greenhouse.

[Meg/ED]

Ah, yes, the modern marvel of the greenhouse. What a hilarious thing to throw in this volume. It would’ve been comedy gold animated too.

[Liz/TL]

The complete surreality of that sequence in the middle of everything else that happens in this book just puts a smile on my face, thinking back on it. Never stop being you, Slayers novels!

[Meg/ED]

And as we carry these lessons into the future, I can’t wait to see what wonderful weirdness we happen upon next.

[Liz/TL]

Whatever it is, we’ll face it together, partner.