[Kamen Rider Die]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zatyme

Ruytaros is more of a clingy younger brother who wants to be told good job while getting head pats than a simp.

Ryutaros is forming a parasocial bond with a woman who literally doesn't know he exists. He is basing his morality around what she'd think of him, and she does not think of him. I think he might actually be worse than the Airimirers? At least Airi's aware of those dudes!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

...And say goodbye to Yonemura for a bit! I don't know what the heck got into Kobayashi that particular year, but she wrote the entire rest of Den-O on TV herself, and most of the movies, which is pretty crazy even by her standards. She usually writes the majority of her shows anyway, but between the measly four episodes not by her, and the fact that she apparently still felt the need to personally punch up the dialogue on them, I get the feeling she really liked working on Den-O in particular? Seems like a particularly fun bunch of characters to write, to be fair!

Yeah, and it's so tricky to get the balance right (Yonemura's two stories definitely hit the opposing ends of the spectrum) that I can see her wanting to take more control just to make sure that no one botches it. If you've got to rewrite the dialogue, you might as well write the plot, too!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Sandwich

16 is definitely a high note for Yonemura to leave on for now, though. I don't have much to say about it that I didn't say about the first part (this is peak raw comedy Den-O), but this is another one with a tricky title that I'm going to do a terrible job trying to explain, so this should be... fun!?

The joke is that both halves are actually pronounced completely identically, with the title in Japanese being "Koufuku no Hoshi, Koufuku no Hoshi".

There are two totally separate words in Japanese pronounced koufuku, one (降伏) which means "surrender", and one (幸福) which very broadly means "happiness", but "lucky" fits the context here better and even lets the translated title preserve a bit of the gag through alliteration. Japanese is kinda infamous for having loads of homophones like this – if you remember the whole "I'm glad to die" line from the penultimate episode of Kabuto, that was actually a translation error caused by somebody getting these exact words mixed up! I just didn't have the heart to tell you at the time because it made for such a good screencap.

Hoshi is the part where they're pretty much cheating though? It means "star" (星), while "lawbreaker" (犯人) is ordinarily hannin. This is the kind of thing Sunred or someone could probably explain WAY better, but basically there's this thing called furigana, where phonetic kana characters are placed above kanji to tell the reader how they're supposed to be pronounced. This is most commonly used in books for children, who won't be familiar with how to correctly read a huge variety of kanji, but cheeky writers and lyricists and such love to use it to specify a thing is deliberately read incorrectly for any number of artistic reasons. This isn't the last time Den-O will do this, either.

I thought I saw Translation Cop hanging around in the flash mob that danced away from the bathhouse! Happy to see that exemplar of explainers back on the beat.