If you’re curious about just what the joke is this time, don’t bother downloading it. Despite being 170 MB, it’s roughly two minutes long, and pretty much just consists of screenshots of their feedback Inbox filled with whining about the release of episode 109 being late, followed by the announcement that because of this there will be no release of Bleach 109.

Past experience suggests that the episode nonetheless will be out before Bleach 110 airs, quite likely sometime tomorrow.

UPDATE: The more I think of it, the more likely it seems that the puzzling actual release of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl Episode 1 was intended, in combination with a known-in-advance delay in getting out Bleach 109, precisely to prompt all the “why are you wasting time subbing Pokemon when BLEACH IS LATE?” whines so they could do this.

Of course, it’s always possible that they are for once serious and won’t release Bleach 109 and that they will continue to release episodes of Pokemon, making me look like an idiot, but I’m used to that.

UPDATE 2: That was faster than I expected. Only four hours after posting the troll, Bleach 109 has appeared on Dattebayo’s tracker. Of course, knowing Dattebayo it could be part of an even more elaborate troll, but I won’t know about that until tomorrow.

So, Bleach’s first filler arc has come to a close. There’s not going to be a whole ton of screencaps or a detailed episode summary here. Even if I wasn’t too lazy to do that and if I was doing this post immediately after watching the episode, Random Curiosity would have already done it first and better. Instead, you get random nitpicking and commentary. Oh, and a fanfic idea!

The end of this arc is fairly reminiscent of the end of a Naruto filler arc, in that the ending feels anti-climatic and the ending fight is unimaginative and predictable. Then again, the arc as a whole is far superior to a Naruto filler arc, so I’ll forgive it that. Hopefully the next time Naruto goes into fillers it will use a longer arc like the Bounto Arc instead of an endless stream of short, meaningless, mostly self-contained stories.

Actually, this ending kind of reminds me of the end of the Soul Society arc, if only in that I thought it was weaker than the arc it concluded. At least this one does really conclude things, though.

The one really annoying thing was the way the episode went out of its way to point out that there were people who could intervene in the inevitable Icihigo vs. Kariya battle but didn’t.

I mean, okay, I can swallow that Yoruichi and Byakuya need to stand by so they can attempt to contain the destruction if Kariya explodes, though it takes some doing. (Kariya has shown that he’s more or less equal in fighting ability to Byakuya or Ichigo, so one might think that Ichigo+Byakuya+Yoruichi would trounce him in short order.)

Much harder to take is everyone else standing by and doing nothing – in particular Chad and Orihime, who haven’t done much of note since the story moved back to Soul Society that I can recall. Have them get drafted into the effort to seal away all the deus ex machina? Fine. Have them not join in because so much raw power is being thrown around that they would just get obliterated? Fine. Have them conveniently only arrive as the battle is winding down? All right.

Having them stand aside because only Ichigo can stop the Bounto because he bears a similar burden? That’s just silly. Even if only Ichigo has the power to stop Kariya, surely it would be easier if the others helped instead of just watching? One can handwave it away with an explanation like the “too much raw power” excuse but it would be nice if the episode bothered to provide a handwave of its own.

Now that it’s over, it looks like there’ll be one more episode of wrap-up before moving on to the next arc. I’ve seen conflicting reports over whether the next arc is filler; my assumption based on the length of Naruto’s fillers is that it is. When they do go back to the manga story, it’ll be interesting to see how they handle the details like the various new characters introduced who haven’t died or conveniently been shuffled to a permanent off-screen location yet or divergences like Rukia’s early reappearance.

So, how to evaluate the arc from a fanfic perspective? Well, the Bounto are a new addition to the toolbox, I suppose, and they provide some interesting characters and powers. Their surprisingly high power-level, though, does produce some setting coherency troubles if they’re brought in unaltered.

I did have one specific fanfic idea that I liked while watching the arc. Back when Mayuri sends Nemu to give Ishida the power-restoring deus ex machina, it seemed to me that some of the scenes and dialogue were almost hinting that Mayuri had ordered Nemu to give Ishida her shinigami powers (like Rukia gives hers to Ichigo at the beginning of the series). Given Ishida’s shinigami issues, that could make for a very interesting character arc.

Maybe someday I’ll even write it in my copious spare time.

In any case, relatively recently I picked up this:

I’d already seen the episodes in question, but I do try to buy the things that I watch on fansubs when they come out, and it is always interesting to see what’s different with the official version. One sentence review: it’s a good release, with nothing noticeably wrong about it.

That’s not what this post is for, though, but it is instead just to discuss a translation issue I found interesting.

Somewhere in the first the first episode Rukia (a shinigami) says (essentially; I’m too lazy to go through the DVD right now to get the exact quote) this to Ichigo (the main character) when he refuses to believe that she is what she says she is:

“You believe in ghosts but not in shinigami?”

For perfectly valid reasons, instead of leaving shinigami untranslated, the official version translates the word as “Soul Reaper.” That sounds a little artificial to my ears, but is workable. However, it turns the above line into:

“You believe in ghosts but not in Soul Reapers?”

That doesn’t make much sense at all, because (unlike shinigami in Japan) “Soul Reapers” have no place in American popular culture as a related concept to ghosts. The whole line winds up coming off very oddly.

As I recall, Lunar fansubs used “death god” as the translation for shinigami, making the line in question:

“You believe in ghosts but not in death gods?”

This choice of translation has its own issues (in that the usage of “death god” seems unwieldy to me in other places), but even for this line it doesn’t quite work for me. The connection between “ghosts” and “death gods” is more immediately apparent, but still from an American perspective to comment makes little sense. Most Americans would probably know what was meant by “death god”, but “death gods” also don’t really have any place in American popular culture.

There really isn’t anything that’s a perfect American shinigami. “Grim reapers” or “angels of death” probably come closest, but both have connotations that wouldn’t work properly for Bleach. Either would work as well as anything for this one line, but would have problems with the rest of the series. It also doesn’t help that both of those are usually seen a singular entities – the Grim Reaper or the Angel of Death.

What would I do? The otaku in me says to just leave it as shinigami, at least for the subtitled version, and have a liner note or something briefly explaining what the word means. The rest of me says that Viz’s choice of translation is perfectly acceptable, and that one mildly nonsensical line is really not worth bothering about.

Hmm. I wonder what the dub did with that line. When I have more time I’ll need to check.

Anyway, if this post had a big grand point, this is where it would go. There really isn’t one, though, except perhaps that translation is a lot harder and more involved than it seems at first glance. So I’ll just leave it at that, because this is already far too many words on such a minor thing.