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Jul. 16th, 2025 07:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thawreckaRead:
A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon, translated by Anton Hur - A women in her late 20s with massive credit card debt discovers that she's a magical girl. The magical girls have a union! They're very concerned about climate change! There are illustrations with each chapter! This is interesting and fun, but slight, but mostly what it made me think about is translation audiences and assumptions made for those audiences. As in, who is the assumed audience and what do we assume they know about a place/a language? What do we assume can go transliterated rather than translated? I'm often thinking about that, because I read books and watch things translated from so many languages, and for different audiences, and they all seem to come with different sets of assumptions. This one transliterated rather than translated: 'unni' (it means older sister/girl who is slightly older than the speaker, right?), 'noraebang' (I had to google this and it seems to mean kbox). I watch the occasional Korean thing, but I wouldn't say I have a particular cultural competence there; I do feel this is more on the side of the assumption that a general audience will know what these things mean, because Korean stuff is so mainstream in English-speaking culture now, the same way someone translating a French novel might assume any random would know what 'monsieur' means.
My other main thought is that Ah Roa and the main character should kiss.
Watched:
Three episodes of Cinderella Closet, a very silly Jdrama on Netflix. A young woman (Haruka) moves to Tokyo, bumps into a very pretty crossdresser (Hikaru), and befriends him and asks for his help to glam up for a date with her coworker, but Hikaru is maybe also interested in Haruka... This has standard Jdrama overacting and is definitely not good, but it is 100% my kind of garbage. Seems like it's based on a manga, which I haven't read. Hikaru is indeed very glam, and I like his outfits.
Two episodes of The Summer Hikaru Died on Netflix. This is AMAZING! Eldritch horror romance! Flirting with the monster who has taken the form of the friend you have unspoken feelings for! The horror of day to day life in a small town! The raw chicken, I'm shrieking.
This is so unsettling, and so beautifully animated. The flash cuts and sound design combine so well to capture the horror of whatever Hikaru is, but also the daily horrors Yoshiki experiences of uncomfortable interactions, and the horrors of adolescence, and the horrors of having that first intense crush with desire you don't know how to deal with. And also in a weird way, the horror of being a monster. The scene with the arm (how should I describe that?? supernatural fisting??) in episode 2 is spectacular.
A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon, translated by Anton Hur - A women in her late 20s with massive credit card debt discovers that she's a magical girl. The magical girls have a union! They're very concerned about climate change! There are illustrations with each chapter! This is interesting and fun, but slight, but mostly what it made me think about is translation audiences and assumptions made for those audiences. As in, who is the assumed audience and what do we assume they know about a place/a language? What do we assume can go transliterated rather than translated? I'm often thinking about that, because I read books and watch things translated from so many languages, and for different audiences, and they all seem to come with different sets of assumptions. This one transliterated rather than translated: 'unni' (it means older sister/girl who is slightly older than the speaker, right?), 'noraebang' (I had to google this and it seems to mean kbox). I watch the occasional Korean thing, but I wouldn't say I have a particular cultural competence there; I do feel this is more on the side of the assumption that a general audience will know what these things mean, because Korean stuff is so mainstream in English-speaking culture now, the same way someone translating a French novel might assume any random would know what 'monsieur' means.
My other main thought is that Ah Roa and the main character should kiss.
Watched:
Three episodes of Cinderella Closet, a very silly Jdrama on Netflix. A young woman (Haruka) moves to Tokyo, bumps into a very pretty crossdresser (Hikaru), and befriends him and asks for his help to glam up for a date with her coworker, but Hikaru is maybe also interested in Haruka... This has standard Jdrama overacting and is definitely not good, but it is 100% my kind of garbage. Seems like it's based on a manga, which I haven't read. Hikaru is indeed very glam, and I like his outfits.
Two episodes of The Summer Hikaru Died on Netflix. This is AMAZING! Eldritch horror romance! Flirting with the monster who has taken the form of the friend you have unspoken feelings for! The horror of day to day life in a small town! The raw chicken, I'm shrieking.
This is so unsettling, and so beautifully animated. The flash cuts and sound design combine so well to capture the horror of whatever Hikaru is, but also the daily horrors Yoshiki experiences of uncomfortable interactions, and the horrors of adolescence, and the horrors of having that first intense crush with desire you don't know how to deal with. And also in a weird way, the horror of being a monster. The scene with the arm (how should I describe that?? supernatural fisting??) in episode 2 is spectacular.
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