Kamen Rider Fourze – 27 Released

STYLISH☆WINDOW CLEANING

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It’s difficult to know what to think about this episode. The writing is incredible but the events are bizarre. Kijima is amazing yet the most awful thing for a translator to deal with. I enjoyed watching the episode a lot, I was proud of how I handled the jokes and stuff within it, I got to channel my inner fabulous a bit more than was probably sensible, and yet somehow I feel absolutely and utterly drained.

Ah well, c’est la vie. Masses, and I mean masses, of TL notes after the jump. Also thanks to a kindly /m/ anon for letting me steal his awesome gif for the release image after I already stole his awesome gif for the release image.

Enjoy the ep!

Right, let’s see. Kijimafest 4000.

Fair warning: Normally I’d put explanations for these in the sponsor segment thing, but there were so many of them it wouldn’t have been practical. Alright, so.

The first two jokes we get from random students attempting to make Kijima laugh. These are both really bad wordplays – the first originally “Futon ga futonda!” (“My mattress blew away!”) which Kijima then responds by ~blowing the dude away~ by… cutting his sausage donut, I guess. The second one gave me a lot more trouble – “Ijimekko wo hagaijime.” (“Deal with bullies by pinning their arms!”) I kind of stumbled with this one because you see the dude pinning the arms on a mannequin as he recites it, which left me in the predicament that whatever equivalent joke I came up with in English also needed to involve pinning.

After entirely too much time trying to think of something I came up with the bowling thing. I do hope you enjoyed it.

Then we get onto a three parter – the toad jokes. The first one is literally “What do Kamen Rider Meteor and a tadpole have in common?” the answer being “Te ga deru, ashi ga deru.” For the tadpole, this has a literal meaning – “to grow arms and legs.” For Meteor it’s more metaphorical, meaning to flail around and not actually accomplish what you set out to do. Using ‘armless as a bad pun kind of covered both, I felt.

The problem is now that these jokes have a narrative, which we have to continue. The second joke says that when he does grow up and become a toad, he’ll be a toad in a well – an idiom in Japanese that basically means someone secluded and unversed in the ways of the world.  So, I made a bad toad joke about him being out of his depth and… yeah. Not saying these are masterpieces, but as you can probably tell from the way Kijima jumps around like a lunatic, he’s rather revelling in how bad his jokes are, so one isn’t to be held to a high standard in these things.

The third joke I had to take more startling liberties with. It just plain doesn’t work in English – lemme give you a little translation. “How many dudes are stronger than Kamen Rider Meteor? Fish eggs. Ikura demo iru. “Ikura demo iru” can mean both “Plenty of people!” and “There’s salmon in there!” which is funny, because he said fish eggs. The joke was not going to survive in any way, shape or form in English, so better off, I felt, just continuing the lineage of bad frog/toad jokes to maintain the aquatic narrative.

There’s a fourth joke that got a bit lost – punning off “sentaku” meaning a decision, or choice, and “sentaku” meaning laundry. Meteor says his decision is simple – he’s setting Cancer up for a fall. Cancer replies by saying that he shouldn’t do that – fallen laundry has a habit of getting dirty. By this point in the proceedings I was basically all out of muse, so I tried to keep it semi-literal by having Meteor “take Cancer down” and then Cancer saying “Like laundry? Make sure I’m clean first~!” just to grind Meteor’s gears a bit.

So yeah, six bad jokes this episode. I hope you all enjoyed suffering through them as much as I did.

Edit: Oh, right, I missed one! When Cancer’s talking about his boss wanting to know who Meteor was, I talked to some people and came to the conclusion that Cancer was trying to make a tongue-twister (Shishou ga anta no shoutai shiritakute) thing with that line, so I went for something alliterative to try and keep the spirit of it, as were. Assuming that’s what they were going for – it could have been pure co-incidence, and if so, I’m dumb.

The only other real note of, uh, note, is the hotpot. Nabe, as it’s called in Japanese, is culturally regarded as a meal that brings people together – everyone sitting around the hotpot, helping themselves and each other to food, sharing their meal together.  That’s why Yuuki suggested it as a meal, and why Gentarou responded as he did – but I wanted to clarify that is an actual Japanese belief and not just one of Gentarou’s bizarre metaphors.

Anyway, enjoy the ep.