With Sailor Moon Eternal Edition, Volume 6, the Death Busters arc wraps up and so does my interest in getting any further volumes of the “Eternal Edition” release.
In Volume 6, the Inner Senshi and the Outer Senshi are forced to work together to protect Earth from Mistress 9 and Pharaoh 90, but they still fundamentally cannot see eye to eye about what to do to – or with – Hotaru. Worse, when from within Mistress 9 Sailor Saturn awakens, the Outers’ reactions are basically to continue to see her as an enemy.
This is why teenagers as magical girls is never really a good idea. ^_^;
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, as Sailor Saturn is so monstrously powerful they wouldn’t have been able to stop her anyway. She and Sailor Moon defeat the Death Busters and Sailor Moon saves everyone, as per the usual playbook. Hotaru is reborn once again, this time to a loving family of three mothers. This continues to be one of the best (and least trainwrecky) of the arc endings that don’t just end with Sailor Moon magicking everyone back to where they started.
This is followed by two extra stories. One of the is the touching story where Luna the cat falls in love with a human, that is the basis of the Sailor Moon S movie. It is in “Chibi-Usa’s Picture Diary, Beware of Tanabata” that my desire to have what ought to have been a definitive edition of this series was killed dead.
On Tuesday, I reviewed the fun mish-mash of Yuri tropes that is Yuri is My Job!, Volume 5 by Miman. In my review I praised translator Diana Taylor’s work, because when you’re neck deep in 100-year old tropes and are trying to make it make sense in the context of a modern maid-cafe oeuvre, it’s not that easy to remember that the readers still need an authentic reading experience. In that volume, Kodansha uses what is usually considered to be standard spelling “onee-sama” for the honorific.
In Sailor Moon, Volume 6, Kodansha did something that made me physically recoil. When Chibi-Usa, happening upon Haruka and Michiru, both in girl’s summer school uniforms, (something I wanted to write about on its own!) calls out to them as “Michiru-onêchan, Haruka-onêchan!” I was, honestly, appalled.
WHO. DOES. THAT?!?
And to highlight the absurdity of this choice, “oniisan” appears in the same volume. This is insanity. There are standard ways to transliterate names and honorifics. Pedantic use of diacritic marks does not make for a smooth reading experience. I’m thrown out of the moment every time.
At almost $30/volume I can’t subject myself to this any longer. The choices being made are enraging and don’t make sense given considering that they aren’t even consistent with other manga being put out by Kodansha right now, much less standard formats for Japanese names and honorifics.
Ratings:
Art – 8 Some of the best art the series has
Story – 8 Same
Characters – 8 Same.
LGBTQ – 5 Alternative family ftw
Service – 1 on principle
Overall – 8 with 2 points off for the typography which is like a stab through the heart every time.
This Eternal Edition may be physically beautiful, large and shiny, by the typography has quite literally robbed me of sleep as I lay there, tortured by the choices being made. It’s like visual misophonia. I have the Japanese volumes, I am therefore going to donate all of these English volumes to my library. These won’t be getting shelf space in my collection. Which is a damn shame.
Every time I see people reacting to Haruka and Michiru, I wonder why the author never tried to devote a separate spin-off series to them. Prequel, sequel, something. It probably would have been a hit.
I agree. It would be nice to see a series of cafes dedicated to the Outer Senshi, since cafes seem to be the primary encore series right now.
It really seems like the petty tyranny of one person (the translator? editor?) who does not like the commonly accepted ways of romanizing Japanese and now that they have a little power is going to plant their flag there, readers be damned. IMO it’s extremely immature to die on a hill like this to be “right” (if it even is right, linguistically) at the expense of a commercial audience. Doubly so when you’re tasked with working on a project that means as much to general (and younger) anime fans as Sailor Moon.
In sports sometimes someone will say “we came to see the players, not the refs” for games when the refs are overofficiating and disrupting the flow of the game. This is the same for reading – you’re forced out of the story and into the editor shouting in your face “THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD WRITE THIS IT’S BETTER THIS WAY TRUST ME” every time you read it. The translator is intruding on the domain of the author and the reader and it’s rude.
I don’t like to call for people’s jobs and whatnot, but it seems to me this person would be better off finding a different line of work than manga. Maybe there’s a scholarly text on ancient Japanese poetry that would be more suited to their talents.
I don’t know and can’t guess. I know why the choice was made for the Perfect Edition, but it’s equally likely that this was the JP rights holders insisting because of technical, literary translation standards. It’s just a damnable shame.