Oh god, this chapter… I knew it would take me two weeks. I didn’t think I would need a third.
I never liked the name “Rugudorull” for the villain. It just never really meshed with all the other western-sounding fantasy names like Ihrie, Fam, Rasha, Migel, and Lyle. “Rugudorull” sounded very phonetic Japanese. Kunihiko Tanaka spelled it “Lugdull,” though I was willing to ignore that since he also called Lyle “Rail,” and Ihrie “Ihrlie.” The katakana for the name was Ru-Gu-Do-u-Ru, with no second “Ru” at the end. so “Rugudorull” was just plain fucking wrong. Geez, ADV, how did you get something as simple as that wrong? So with that in mind, I completely rejected “Rugudorull.” I wasn’t in love with the way Tanaka spelled names, so I decided to go with “Lugdol,” at least until I decided to do just a little bit more research and discovered the “Do-u” combination could be used to mimic a “Du” sound, so “Lugdull” would in fact be more correct. I’m still not using “Rail” or “Ihrlie” because that’s just plain silly.
This chapter was also a serious pain to clean. There were THREE two-page spreads in it, and one of them refused to line up properly, so I did considerable redrawing before finally going “fuck it” and just accepted the sloppiness for my own sanity.
There was one line that for the life of me I could just not translate. The Spanish translation didn’t make too much sense, so I translated the Japanese version. To my surprise, the Japanese translation pretty much matched the Spanish translation almost word for word, to the point where I’m fairly certain even the Spanish translators didn’t know how the fuck to translate it and just did a direct translation for the sake of putting SOMETHING in that speech bubble. I just ended up guessing what the phrase meant to put across and hoped for the best.
I was disappointed to see that this chapter pretty much supplants the action scene in the third episode of the OVA, as that was my favorite scene in the entire anime. Everyone throws all they have at Lugdull and he just tanks it like a motherfucker, then Ihrie uses a spell that completely owns Lugdull. It’s fucking badass, and Ihrie needs more moments like that in the manga.
The next chapter is 10 pages shorter, which could make all the difference in the world. It’ll probably take me another three weeks since I’ll be busy with work again. But after that, I’ll be done with the tankoubon chapters and moving on to the magazine chapters! Rather than full chapters, they’re divided into parts, each about 9-12 pages long, so it’s much more manageable for me. The only problem is, there’s no Spanish translation to fall back on, and it takes a considerable amount of time for me to translate Japanese. I have no idea what the pace is going to be like, but here’s hoping for the best.