Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 5 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translation Notes: On Publication

The world of light novel publishing is, in a word, complicated. This is true in the English-speaking side of the industry, of course, but what I’m really talking about is the Japanese side, where all sorts of strangeness goes down that English-speaking fans are generally only exposed to bits and pieces of. Given that weirdness’s relevance to this very volume’s publication history, I thought I’d dig into that topic with a broad and basic overview of how all that stuff works!

Kota Nozomi alluded to one of the peculiarities of the light novel world back in the afterword for volume 2 when he brought up Supernatural Battles’s short story series. He noted that they might get compiled into a single volume someday, but that if you don’t bother looking into them, “you never know when you might be missing out”—a particularly distressing phrasing for overseas fans who very literally wouldn’t even know if there were chunks of content somewhere out there that never made it into a volume! Thankfully, as this volume’s afterword made clear, the short stories were indeed compiled and published as a single volume—but what’s the deal with these short stories, anyway? And “light novel magazines”? Are those, like, a thing?

In short: yes, but also, it’s complicated! The most obvious point of comparison would seem to be manga magazines at a glance, but light novel magazines are fairly distinct in a number of ways. For one thing, it’s pretty common for light novel magazines to also feature serialized manga—often adaptations or spin-offs of light novel series associated with the same publisher. That’s a good representation of the other thing that makes them distinct: unlike manga magazines, which tend to be focused around serializing the same continuous stories on a week-to-week or month-to-month basis, the light novel magazines I’ve personally explored are a much more eclectic mishmash, both in terms of the types of content and the specific series that are featured.

Note that I’m generalizing based on a fairly limited data set—my knowledge of light novel magazines is by no means encyclopedic, and there are probably examples that don’t conform to the format I’m describing here! That being said, in my experience, light novel magazines tend to have a mixture of features and advertisements about light novels themselves; news and promotions about adaptations and merch; manga; and, of course, short stories from existing series and/or sections of novels that are being serialized. A ton of light novels have started out in this serialized form, and others that started out as full novels have had short stories compiled into single volumes later on, much like this very volume of Supernatural Battles.

Of course, not every series that has a short story in a magazine is necessarily going to put it into a volume later on down the line! If all this is making you worry about missing content from your favorite light novel series, I have some bad news for you: the magazines are only the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of other ways in which content for light novel series gets put out that never finds its way into a proper volume, and by extension never ends up getting translated.

The biggest example that comes to mind is a relatively modern trend: short stories that are included with light novels when you buy them from a specific retailer. The idea, presumably, is to encourage people to buy multiple copies of the book from different places in order to get all that bonus content. If you’re reading these TL notes, I assume that you’re aware of J-Novel Club’s premium ebook bonuses, and I imagine you’ve probably encountered short stories included in one of those premium ebooks as its bonus content. Those short stories are frequently the very same bonus stories that were handed out with a purchase in Japan.

Between bonus short stories, magazine ones, online ones, and presumably even more methods of media delivery I’m not aware of, there’s a lot to keep track of if you want to know for sure you’ve seen everything there is to see from a series. I’m sure that every hyper-popular franchise has at least one hyper-obsessive fan keeping a comprehensive index of every piece of media put out to date, but I’m equally sure that with the light novel industry as saturated as it is, a lot of stuff still slips through the cracks. The thought of how many of these stories are likely to end up as lost media honestly distresses me, and I really appreciate that JNC’s premium ebook system gives at least some of them the chance to not only be preserved, but also be brought over to an international audience. (Disclaimer: JNC management did not request that I plug the company like this or pay me extra for doing so. Which is not to say I wouldn’t accept a bribe—if my PM’s reading this, you know where to find me.)

With all that established, I’d like to steer us back toward Supernatural Battles to dig into one final question: what else, if anything, is out there for this series in particular? Does volume 5 represent the only side content that was ever put out, or was more written after the fact? I won’t go into all the details of the digital archaeological dig I conducted in an effort to find the answer to that question—picture a maze of broken links, ancient promo pages, and dead ends that I had to use archive.org to get around—but the long story short version is that yes, there were more Supernatural Battles short stories! I actually had to buy a digital copy of the February 2014 issue of GA Bunko Magazine to verify this fact (which was in and of itself something of an ordeal thanks to region restrictions), but within it I found what was very distinctly content that volume 5 did not cover...only to run a search for the first line and discover that it is covered in volume 9.

So, yeah—there were more magazine short stories, and you will get to read (at least some of) them four volumes from now! I wasn’t able to conclusively verify that absolutely all the short stories that were ever written ended up republished in that manner, but personally speaking, I’m reasonably confident that’s the case. I bought a bunch of other digital GA Bunko Magazine copies, and the last short story I could find was in the October 2014 issue. If there were any more after that point, they’re remarkably well hidden, and that final story is also present in volume 9. The complete and utter lack of a clear, searchable index of the stories that have run in the magazine keeps me from being as conclusive as I’d like to be about this, but you’ll just have to take my word that if there are secret Supernatural Battles short stories out there somewhere, they’re incredibly hard to track down whether you know Japanese or not.

One last note re: non-novel content: over the course of my search, I did stumble across evidence of a few pieces of other Supernatural Battles media! There was a manga, to start, which had four volumes published in total from early 2014 to early 2015. There were also at least two drama CDs, one of which was a standalone release from 2013 and the other of which came bundled with the special edition of volume 10 in 2015. On a somewhat similar note, there was also a radio show associated with the series and hosted by the anime’s voice actresses for Tomoyo and Chifuyu, though unlike the drama CDs, the radio show doesn’t seem to have been done in-character and is only tangentially related to the series in terms of content.

Finally, and most shockingly, it turns out that there was a short-lived Supernatural Battles gacha game! Described as a “card battle RPG,” the game lasted for less than a year before being summarily shut down. There’s very little information available online about the game itself—there’s only one extant video associated with it, and it’s a sixteen-second trailer with no gameplay footage—but I did find one rather irate review that described it as being a bug-riddled, borderline unplayable mess, so I think we can make a pretty educated guess as to what did it in.

Unfortunately, I can say with great confidence that the drama CDs will never be officially translated, and with reasonable confidence that the manga’s highly unlikely as well. I may, however, attempt to get my hands on them and at the very least provide a description/summary of them in a future TL notes section, so stay tuned for that (pending my ability to actually find and acquire the things)!

And with that, I believe it’s time to move on to the references! This volume is something of an oddity in the sense that we have way fewer of them to go over than usual—you can thank Hitomi being significantly less of an unapologetic nerd than our usual narrator for that fact. Kiryuu’s presence means that we still have a handful of pop-culture shout-outs to contextualize, though, and it’s my job to make sure they don’t go over your head in the way that most of them went over Hitomi’s, so let’s get to it!