Slayers - Volume 4 - Chapter SS

Bonus Translator/Editor Chat!

[Meg/ED]

Well, I think we last left off talking about how wonderful the food in Saillune is. But in truth, the city’s got a lot more going for it than that!

The dang place is practically infested with intrigue. This volume is really interesting to me because we have not one, not two, but three bad guys hanging around.

[Liz/TL]

I thought you were going to say justice! But yeah, the villains have a lot of moving pieces on the board, don’t they? Zuma, Kanzel, and the royal mastermind himself.

[Meg/ED]

Indeed. I suppose this volume is closest, then, to volume 2 in its setup, so perhaps it’s fitting it fell into Slayers NEXT. But as I recall, we meet Amelia, Prince Phil, and even Uncle Randy way back in the early episodes of Slayers.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, that was really interesting to me. I remembered the “intrigue at the palace” storyline from NEXT fairly clearly, but until I rewatched Amelia’s debut, I completely forgot that they’d used that storyline to integrate the “first time Lina met Phil” story Lina mentions in this volume. It’s pretty clever organization, really. Since we don’t have Sylphiel in the NEXT storyline, we at least get the “an innocent girl’s dreams of meeting a stereotypical handsome prince are crushed” jokes from Lina in that first episode.

I’m a little curious if that storyline is ever covered in Special or Smash, and if it does, how it differs from what the anime did.

[Meg/ED]

It was indeed a clever way to introduce them, and it was fun to see it in action... but the Randy bit kind of surprised me! Lina doesn’t give us the whole story within the scope of volume 4, so it was interesting to see a full take on Randy. You can read between the lines in the novel and assume he was a would-be usurper as well, but the anime makes that explicitly clear.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, I figure it’s one of those things the author mentioned in the last afterword, where he likes to throw in details that he may or may not ever actually explore, just to make the world feel more lived-in. It’s unconventional in a world where “Chekhov’s Gun” is frequently treated as an ironclad rule of fiction-writing, but it’s really interesting once you get used to it, and I think it’s something that enabled the anime adaptation to have a lot of flexibility in how it approached the storylines.

[Meg/ED]

I like it! And, now that I think about it, this isn’t the first time we’ve had the anime fill in some gaps for us. It makes it particularly fun to follow alongside the books.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, although it creates some amusing contradictions if you try to reconcile them. The anime version of this plotline really makes Christopher a good guy... he abdicates his place in the line of succession when the threats to Phil grow serious, and when Alfred is revealed as the true culprit, there’s no suggestion at all that Christopher egged him into it.

So there’s even a scene where they’re burying Alfred and Phil says something like “Such a shame, he’d never have done this if the demons hadn’t gotten to him,” and Christopher says something like “No, it was the evil in his own heart.” So if you imagine that anime Christopher is the same as novel Christopher, that line comes off as hilariously weaselly. “Yeah, definitely just the evil in my son’s heart! Nothing to do with how I raised him, la la la!”

[Meg/ED]

Pfft! The anime is a smidge heavy-handed when it comes to Al, methinks. (I even seem to recall the camera cutting to him when Lina and the gang first show up going, “Who could be behind all this?!”) Whereas, I have to admit, the book actually had me going for a bit.

And poor Chris... I liked that the anime imagined him as a good guy, but it did make him a little one-dimension at the end. I mean, versus the scene where he has to face his own (non-literal) demons and deal with Al himself. That was just tragic—in a painfully humanizing kind of way.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, in the book you get this idea that these tensions have existed for a long, long time; everyone in the palace is pretty sure Chris must be the one behind all this because of this sort of off-camera tension between him and Phil. But in the anime they all appear to be a very close, loving family, and Lina’s initial suspicions of Chris are kind of an outlier opinion.

So when Alfred is revealed as the culprit it’s a much more shocking betrayal. Of course, there’s less room to make this a parable about toxic ideology in NEXT, because it’s working to integrate this episode into the overarching plotline a bit more strongly—to the point of fusing it with the plotline of the next novel in places!

[Meg/ED]

Yup. Speaking in broad strokes, I think the anime somewhat undercuts the tragedy of this volume in service of furthering the combo-plot (which is perfectly in line with other directorial choices we’ve seen thus far). The demons use the royal family drama as a springboard for a certain machination, which is a whole other can of worms in the novels... There’s lots to chew on here! Suffice to say, I suppose, that intrigue begets intrigue. The demons and their exact motivations are something we’ll be exploring more in the volumes to come.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, and if you’re coming in from the anime you’ll see some familiar elements that were absent in this volume finally come into play next time. And, on the plus side, we finally get Amelia! I gotta give the anime credit for giving us mass quantities of wholesome Amelia/Phil content.

[Meg/ED]

All hail JUSTICE! ’Cause we’re gonna need some of it in short order. But before we officially move on to volume 5, is there anything else you’d like to touch on here in volume 4?

[Liz/TL]

Well, this talk of our favorite pratfaller has me reflecting on the sheer amount of Sploosh! and Wham! content we see in this volume, you know? Light novels are no stranger to those kinds of in-line sound effects, and it’s always a decision we have to make, to write around them or leave them in. In this case, I think we agreed that for the kind of story Slayers was, it was better to leave them in in most cases.

[Meg/ED]

I, for one, am a sucker for some quality slapstick, and Amelia is a goldmine in that regard. A good, hearty Splat! is just a lot more visceral, don’t you think?

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, in other novels you might write around it a bit more, something like “She fell to the ground with a splat!” or “With a bloosh, the interdimensional monster burst out of the soup bowl!” and that would be okay. But there’s something a little inherently comic book-y about the writing in Slayers, I think, with Lina’s snarky monologue and all. And so I like to keep those sound effects when I can, to give you that immediate visual and preserve the rhythm of the writing. 

[Meg/ED]

Haha, yeah. I think it’s especially fun with Lina as a narrator, because the Wham! interjections and such feel pretty authentic to first-person storytelling. (I could easily imagine her actually telling us this story aloud, embellishments and all.)

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, it really feels like she’s acting it out for the camera, right? It makes things a little funny in the editing process, though... Sometimes I write down a sound effect, and I find you’ve replaced it with a slightly different spelling of the same sound effect. So I’ve been dying to know, as an editor... how do you know how many Os to put in ‘rooooooar’?

[Meg/ED]

Coming from a manga background, I have a lot of experience with written sound effects, onomatopoeia, and the like. I try to be as descriptive as possible with them, especially in novels where we don’t have too many accompanying visuals. And, funnily enough, I actually have a rule of thumb for repeating vowels.

You sort of get diminishing returns, so in general, I think less is more. I typically stick to three, five, or eight, depending on the context and severity of the situation. (I think the most I’ve ever used was eleven in an over-the-top case like a death scene.) It gives a sense of consistency without risking chunky line breaks and whatnot.

[Liz/TL]

Innnteresting...

[Meg/ED]

It’s funny, though, because there are always exceptions (and instances where “the rules” are broken for comedic or dramatic effect). For example, words that use a double vowel to begin with—like, let’s say, “bwoosh”—need extra consideration because using three Os would just look like a typo.

[Liz/TL]

That’s true, I never thought about that. I guess you go right to five then? Or is a bwoosh always a bwoosh?

[Meg/ED]

I’d say “bwoosh” is pretty powerful on its own, but you can have particularly pronounced or drawn-out instances (e.g. super-explosions or long gusts of wind). Then we can also get into the nuance of weighing a “bwoosh” against a “kablooey” or something. This is high-brow editorial stuff, I tell you.

[Liz/TL]

It’s important! The sound effects in manga matter a whole lot, and in that respect we get off easy. Slayers has never asked us to represent the sound of someone being intimidating, for which I am very grateful.

[Meg/ED]

Ah, the sound of silence is a personal favorite of mine. But on the whole, I think sound effects are representative of the whole editing process for me. They have to pass muster on two counts: Do they look, sound, and feel right? And do they convey the right meaning?

(There’s a comical moment of every workday for me where I’m just sitting at my desk muttering “Whoom!”, “Vwoom!”, and “Whoosh!” to myself...)

[Liz/TL]

And does it convey JUSTICE?! ...Well, I guess that’s mainly applicable for Amelia, but still.

[Meg/ED]

Forget trees in the forest! What does a JUST punch to the face sound like?!

All joking aside, working on this series really is a ton of fun.

[Liz/TL]

It is a lot of fun. And next volume we’ll finally get to... the most fun? Well, that’s debatable. But I have a lot of fun writing him, at least!

[Meg/ED]

At last, the elusive you-know-who! I can’t wait to get into more detail on him.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, we’ve got our main cast together and now we’re champing at the bit for volume 5, when the plot really starts a-rolling! So I guess there’s nothing more to say but, see you then?

[Meg/ED]

I’ll be sure to have my DIY bag-mask ready for next time!

[Liz/TL]

I’m just gonna get the roller for all the animal hair on the couch.