Darbury

You need to know something about me: I love cheese. Lovelovelove it.
Don’t know what to get me for my birthday? Cheese. Want to cheer me up at the end of a long day? Cheese. Watching the timer tick down on the bad guy’s bomb and you don’t know which wire to cut? Cheese. That doesn’t even make sense and I don’t care. You know why? Cheese.
And since you were kind enough to bring up the topic of cheese, I’ll go one step further and say the following: not much in life measures up to a good unpasteurized cheese. Something really rich and complex and made from raw milk. The good stuff. The real stuff. Something that makes you feel (and smell) like you’ve died and gone to cheese heaven. I’m talking cheese with a capital C.
But here’s the problem: I live in the United States, and here on this side of the pond, the FDA takes a dim view of unpasteurized dairy products such as these. In fact, it’s actually illegal to import or sell certain kinds of raw milk cheese here in the States — a traditional Camembert, for instance. There’s been some debate among foodies about the factual basis for that decision, but since I don’t know much about the science one way or the other, I’ll leave those debates to wiser minds than mine.
Anyway, in theory, the FDA ban shouldn’t really affect me much. The kinds of raw milk cheeses I prefer — funky, nuanced, mature — all pass these FDA requirements with flying colors. Yup, I should just be able to buy my curds and be on my whey. (Yeah, I did just write that. And no, I’m not taking it back.) But the reality of things isn’t nearly so kind. Most big chain supermarkets won’t carry unpasteurized cheeses at all, regardless of their provenance or if they’ve been approved for sale by the FDA. And why should they? Too much work for too little reward. Not only does unpasteurized cheese carry a certain stigma of food-borne illness, it requires extra care in shipping, handling, staff education, selling — and the demand just isn’t there yet to justify such efforts.
Sure, there are specialty cheese shops where one can go to buy the good stuff. (They’re called cheesemongers, which sounds pretty baller if you ask me.) And if you’re in the know, you might even have ways of getting some unadulterated cheese from the curd-loving community — unofficial food co-ops and that sort of thing. But for many people, unpasteurized cheese is simply something they don’t know much about or have easy access to. And so, they don’t buy it.

This obviously poses a problem for cheese importers. Their business model is simple: acquire product from cheesemakers overseas, ship it to the United States, then repackage and sell it for enough to cover the costs of importing — plus a small profit. If the potential market is too small, however, it’s often not worth the cost of bringing the cheese over at all; they’d never recoup their initial investment. In that scenario, the importers go out of business, and we’re all stuck eating great big orange hunks of Velveeta™ brand cheeze food product instead.
So what some importers have started doing, in partnership with the international cheesemakers themselves, is offering alternate pasteurized versions of these very same cheeses for import and resale in America. They’re a little different from the originals — the pasteurization process has stripped away some of the quirkiness and complexity that made the cheeses so interesting in the first place — but they’re products that the big supermarket chains are now willing to stock and sell. And for many people, a good pasteurized cheese that’s somewhat close to the original is better than no cheese at all. As a bonus, the sales volume generated by the pasteurized cheeses often (but not always) allows the importers to bring over the unpasteurized version to those specialty shops stateside.
Win-win, right? Depends who you ask.
For example, a foodie friend of mine is absolutely livid, saying this whole pasteurized cheese business has left a bad taste in his mouth. He’s so upset, in fact, that he’s vowed never to support these particular cheese importers again. “Don’t you get it, Darbury?” he demands of me. “This is cheese censorship!”
He’s a good guy, my friend, but he has a flair for the dramatic.
“They’re selling people bastardized versions of these cheeses. Shoppers see Camembert on the label, but they’re not actually getting the real unpasteurized Camembert that people in France are eating. It might have started out that way, but they sucked the soul out of it for the sake of more sales here in America. And unless people research their cheese ahead of time, they won’t even know they’re not getting the real thing. The cheese importers are lying to us for a quick buck!”
Like I said, dramatic.
While I can’t swear to it, I tell him, I doubt the import companies are trying to systematically deceive the cheese eaters of America. I mean, the Camembert says “pasteurized” right there on the label. How much more notice do they have to give consumers? A giant red sticker that says, “WARNING! THIS CAMEMBERT IS NOT THE SAME AS THE UNPASTEURIZED CAMEMBERT YOU CAN GET IN FRANCE! IF YOU HAVE ANY RESPECT FOR YOURSELF, DON’T BUY THIS”? Besides, I say, now people are getting exposed to all sorts of different cheeses they might not have had access to otherwise. And even if those cheeses aren’t the pure and unadulterated experiences of the originals, they’re pretty close. Plus, those pasteurized alternatives are broadening the market for cheese in general, which means more foreign cheesemakers will be interested in importing their products to the States in the future. And hey, once the public demand is large enough, more big supermarkets might consider carrying unpasteurized cheese.
“What, do you work for the cheese importers or something? Why are you sticking up for them? They’re just rolling around in big piles of money and Brie right now, laughing at us. People deserve the cheeses that their makers originally intended. Simple as that. Either give us the original cheese, or don’t bother. Anything else is disrespectful to the vision of the dairy farmer. Anyway, I’m not interested in expanding the general audience for dairy products. I just want to be able to buy the cheeses I like, the way that I like them.”
But wait, I say. Aren’t a lot of the cheese importers also bringing over the unpasteurized originals as part of the deal that lets them sell the pasteurized versions?
“Seriously, Darbury — how much are they paying you to say stuff like this? There’s no guarantee they’ll ever bring over that original cheese. They just dump the pasteurized version on store shelves with some vague promise that, if enough people buy it, they might bring over the unpasteurized one. Whatever. And even when they do follow through, they do a crap-ass job of it. You know about Casu Marzu, right? It’s this amazing cheese made in Sardinia, filled with thousands of live, wriggling maggots. Sounds totally intense, right? You cut it open and they all come pouring out. But when the importers bring that cheese to America, you know what? There are no maggots in it. None.”
Well yeah, I say. I think that’s against every single customs regulation on the books. You can’t bring live maggots into the country. It’s straight up illegal. And kind of disgusting.
“Duh. Of course it is. Unlike some people, Darbury, I try to actually know what I’m talking about before I open my big mouth. What I’m trying to tell you is that if the importers really cared about what the cheese-enthusiast community thought, they’d put maggots back into the cheese before reselling it here. But they don’t. Because they’re greedy and lazy. And that’s why they’ll never see another dollar of my money.”
Wait, I say. Hold up. You want them to put maggots back into the cheese?
“Yeah. The original cheese had maggots before it was imported, so it should have maggots when I buy it here. Anything else is a lie.”
But they’re not even the same maggots, I say. Replacement maggots are no more authentic than the absence of maggots would be.
“Stop arguing semantics with me, Darbury. Censorship is censorship. If there aren’t any maggots in it, then it’s not Casu Marzu. And I won’t support cheese censorship. This is how Nazi Germany started.”
I slowly back away.
“Don’t let them win, Darbury! If you really care about cheese, it’s time to buy a cow and a couple of goats and learn how to make your own raw milk cheese. That way, you don’t have to sit around waiting for whatever those lying cheese importers are willing to foist on you.”
Then my friend throws a smoke bomb at the ground directly in front of him and vanishes, bad-ass ninja style.
"Don't let them win, Darburrrryyyyyy..."
Like I said, dramatic.
I’m glad he disappeared when he did, because what I was going to say next would have driven him completely over the edge. Here’s the thing: while I love raw milk cheese, I also enjoy having the pasteurized option available to me. For various reasons, most of my cheese eating is done in public places like trains or planes, and I’d prefer not to have random people look over and catch me noshing on something that smells like an elk just shat out a gangrenous foot. Certain things should be enjoyed in the privacy of one’s home; it’s just common courtesy. I don’t want to be That Guy on the Train, and those pasteurized cheeses go a long way toward helping me not be Him.
There’s more I could say about cheese, but — crap! — I just remembered this was supposed to be a blog about visual novels. Sorry! I honestly don’t know what came over me. Never sit down to write a post when you’re feeling hungry, amirite?
Lesson learned. Next time, I promise I’ll write something about visual novels. Unlike this blog post, which was clearly about cheese.

You need to know something about me: I love cheese. Lovelovelove it.
Don’t know what to get me for my birthday? Cheese. Want to cheer me up at the end of a long day? Cheese. Watching the timer tick down on the bad guy’s bomb and you don’t know which wire to cut? Cheese. That doesn’t even make sense and I don’t care. You know why? Cheese.
And since you were kind enough to bring up the topic of cheese, I’ll go one step further and say the following: not much in life measures up to a good unpasteurized cheese. Something really rich and complex and made from raw milk. The good stuff. The real stuff. Something that makes you feel (and smell) like you’ve died and gone to cheese heaven. I’m talking cheese with a capital C.
But here’s the problem: I live in the United States, and here on this side of the pond, the FDA takes a dim view of unpasteurized dairy products such as these. In fact, it’s actually illegal to import or sell certain kinds of raw milk cheese here in the States — a traditional Camembert, for instance. There’s been some debate among foodies about the factual basis for that decision, but since I don’t know much about the science one way or the other, I’ll leave those debates to wiser minds than mine.
Anyway, in theory, the FDA ban shouldn’t really affect me much. The kinds of raw milk cheeses I prefer — funky, nuanced, mature — all pass these FDA requirements with flying colors. Yup, I should just be able to buy my curds and be on my whey. (Yeah, I did just write that. And no, I’m not taking it back.) But the reality of things isn’t nearly so kind. Most big chain supermarkets won’t carry unpasteurized cheeses at all, regardless of their provenance or if they’ve been approved for sale by the FDA. And why should they? Too much work for too little reward. Not only does unpasteurized cheese carry a certain stigma of food-borne illness, it requires extra care in shipping, handling, staff education, selling — and the demand just isn’t there yet to justify such efforts.
Sure, there are specialty cheese shops where one can go to buy the good stuff. (They’re called cheesemongers, which sounds pretty baller if you ask me.) And if you’re in the know, you might even have ways of getting some unadulterated cheese from the curd-loving community — unofficial food co-ops and that sort of thing. But for many people, unpasteurized cheese is simply something they don’t know much about or have easy access to. And so, they don’t buy it.

This obviously poses a problem for cheese importers. Their business model is simple: acquire product from cheesemakers overseas, ship it to the United States, then repackage and sell it for enough to cover the costs of importing — plus a small profit. If the potential market is too small, however, it’s often not worth the cost of bringing the cheese over at all; they’d never recoup their initial investment. In that scenario, the importers go out of business, and we’re all stuck eating great big orange hunks of Velveeta™ brand cheeze food product instead.
So what some importers have started doing, in partnership with the international cheesemakers themselves, is offering alternate pasteurized versions of these very same cheeses for import and resale in America. They’re a little different from the originals — the pasteurization process has stripped away some of the quirkiness and complexity that made the cheeses so interesting in the first place — but they’re products that the big supermarket chains are now willing to stock and sell. And for many people, a good pasteurized cheese that’s somewhat close to the original is better than no cheese at all. As a bonus, the sales volume generated by the pasteurized cheeses often (but not always) allows the importers to bring over the unpasteurized version to those specialty shops stateside.
Win-win, right? Depends who you ask.
For example, a foodie friend of mine is absolutely livid, saying this whole pasteurized cheese business has left a bad taste in his mouth. He’s so upset, in fact, that he’s vowed never to support these particular cheese importers again. “Don’t you get it, Darbury?” he demands of me. “This is cheese censorship!”
He’s a good guy, my friend, but he has a flair for the dramatic.
“They’re selling people bastardized versions of these cheeses. Shoppers see Camembert on the label, but they’re not actually getting the real unpasteurized Camembert that people in France are eating. It might have started out that way, but they sucked the soul out of it for the sake of more sales here in America. And unless people research their cheese ahead of time, they won’t even know they’re not getting the real thing. The cheese importers are lying to us for a quick buck!”
Like I said, dramatic.
While I can’t swear to it, I tell him, I doubt the import companies are trying to systematically deceive the cheese eaters of America. I mean, the Camembert says “pasteurized” right there on the label. How much more notice do they have to give consumers? A giant red sticker that says, “WARNING! THIS CAMEMBERT IS NOT THE SAME AS THE UNPASTEURIZED CAMEMBERT YOU CAN GET IN FRANCE! IF YOU HAVE ANY RESPECT FOR YOURSELF, DON’T BUY THIS”? Besides, I say, now people are getting exposed to all sorts of different cheeses they might not have had access to otherwise. And even if those cheeses aren’t the pure and unadulterated experiences of the originals, they’re pretty close. Plus, those pasteurized alternatives are broadening the market for cheese in general, which means more foreign cheesemakers will be interested in importing their products to the States in the future. And hey, once the public demand is large enough, more big supermarkets might consider carrying unpasteurized cheese.
“What, do you work for the cheese importers or something? Why are you sticking up for them? They’re just rolling around in big piles of money and Brie right now, laughing at us. People deserve the cheeses that their makers originally intended. Simple as that. Either give us the original cheese, or don’t bother. Anything else is disrespectful to the vision of the dairy farmer. Anyway, I’m not interested in expanding the general audience for dairy products. I just want to be able to buy the cheeses I like, the way that I like them.”
But wait, I say. Aren’t a lot of the cheese importers also bringing over the unpasteurized originals as part of the deal that lets them sell the pasteurized versions?
“Seriously, Darbury — how much are they paying you to say stuff like this? There’s no guarantee they’ll ever bring over that original cheese. They just dump the pasteurized version on store shelves with some vague promise that, if enough people buy it, they might bring over the unpasteurized one. Whatever. And even when they do follow through, they do a crap-ass job of it. You know about Casu Marzu, right? It’s this amazing cheese made in Sardinia, filled with thousands of live, wriggling maggots. Sounds totally intense, right? You cut it open and they all come pouring out. But when the importers bring that cheese to America, you know what? There are no maggots in it. None.”
Well yeah, I say. I think that’s against every single customs regulation on the books. You can’t bring live maggots into the country. It’s straight up illegal. And kind of disgusting.
“Duh. Of course it is. Unlike some people, Darbury, I try to actually know what I’m talking about before I open my big mouth. What I’m trying to tell you is that if the importers really cared about what the cheese-enthusiast community thought, they’d put maggots back into the cheese before reselling it here. But they don’t. Because they’re greedy and lazy. And that’s why they’ll never see another dollar of my money.”
Wait, I say. Hold up. You want them to put maggots back into the cheese?
“Yeah. The original cheese had maggots before it was imported, so it should have maggots when I buy it here. Anything else is a lie.”
But they’re not even the same maggots, I say. Replacement maggots are no more authentic than the absence of maggots would be.
“Stop arguing semantics with me, Darbury. Censorship is censorship. If there aren’t any maggots in it, then it’s not Casu Marzu. And I won’t support cheese censorship. This is how Nazi Germany started.”
I slowly back away.
“Don’t let them win, Darbury! If you really care about cheese, it’s time to buy a cow and a couple of goats and learn how to make your own raw milk cheese. That way, you don’t have to sit around waiting for whatever those lying cheese importers are willing to foist on you.”
Then my friend throws a smoke bomb at the ground directly in front of him and vanishes, bad-ass ninja style.
"Don't let them win, Darburrrryyyyyy..."
Like I said, dramatic.
I’m glad he disappeared when he did, because what I was going to say next would have driven him completely over the edge. Here’s the thing: while I love raw milk cheese, I also enjoy having the pasteurized option available to me. For various reasons, most of my cheese eating is done in public places like trains or planes, and I’d prefer not to have random people look over and catch me noshing on something that smells like an elk just shat out a gangrenous foot. Certain things should be enjoyed in the privacy of one’s home; it’s just common courtesy. I don’t want to be That Guy on the Train, and those pasteurized cheeses go a long way toward helping me not be Him.
There’s more I could say about cheese, but — crap! — I just remembered this was supposed to be a blog about visual novels. Sorry! I honestly don’t know what came over me. Never sit down to write a post when you’re feeling hungry, amirite?
Lesson learned. Next time, I promise I’ll write something about visual novels. Unlike this blog post, which was clearly about cheese.

You need to know something about me: I love cheese. Lovelovelove it.
Don’t know what to get me for my birthday? Cheese. Want to cheer me up at the end of a long day? Cheese. Watching the timer tick down on the bad guy’s bomb and you don’t know which wire to cut? Cheese. That doesn’t even make sense and I don’t care. You know why? Cheese.
And since you were kind enough to bring up the topic of cheese, I’ll go one step further and say the following: not much in life measures up to a good unpasteurized cheese. Something really rich and complex and made from raw milk. The good stuff. The real stuff. Something that makes you feel (and smell) like you’ve died and gone to cheese heaven. I’m talking cheese with a capital C.
But here’s the problem: I live in the United States, and here on this side of the pond, the FDA takes a dim view of unpasteurized dairy products such as these. In fact, it’s actually illegal to import or sell certain kinds of raw milk cheese here in the States — a traditional Camembert, for instance. There’s been some debate among foodies about the factual basis for that decision, but since I don’t know much about the science one way or the other, I’ll leave those debates to wiser minds than mine.
Anyway, in theory, the FDA ban shouldn’t really affect me much. The kinds of raw milk cheeses I prefer — funky, nuanced, mature — all pass these FDA requirements with flying colors. Yup, I should just be able to buy my curds and be on my whey. (Yeah, I did just write that. And no, I’m not taking it back.) But the reality of things isn’t nearly so kind. Most big chain supermarkets won’t carry unpasteurized cheeses at all, regardless of their provenance or if they’ve been approved for sale by the FDA. And why should they? Too much work for too little reward. Not only does unpasteurized cheese carry a certain stigma of food-borne illness, it requires extra care in shipping, handling, staff education, selling — and the demand just isn’t there yet to justify such efforts.
Sure, there are specialty cheese shops where one can go to buy the good stuff. (They’re called cheesemongers, which sounds pretty baller if you ask me.) And if you’re in the know, you might even have ways of getting some unadulterated cheese from the curd-loving community — unofficial food co-ops and that sort of thing. But for many people, unpasteurized cheese is simply something they don’t know much about or have easy access to. And so, they don’t buy it.

This obviously poses a problem for cheese importers. Their business model is simple: acquire product from cheesemakers overseas, ship it to the United States, then repackage and sell it for enough to cover the costs of importing — plus a small profit. If the potential market is too small, however, it’s often not worth the cost of bringing the cheese over at all; they’d never recoup their initial investment. In that scenario, the importers go out of business, and we’re all stuck eating great big orange hunks of Velveeta™ brand cheeze food product instead.
So what some importers have started doing, in partnership with the international cheesemakers themselves, is offering alternate pasteurized versions of these very same cheeses for import and resale in America. They’re a little different from the originals — the pasteurization process has stripped away some of the quirkiness and complexity that made the cheeses so interesting in the first place — but they’re products that the big supermarket chains are now willing to stock and sell. And for many people, a good pasteurized cheese that’s somewhat close to the original is better than no cheese at all. As a bonus, the sales volume generated by the pasteurized cheeses often (but not always) allows the importers to bring over the unpasteurized version to those specialty shops stateside.
Win-win, right? Depends who you ask.
For example, a foodie friend of mine is absolutely livid, saying this whole pasteurized cheese business has left a bad taste in his mouth. He’s so upset, in fact, that he’s vowed never to support these particular cheese importers again. “Don’t you get it, Darbury?” he demands of me. “This is cheese censorship!”
He’s a good guy, my friend, but he has a flair for the dramatic.
“They’re selling people bastardized versions of these cheeses. Shoppers see Camembert on the label, but they’re not actually getting the real unpasteurized Camembert that people in France are eating. It might have started out that way, but they sucked the soul out of it for the sake of more sales here in America. And unless people research their cheese ahead of time, they won’t even know they’re not getting the real thing. The cheese importers are lying to us for a quick buck!”
Like I said, dramatic.
While I can’t swear to it, I tell him, I doubt the import companies are trying to systematically deceive the cheese eaters of America. I mean, the Camembert says “pasteurized” right there on the label. How much more notice do they have to give consumers? A giant red sticker that says, “WARNING! THIS CAMEMBERT IS NOT THE SAME AS THE UNPASTEURIZED CAMEMBERT YOU CAN GET IN FRANCE! IF YOU HAVE ANY RESPECT FOR YOURSELF, DON’T BUY THIS”? Besides, I say, now people are getting exposed to all sorts of different cheeses they might not have had access to otherwise. And even if those cheeses aren’t the pure and unadulterated experiences of the originals, they’re pretty close. Plus, those pasteurized alternatives are broadening the market for cheese in general, which means more foreign cheesemakers will be interested in importing their products to the States in the future. And hey, once the public demand is large enough, more big supermarkets might consider carrying unpasteurized cheese.
“What, do you work for the cheese importers or something? Why are you sticking up for them? They’re just rolling around in big piles of money and Brie right now, laughing at us. People deserve the cheeses that their makers originally intended. Simple as that. Either give us the original cheese, or don’t bother. Anything else is disrespectful to the vision of the dairy farmer. Anyway, I’m not interested in expanding the general audience for dairy products. I just want to be able to buy the cheeses I like, the way that I like them.”
But wait, I say. Aren’t a lot of the cheese importers also bringing over the unpasteurized originals as part of the deal that lets them sell the pasteurized versions?
“Seriously, Darbury — how much are they paying you to say stuff like this? There’s no guarantee they’ll ever bring over that original cheese. They just dump the pasteurized version on store shelves with some vague promise that, if enough people buy it, they might bring over the unpasteurized one. Whatever. And even when they do follow through, they do a crap-ass job of it. You know about Casu Marzu, right? It’s this amazing cheese made in Sardinia, filled with thousands of live, wriggling maggots. Sounds totally intense, right? You cut it open and they all come pouring out. But when the importers bring that cheese to America, you know what? There are no maggots in it. None.”
Well yeah, I say. I think that’s against every single customs regulation on the books. You can’t bring live maggots into the country. It’s straight up illegal. And kind of disgusting.
“Duh. Of course it is. Unlike some people, Darbury, I try to actually know what I’m talking about before I open my big mouth. What I’m trying to tell you is that if the importers really cared about what the cheese-enthusiast community thought, they’d put maggots back into the cheese before reselling it here. But they don’t. Because they’re greedy and lazy. And that’s why they’ll never see another dollar of my money.”
Wait, I say. Hold up. You want them to put maggots back into the cheese?
“Yeah. The original cheese had maggots before it was imported, so it should have maggots when I buy it here. Anything else is a lie.”
But they’re not even the same maggots, I say. Replacement maggots are no more authentic than the absence of maggots would be.
“Stop arguing semantics with me, Darbury. Censorship is censorship. If there aren’t any maggots in it, then it’s not Casu Marzu. And I won’t support cheese censorship. This is how Nazi Germany started.”
I slowly back away.
“Don’t let them win, Darbury! If you really care about cheese, it’s time to buy a cow and a couple of goats and learn how to make your own raw milk cheese. That way, you don’t have to sit around waiting for whatever those lying cheese importers are willing to foist on you.”
Then my friend throws a smoke bomb at the ground directly in front of him and vanishes, bad-ass ninja style.
"Don't let them win, Darburrrryyyyyy..."
Like I said, dramatic.
I’m glad he disappeared when he did, because what I was going to say next would have driven him completely over the edge. Here’s the thing: while I love raw milk cheese, I also enjoy having the pasteurized option available to me. For various reasons, most of my cheese eating is done in public places like trains or planes, and I’d prefer not to have random people look over and catch me noshing on something that smells like an elk just shat out a gangrenous foot. Certain things should be enjoyed in the privacy of one’s home; it’s just common courtesy. I don’t want to be That Guy on the Train, and those pasteurized cheeses go a long way toward helping me not be Him.
There’s more I could say about cheese, but — crap! — I just remembered this was supposed to be a blog about visual novels. Sorry! I honestly don’t know what came over me. Never sit down to write a post when you’re feeling hungry, amirite?
Lesson learned. Next time, I promise I’ll write something about visual novels. Unlike this blog post, which was clearly about cheese.

You need to know something about me: I love cheese. Lovelovelove it.
Don’t know what to get me for my birthday? Cheese. Want to cheer me up at the end of a long day? Cheese. Watching the timer tick down on the bad guy’s bomb and you don’t know which wire to cut? Cheese. That doesn’t even make sense and I don’t care. You know why? Cheese.
And since you were kind enough to bring up the topic of cheese, I’ll go one step further and say the following: not much in life measures up to a good unpasteurized cheese. Something really rich and complex and made from raw milk. The good stuff. The real stuff. Something that makes you feel (and smell) like you’ve died and gone to cheese heaven. I’m talking cheese with a capital C.
But here’s the problem: I live in the United States, and here on this side of the pond, the FDA takes a dim view of unpasteurized dairy products such as these. In fact, it’s actually illegal to import or sell certain kinds of raw milk cheese here in the States — a traditional Camembert, for instance. There’s been some debate among foodies about the factual basis for that decision, but since I don’t know much about the science one way or the other, I’ll leave those debates to wiser minds than mine.
Anyway, in theory, the FDA ban shouldn’t really affect me much. The kinds of raw milk cheeses I prefer — funky, nuanced, mature — all pass these FDA requirements with flying colors. Yup, I should just be able to buy my curds and be on my whey. (Yeah, I did just write that. And no, I’m not taking it back.) But the reality of things isn’t nearly so kind. Most big chain supermarkets won’t carry unpasteurized cheeses at all, regardless of their provenance or if they’ve been approved for sale by the FDA. And why should they? Too much work for too little reward. Not only does unpasteurized cheese carry a certain stigma of food-borne illness, it requires extra care in shipping, handling, staff education, selling — and the demand just isn’t there yet to justify such efforts.
Sure, there are specialty cheese shops where one can go to buy the good stuff. (They’re called cheesemongers, which sounds pretty baller if you ask me.) And if you’re in the know, you might even have ways of getting some unadulterated cheese from the curd-loving community — unofficial food co-ops and that sort of thing. But for many people, unpasteurized cheese is simply something they don’t know much about or have easy access to. And so, they don’t buy it.

This obviously poses a problem for cheese importers. Their business model is simple: acquire product from cheesemakers overseas, ship it to the United States, then repackage and sell it for enough to cover the costs of importing — plus a small profit. If the potential market is too small, however, it’s often not worth the cost of bringing the cheese over at all; they’d never recoup their initial investment. In that scenario, the importers go out of business, and we’re all stuck eating great big orange hunks of Velveeta™ brand cheeze food product instead.
So what some importers have started doing, in partnership with the international cheesemakers themselves, is offering alternate pasteurized versions of these very same cheeses for import and resale in America. They’re a little different from the originals — the pasteurization process has stripped away some of the quirkiness and complexity that made the cheeses so interesting in the first place — but they’re products that the big supermarket chains are now willing to stock and sell. And for many people, a good pasteurized cheese that’s somewhat close to the original is better than no cheese at all. As a bonus, the sales volume generated by the pasteurized cheeses often (but not always) allows the importers to bring over the unpasteurized version to those specialty shops stateside.
Win-win, right? Depends who you ask.
For example, a foodie friend of mine is absolutely livid, saying this whole pasteurized cheese business has left a bad taste in his mouth. He’s so upset, in fact, that he’s vowed never to support these particular cheese importers again. “Don’t you get it, Darbury?” he demands of me. “This is cheese censorship!”
He’s a good guy, my friend, but he has a flair for the dramatic.
“They’re selling people bastardized versions of these cheeses. Shoppers see Camembert on the label, but they’re not actually getting the real unpasteurized Camembert that people in France are eating. It might have started out that way, but they sucked the soul out of it for the sake of more sales here in America. And unless people research their cheese ahead of time, they won’t even know they’re not getting the real thing. The cheese importers are lying to us for a quick buck!”
Like I said, dramatic.
While I can’t swear to it, I tell him, I doubt the import companies are trying to systematically deceive the cheese eaters of America. I mean, the Camembert says “pasteurized” right there on the label. How much more notice do they have to give consumers? A giant red sticker that says, “WARNING! THIS CAMEMBERT IS NOT THE SAME AS THE UNPASTEURIZED CAMEMBERT YOU CAN GET IN FRANCE! IF YOU HAVE ANY RESPECT FOR YOURSELF, DON’T BUY THIS”? Besides, I say, now people are getting exposed to all sorts of different cheeses they might not have had access to otherwise. And even if those cheeses aren’t the pure and unadulterated experiences of the originals, they’re pretty close. Plus, those pasteurized alternatives are broadening the market for cheese in general, which means more foreign cheesemakers will be interested in importing their products to the States in the future. And hey, once the public demand is large enough, more big supermarkets might consider carrying unpasteurized cheese.
“What, do you work for the cheese importers or something? Why are you sticking up for them? They’re just rolling around in big piles of money and Brie right now, laughing at us. People deserve the cheeses that their makers originally intended. Simple as that. Either give us the original cheese, or don’t bother. Anything else is disrespectful to the vision of the dairy farmer. Anyway, I’m not interested in expanding the general audience for dairy products. I just want to be able to buy the cheeses I like, the way that I like them.”
But wait, I say. Aren’t a lot of the cheese importers also bringing over the unpasteurized originals as part of the deal that lets them sell the pasteurized versions?
“Seriously, Darbury — how much are they paying you to say stuff like this? There’s no guarantee they’ll ever bring over that original cheese. They just dump the pasteurized version on store shelves with some vague promise that, if enough people buy it, they might bring over the unpasteurized one. Whatever. And even when they do follow through, they do a crap-ass job of it. You know about Casu Marzu, right? It’s this amazing cheese made in Sardinia, filled with thousands of live, wriggling maggots. Sounds totally intense, right? You cut it open and they all come pouring out. But when the importers bring that cheese to America, you know what? There are no maggots in it. None.”
Well yeah, I say. I think that’s against every single customs regulation on the books. You can’t bring live maggots into the country. It’s straight up illegal. And kind of disgusting.
“Duh. Of course it is. Unlike some people, Darbury, I try to actually know what I’m talking about before I open my big mouth. What I’m trying to tell you is that if the importers really cared about what the cheese-enthusiast community thought, they’d put maggots back into the cheese before reselling it here. But they don’t. Because they’re greedy and lazy. And that’s why they’ll never see another dollar of my money.”
Wait, I say. Hold up. You want them to put maggots back into the cheese?
“Yeah. The original cheese had maggots before it was imported, so it should have maggots when I buy it here. Anything else is a lie.”
But they’re not even the same maggots, I say. Replacement maggots are no more authentic than the absence of maggots would be.
“Stop arguing semantics with me, Darbury. Censorship is censorship. If there aren’t any maggots in it, then it’s not Casu Marzu. And I won’t support cheese censorship. This is how Nazi Germany started.”
I slowly back away.
“Don’t let them win, Darbury! If you really care about cheese, it’s time to buy a cow and a couple of goats and learn how to make your own raw milk cheese. That way, you don’t have to sit around waiting for whatever those lying cheese importers are willing to foist on you.”
Then my friend throws a smoke bomb at the ground directly in front of him and vanishes, bad-ass ninja style.
"Don't let them win, Darburrrryyyyyy..."
Like I said, dramatic.
I’m glad he disappeared when he did, because what I was going to say next would have driven him completely over the edge. Here’s the thing: while I love raw milk cheese, I also enjoy having the pasteurized option available to me. For various reasons, most of my cheese eating is done in public places like trains or planes, and I’d prefer not to have random people look over and catch me noshing on something that smells like an elk just shat out a gangrenous foot. Certain things should be enjoyed in the privacy of one’s home; it’s just common courtesy. I don’t want to be That Guy on the Train, and those pasteurized cheeses go a long way toward helping me not be Him.
There’s more I could say about cheese, but — crap! — I just remembered this was supposed to be a blog about visual novels. Sorry! I honestly don’t know what came over me. Never sit down to write a post when you’re feeling hungry, amirite?
Lesson learned. Next time, I promise I’ll write something about visual novels. Unlike this blog post, which was clearly about cheese.

You need to know something about me: I love cheese. Lovelovelove it.
Don’t know what to get me for my birthday? Cheese. Want to cheer me up at the end of a long day? Cheese. Watching the timer tick down on the bad guy’s bomb and you don’t know which wire to cut? Cheese. That doesn’t even make sense and I don’t care. You know why? Cheese.
And since you were kind enough to bring up the topic of cheese, I’ll go one step further and say the following: not much in life measures up to a good unpasteurized cheese. Something really rich and complex and made from raw milk. The good stuff. The real stuff. Something that makes you feel (and smell) like you’ve died and gone to cheese heaven. I’m talking cheese with a capital C.
But here’s the problem: I live in the United States, and here on this side of the pond, the FDA takes a dim view of unpasteurized dairy products such as these. In fact, it’s actually illegal to import or sell certain kinds of raw milk cheese here in the States — a traditional Camembert, for instance. There’s been some debate among foodies about the factual basis for that decision, but since I don’t know much about the science one way or the other, I’ll leave those debates to wiser minds than mine.
Anyway, in theory, the FDA ban shouldn’t really affect me much. The kinds of raw milk cheeses I prefer — funky, nuanced, mature — all pass these FDA requirements with flying colors. Yup, I should just be able to buy my curds and be on my whey. (Yeah, I did just write that. And no, I’m not taking it back.) But the reality of things isn’t nearly so kind. Most big chain supermarkets won’t carry unpasteurized cheeses at all, regardless of their provenance or if they’ve been approved for sale by the FDA. And why should they? Too much work for too little reward. Not only does unpasteurized cheese carry a certain stigma of food-borne illness, it requires extra care in shipping, handling, staff education, selling — and the demand just isn’t there yet to justify such efforts.
Sure, there are specialty cheese shops where one can go to buy the good stuff. (They’re called cheesemongers, which sounds pretty baller if you ask me.) And if you’re in the know, you might even have ways of getting some unadulterated cheese from the curd-loving community — unofficial food co-ops and that sort of thing. But for many people, unpasteurized cheese is simply something they don’t know much about or have easy access to. And so, they don’t buy it.

This obviously poses a problem for cheese importers. Their business model is simple: acquire product from cheesemakers overseas, ship it to the United States, then repackage and sell it for enough to cover the costs of importing — plus a small profit. If the potential market is too small, however, it’s often not worth the cost of bringing the cheese over at all; they’d never recoup their initial investment. In that scenario, the importers go out of business, and we’re all stuck eating great big orange hunks of Velveeta™ brand cheeze food product instead.
So what some importers have started doing, in partnership with the international cheesemakers themselves, is offering alternate pasteurized versions of these very same cheeses for import and resale in America. They’re a little different from the originals — the pasteurization process has stripped away some of the quirkiness and complexity that made the cheeses so interesting in the first place — but they’re products that the big supermarket chains are now willing to stock and sell. And for many people, a good pasteurized cheese that’s somewhat close to the original is better than no cheese at all. As a bonus, the sales volume generated by the pasteurized cheeses often (but not always) allows the importers to bring over the unpasteurized version to those specialty shops stateside.
Win-win, right? Depends who you ask.
For example, a foodie friend of mine is absolutely livid, saying this whole pasteurized cheese business has left a bad taste in his mouth. He’s so upset, in fact, that he’s vowed never to support these particular cheese importers again. “Don’t you get it, Darbury?” he demands of me. “This is cheese censorship!”
He’s a good guy, my friend, but he has a flair for the dramatic.
“They’re selling people bastardized versions of these cheeses. Shoppers see Camembert on the label, but they’re not actually getting the real unpasteurized Camembert that people in France are eating. It might have started out that way, but they sucked the soul out of it for the sake of more sales here in America. And unless people research their cheese ahead of time, they won’t even know they’re not getting the real thing. The cheese importers are lying to us for a quick buck!”
Like I said, dramatic.
While I can’t swear to it, I tell him, I doubt the import companies are trying to systematically deceive the cheese eaters of America. I mean, the Camembert says “pasteurized” right there on the label. How much more notice do they have to give consumers? A giant red sticker that says, “WARNING! THIS CAMEMBERT IS NOT THE SAME AS THE UNPASTEURIZED CAMEMBERT YOU CAN GET IN FRANCE! IF YOU HAVE ANY RESPECT FOR YOURSELF, DON’T BUY THIS”? Besides, I say, now people are getting exposed to all sorts of different cheeses they might not have had access to otherwise. And even if those cheeses aren’t the pure and unadulterated experiences of the originals, they’re pretty close. Plus, those pasteurized alternatives are broadening the market for cheese in general, which means more foreign cheesemakers will be interested in importing their products to the States in the future. And hey, once the public demand is large enough, more big supermarkets might consider carrying unpasteurized cheese.
“What, do you work for the cheese importers or something? Why are you sticking up for them? They’re just rolling around in big piles of money and Brie right now, laughing at us. People deserve the cheeses that their makers originally intended. Simple as that. Either give us the original cheese, or don’t bother. Anything else is disrespectful to the vision of the dairy farmer. Anyway, I’m not interested in expanding the general audience for dairy products. I just want to be able to buy the cheeses I like, the way that I like them.”
But wait, I say. Aren’t a lot of the cheese importers also bringing over the unpasteurized originals as part of the deal that lets them sell the pasteurized versions?
“Seriously, Darbury — how much are they paying you to say stuff like this? There’s no guarantee they’ll ever bring over that original cheese. They just dump the pasteurized version on store shelves with some vague promise that, if enough people buy it, they might bring over the unpasteurized one. Whatever. And even when they do follow through, they do a crap-ass job of it. You know about Casu Marzu, right? It’s this amazing cheese made in Sardinia, filled with thousands of live, wriggling maggots. Sounds totally intense, right? You cut it open and they all come pouring out. But when the importers bring that cheese to America, you know what? There are no maggots in it. None.”
Well yeah, I say. I think that’s against every single customs regulation on the books. You can’t bring live maggots into the country. It’s straight up illegal. And kind of disgusting.
“Duh. Of course it is. Unlike some people, Darbury, I try to actually know what I’m talking about before I open my big mouth. What I’m trying to tell you is that if the importers really cared about what the cheese-enthusiast community thought, they’d put maggots back into the cheese before reselling it here. But they don’t. Because they’re greedy and lazy. And that’s why they’ll never see another dollar of my money.”
Wait, I say. Hold up. You want them to put maggots back into the cheese?
“Yeah. The original cheese had maggots before it was imported, so it should have maggots when I buy it here. Anything else is a lie.”
But they’re not even the same maggots, I say. Replacement maggots are no more authentic than the absence of maggots would be.
“Stop arguing semantics with me, Darbury. Censorship is censorship. If there aren’t any maggots in it, then it’s not Casu Marzu. And I won’t support cheese censorship. This is how Nazi Germany started.”
I slowly back away.
“Don’t let them win, Darbury! If you really care about cheese, it’s time to buy a cow and a couple of goats and learn how to make your own raw milk cheese. That way, you don’t have to sit around waiting for whatever those lying cheese importers are willing to foist on you.”
Then my friend throws a smoke bomb at the ground directly in front of him and vanishes, bad-ass ninja style.
"Don't let them win, Darburrrryyyyyy..."
Like I said, dramatic.
I’m glad he disappeared when he did, because what I was going to say next would have driven him completely over the edge. Here’s the thing: while I love raw milk cheese, I also enjoy having the pasteurized option available to me. For various reasons, most of my cheese eating is done in public places like trains or planes, and I’d prefer not to have random people look over and catch me noshing on something that smells like an elk just shat out a gangrenous foot. Certain things should be enjoyed in the privacy of one’s home; it’s just common courtesy. I don’t want to be That Guy on the Train, and those pasteurized cheeses go a long way toward helping me not be Him.
There’s more I could say about cheese, but — crap! — I just remembered this was supposed to be a blog about visual novels. Sorry! I honestly don’t know what came over me. Never sit down to write a post when you’re feeling hungry, amirite?
Lesson learned. Next time, I promise I’ll write something about visual novels. Unlike this blog post, which was clearly about cheese.

Hey Fuwans! I've never done a blog before (or at least, not one that wasn't a work of fiction... is that still a blog?) and therefore I may lack the basic principles of layout, appropriate language, and possibly the most important factor of being slightly interesting. Still, I figured I'd give it a crack, partially to try to understand the events in my life leading up to where I am now and partially to offer my pearls of wisdom on various facets of all things Japanese and fun. I hope that in the very least it's a vaguely entertaining read, and that it might occasionally spark a blob of discussion!
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A few days ago I found myself wondering, while browsing the forums in a way that can only be described as a procrastinatory fashion, at what stage in my life I started to become interested in Japanese things. As a child, I never watched Pokémon, nor owned a Nintendo device, nor played Yu-Gi-Oh! round the back of the playground shed (cards were banned at my infant and primary schools for some reason). I used to like the shape of Japan on maps, but then again I liked the shape of many places on maps - including my first national love of Finland. I used to randomly drop Finnish words into conversation (still do on occasion...), spend ages reading instruction manuals with the Finnish language in, and would watch any film with Finnish subtitles because it seemed cool. In some ways, I was a Finland weeb, if that ever could be a thing.
Over time, this spread to an interest in language generally, leading to me collating words from anything I could find in a big diary, divided and split into their separate categories with unconnected words scrawled in. I guess I liked thinking how different these things were. However, even this eventually petered out, and for a while I had little more than a passing inquisitive interest in anything outside of my cosy little life in southeast England.
After school, I went to college, and it was here that I had my first definite experience with things of a Japanese nature. On my second or third day, I started talking to someone - or rather, he started talking to me - about an online roleplaying game which he was an active member of. He was describing to me his current character, telling me all about her personality and appearance, when he said that she was a 'tsundere'. I had no bloody idea what that was, so I naturally asked him (actually, I asked him what's a sundern', which I later found out is a town in Nord Rhine-Westphalia). Following his description, I became curious about why such a trait would exist, although I had no real reference point to go on. This friend went on to play a key role in getting me interested in anime, as at his suggestion I watched Kill La Kill, Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai and Tokyo Ghoul. I sadly don't talk much with him anymore as I left college and we went our separate ways, but we still chat every now and then.
Also while at college, I was surfing that halcyon land of the internet formally known as 4chan, when I came across a Katawa Shoujo thread. I'd seen them previously, but never really paid much attention - but, through a mixture of people talking about 'feels' (I liked to think I was somewhat impervious to emotion... ), cute drawn girls and the only vaguely fun 'community' I could find on /b/, I gave it a bash.
Hanako showing a somewhat accurate portrayal of my experience playing Katawa Shoujo for the first time.
Yeah. That. My outlook on life was pretty shit at the time, so having something which made me feel so strongly felt like some kind of emotional release for me that I had never had before (Wiosna, its theme tune, still makes me feel rather emotional to this day). It was due to this experience that I started to look out for other visual novels - in the following months, I played True Remembrance, Marry Me Misato!, Homeward, Yandere-chan, and my homeboy at college sourced me a copy of Fate/Stay Night, which with my very basic awareness at the time I'd heard was 'alright'. I started to open up socially again - not only in my actual life, but in my virtual life too, as I joined my first internet community in the Katawa Shoujo forums. It was great to be able to talk to such a wide variety of people about something I couldn't adequately discuss with anyone in the 'real world'.
How I learned what a 'yandere' was. Hmm.
Over the course of the next 12 months or so (so I guess April 2014 - April 2015) my interest in things drawn and Japanese-based waned somewhat. After running out of things to say on the KS forums, leaving college and starting university, I just got doing other things - mostly involving playing guitar and habitually cursing my decision of taking mathematics. However, for some reason one day I decided to Google 'visual novels'  and I came across a list of 50 VNs on some site called forums.fuwanovel.net by a user called Kaguya. Now, I'm not gonna say I danced on the rooftops (metaphorically or physically) but needless to say I became very intrigued, researching and reading about and around the titles on this list, as well as starting to make a concerted effort at learning Japanese. At roughly the same time, a friend of mine recommended that I checked out a guy called 'Gackt', in particular his first two albums. I was blown away, and so started to check as many different facets of the Japanese music scene as I could (visual kei, J-Pop, shibuya-kei... and grindcore ). Not two months later, I signed up to this glorious forum and things have only really continued from there!
This past 5 or 6 months have been a bit like Alice wandering through Wonderland for me. Through my investigations into all things Japan, there have been things that have amused me greatly, things that have appalled me, and some that have just left me thinking what a truly interesting place it is. I still consider myself somewhat of a newbie to things, and that is in part what this blog is going to be about: feeling kinda like a tourist to a largely unfamiliar world, and trying to learn as much as possible along the way.
 
Please be patient with me.

First, I should say that, despite Gamespot's glowing review of this game, I can honestly say that this game's story sucks.  This is fairly typical of Bethesda, as the main stories of all their games have sucked.  Frequently a side-quest chain will be the best part of the game's 'story'.  For instance, the political issues in Skyrim were way more interesting than all that Dragonborn BS, and they never did manage to make the main story of Morrowind seem compelling.  Fallout 4 suffers from the usual pitfalls of Bethesda using its own internal team to write the story, and I honestly thought that they completely wasted the settlements.
That said, there are some high points in the game, so far... Codsworth is probably one of the most amusing companions they've ever produced, and Dogmeat actually feels like a companion rather than a hindrance in this one. 
The most jumbled and difficult to use mechanic of the game (and seemingly the most pointless) is the settlements.  What do you basically do?  You build buildings, fill them with beds, plant enough food and water to provide for the random settlers attracted by a radio beacon, set up a few shops and some auto-turrets for defenses... and basically they do nothing for you, if you don't bother setting up shops (the shops can be useful, obviously).  Theoretically, setting up artillery in your settlements can give you an advantage, but I honestly don't think it is worth it.  The only reason I bother is to have places to drop my junk after looting various buildings.
Power armor in this game is a vehicle... and that has its downsides and upsides, as it is very much like being in a walking tank in terms of unstoppability... and it gobbles fusion cores.  Fusion cores are a relatively rare find amongst (rarer than any non-unique item except the power armor itself) the items in this game, though you can buy at least one from every merchant in the game (including the ones you set up yourself)... at a cost of around five hundred caps, which is an impossible amount early on.  That said, because you can purchase them in potentially unlimited amounts, power armor has more utility than you'd guess from the concept.  I do suggest you keep a solid stock of cores on you and remove any cores from power armor you get out of (so someone else can't steal it).  When it comes to dealing with armies of super mutants and other massive horrors, power armor can be a nice powerful crutch, lol.
Enemies in this game work a lot better than they did in Fallout 3.  Why do I say this?  Because ghouls act a lot like fast-running, brain-eating superzombies (they can come crawling out of the weirdest places) and super mutants are even more insane than they were in the other games.  Flying insects, moles, and dogs are all more dangerous/scary than they were n Fallout 3 or NV, and Deathclaws are even scarier. 
Unfortunately, the same can't be said for humans... raiders are weak, there is no really interesting human faction out there (the Minutemen being a bunch of idiots carrying around slow-firing lasers), and there is no even relatively interesting antagonist available.  I mean, the entire thing takes me back to the bad Bond movies from the seventies... in a bad way.  The idea behind the Institute is way too super-villainy for me. 
All in all, while the gameplay itself is fun, some parts, such as the settlement functions and inventory management, are clunky, and I honestly have to wonder if they really were trying to tell a story in this game at all...

There’s no getting around it. If you’re looking to edit visual novels, at some point you’re going to have roll up your sleeves, put on the rubber gloves, and get elbow-deep in some H. The good news is that if you come prepared, practice your technique, and set some clear boundaries, it can be a pleasurable experience for both you and the reader.

First, a disclaimer: I don’t like pineapple on my pizza, and I don’t like H-scenes in my VNs. It’s not a prudish thing; it’s a narrative thing. They’re rarely well crafted — you can feel all the hallmarks of the B-team being brought in to write them — and they almost never add plot/characterization that couldn’t have been handled better some other way. (I’ll pause here so you can mention Amane’s route from Grisaia, an exception that helps prove the rule.) Let’s be honest: they’re shoehorned in to help sell product. It’s built into the economics of the eroge genre. And honestly, that’s fine. I try to be sanguine about it and think of H-scenes as banner ads or TV commercials. They’re profit centers that help support the content I’m actually interested in. (I suspect more than a few developers feel the same way.)

Long story short, H-scenes ain’t going anywhere. So how do we deal with them? Go in with a game plan.

[Warning, there will be some NSFW language from this point forward. Sorry! It’s all part of seeing how the sausage is made.]

1. Do your research
In raw translation, sex scenes from a Japanese visual novel tend to be far from erotic. More often than not, they read like an obsessively detailed transcript of a gynecological exam. That’s not because the Japanese writing team suddenly forgot they were supposed to be penning a passionate sex scene. It’s just that what’s erotic in one culture isn’t always as erotic in another. It’s your job (along with the translator) to help bridge that cultural divide and come up with something that feels faithful to the original, yet still sexy in English.

Your first stop? Research. Read some English-language erotica so you can get a better sense of what works and what doesn’t. Sites like literotica.com even have stories broken out into fairly specific categories, so if you know you’ll be editing BDSM, threesome, and footjob scripts, you’ll have no problem finding what you need. (If you have all three in a single scene, you still might be in luck.) There’s also a category called “First Time,” which is more broadly useful, given how fixated many VNs are on virgins.

Read, read, and read some more. Pay attention to the verbs, the nouns, the pacing. Try to quickly form a model of what makes a sex scene successful, then look to carry those techniques over to your VN script.

2. Pack a box lunch
If you take nothing else away from this post, remember this: bring a big bag of dicks; you’ll need them. Better pack a few pussies while you’re at it.

By the time you’ve edited your third or fourth H-script, you’ll find you’ve run dry of good synonyms for the male and female genitalia. In KoiRizo, the raw script mostly used the word "thing" for the protag’s package, which ended up sounding childish and/or ambiguous in English. (I only kept it in a few instances where such a reaction might be appropriate — for example, when the route partner catches her very first glimpse of Lil’ Protag: “Is that your ... thing?”). The remainder of the original script was a mix of the clinical ("my mucous membrane”) and the hilarious (“my soiled meat stick”). As for ladyparts, the original script relied heavy on metaphor and indirect reference — lots of openings, entrances, gates, doors, depths, special places, overflowing pots of nectar, etc.

So what’s missing from the above? The common English erotica standbys: “dick” and “cock” for men, “pussy” for women. There’s a reason for that. KoiRizo complicated things by using the Japanese equivalents of these very sparingly, reserving them mainly for shock effect in dialogue — “e.g., OMG, she just said ‘cock!’ Things must be getting real.” Moreover, when these words were finally hauled out, the devs bleeped the VO and censored the text string (e.g., “p*ssy”). That meant it was very obvious when those words were being used and when they weren’t.

All of which presented quite a challenge to the team: if we were to preserve those “shocking” character moments, we couldn’t use the most common English terms 99% of the time. And so, I fell back on a shortlist of alternate references: pole, rod, erection, hard-on, manhood, etc. By the time I was done editing, however, this list felt far too limited; those words were overused pencils worn down to their nubs.

This is one of those areas where, in hindsight, I feel like I could have done a better job with KoiRizo. The takeaway: If I ever tackle a VN this H-heavy again — doubtful — I’ll come packing a much longer list of euphemisms.



3. Bring a raincoat
Compared to its English counterpart, Japanese erotica seems downright obsessed with fluids: saliva, vaginal secretions, semen, urine — you name it. The look, the sound, the feel, the taste, the smell, the volume. You’ll be describing a lot of liquids in a lot of ways, so get ready to break out the thesaurus. And an umbrella.

4. Embrace the improbable
Let’s admit it: VN sex is over-the-top ridiculous. In a matter of seconds, sheepish virgins turn into seasoned pornstars, cramming 20 orgasms and 40 positions into a quickie broom closet hookup. (Oh so much cramming.) This is the nature of the genre, so don’t fight it; embrace it. Trying to force realism onto a typical H-scene would be like trying to force realism onto a Dragon Ball Z fight: everyone still looks constipated, but no one’s having any fun. If you’re that desperate to edit sadly mundane sex scenes, wait for the VN version of Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs to come out. Till then, work with what you have.

I remember a tiny dustup a while back when another TL team supposedly wrote lubricant into an H-scene because they felt the acts described would be difficult or painful without it. It’s a minor thing, but if the original writer left the lube out, I’m inclined to do so too. These portions of the script are wish fulfillment at their best/worst, so just leave them be.

Except ...

5. Reject the impossible
... Except when the improbable becomes the impossible. More often than not, this is either the result of a mistranslation or an error by the original writers. (As an example of the latter, KoiRizo was haunted by an entity we dubbed “phantom Riho.” A couple of times, the devs would forget they were writing another girl’s scene and use Riho’s name for a line or two instead. We fixed this in our version, but still ...)

Anyway, as editor, it’s your job to keep an eye out for the impossible. Is the protag’s penis simultaneously in someone’s vagina, anus, mouth, and ear? Did the heroine’s hymen suddenly regenerate? (Starfish Girl is mah waifu!) Did a corded vibrator suddenly become a battery-operated one? Ask to have the TL double-checked and, if that still doesn’t resolve the issue, use your best judgement to fix the error while causing minimal disruption to the surrounding lines.

6. Set your limits
This is important. Know what you’re comfortable with going into a project and make those boundaries abundantly clear. Some VNs can venture into very unpleasant territory — rape, abuse, gore, catgirls, etc. — and it’s best to ask yourself up front if you could, in good conscience, commit to editing that sort of content. Set your limits early on, then make sure your team’s fully aware of them.

7. Have a sense of humor
At the end of the day, VNs are entertainment. Unless you’re editing Saya no Uta 2: Vom Harder, it’s probably okay to approach your H-scripts with a subtle sense of play. A decent chunk of your audience will either be fast-forwarding through these scenes outright, or paying far more attention to the visuals than the script.

So think of these times as exhibition games in your script editing schedule. They’re opportunities to spread your wings a little bit, try a few stylistic experiments — maybe even slip in a sly joke or two. And even if everything doesn’t quite work, we’ll still respect you in the morning.

I just had an extra big breakfast, so I thought I'd pull up a chair and solve one of the most hotly debated issues facing the English-speaking VN community today. No, no need for thanks. Just name a stadium or sandwich after me at some point. Or both.

Ready? Here we go. Honorifics or no honorifics? Should translated visual novels maintain the traditional Japanese cavalcade of name suffixes — san, kun, chan, sama, and so forth? Or should they adopt a more familiar Western approach, dropping honorifics entirely and/or replacing them with English titles — Mr., Mrs., Sir, etc. — only where situationally appropriate?
San? Or sans san?

I've thought long and hard on the matter and I think I've finally figured it out. Here's the answer you've all been waiting for.

ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?

Haven't you been reading this blog? Did you really think a self-professed amateur VN editor would suddenly crack the code wide open and save the day? I’m quite literally an idiot. My wife will back me up on that one. And besides, this isn't some question with an obvious answer, like "Should I put ketchup on my steak?" (Answer: No. And if you do, you're an awful person who probably pushes elderly nuns in front of buses when you think no one's looking, then steals their mangled nun panties.)
In fact, that question doesn't even have an answer, per se; it has a decision tree. Imagine your friend asks you, "Should I get a tattoo?" There are a lot of considerations to run through before you can give an answer. What kind of job do they have? Bankers and bartenders each have different leeway when it comes to full-sleeve tats. What's the context of their question? Is your friend asking you this over coffee? Or looking up at you from a vomit-filled toilet bowl in a way off-Strip Vegas casino? And what's the tattoo of? If it's Tweety Bird, then it's off to prison with them, along with all the steak-on-ketchup panty sniffers.
Same for honorifics. There's no one-size-fits-all answer — only questions and considerations. And the first big branch of that decision tree: Who are your readers and why do they read VNs?
The Battle Lines Are Drawn
By and large, we can break VN readers down into two camps: story-seekers and culture-seekers. It’s an overgeneralization, of course — there’s some drift and overlap between these two groups — but it will give us a useful starting point for our discussion.
Story-seekers tend to read visual novels for the plot, for the romance, for the giant mechs, for the faps, and for THE FEELS, MAN, THE FEELS. The fact that these stories are Japanese in origin is kinda cool, but secondary to the overall experience. As a group, they value readability over verisimilitude. They don’t get their stolen nun panties in a bunch because Ixrec’s translation of Rewrite doesn’t capture every last nuance of the Japanese, or even gets a few lines wrong at times. They just sit back and enjoy the ride. And for them, honorifics are often just weeaboo speedbumps that interfere with said ride.
Culture-seekers, on the other hand, tend to read VNs not only for the story, but to indulge their passion for Japanese culture. They might speak Japanese, or they might be in the process of learning to do so. Visual novels are often a means to an end: they read VNs in part to practice their Japanese. (And they practice Japanese to read VNs. Loopity-loopity-loop.) Culture-seekers enjoy the inherent Japanese-ness of the medium — seeing the subtle social interplay of honorifics at work, for example — so for them, stripping away “san” to please some Naruto-watching noobs is like throwing away part of the story.
As a translator or editor, you will inevitably piss off one of these camps. Sorry, that’s just how it is. You’re dealing with two groups of people who have inherently different motivations for reading the same work. And you can only translate/edit one way. Sucks, right? To extend my steak metaphor, it’s like owning a restaurant that, for logistical reasons, can only cook its steaks to one temperature — rare or well-done. And it’s up to you to pick which. If you go with rare, all the well-done lovers will give your little bistro one-star reviews on Yelp. And if you choose well-done, the folks who like their steaks blue and bloody will come at you with knives drawn.


In a way, this becomes sort of liberating. No matter what you do, you will annoy a good chunk of your audience. This is fait accompli. So you’re now free to do what you actually think is right for the work, knowing it won’t really affect the outcome much.
Of course, you’re also probably in one of those two camps yourself. (I know I am.) As such, you probably have an clear bias toward a particular approach — san or sans san. And you know what? That’s fine. Recognize your bias. Embrace it. Make friends with the fact that you prefer to translate/edit one way or the other. Then remember the advice I gave a few blog entries back: You are not your audience. Your close friends are not your audience. The message boards you follow are not your audience.
Your audience is your audience; its needs may differ from yours. And the novel is the novel; its needs may also differ from yours.
So here’s what I propose: Rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach to every VN, just accept that, all things being equal, you will probably prefer one approach to editing/translation over the other. And then leave yourself open to the possibility of changing that approach based on the specific needs of the VN and the audience for that VN. Handle it the same way you would that friend asking about the tattoo. Is getting inked right for them right now? And is including honorifics right for the audience and right for the novel?
Let’s walk through some questions you might ask yourself while making that decision:
Who’s the primary audience for the VN?
Are your readers primarily story-seekers or culture-seekers? Is your VN some niche title that appeals only to otakus, or is it a game with broad crossover appeal? A stronger case could be made for honorifics in the former situation; less so in the latter
What's the setting of the visual novel?
If your characters are all alien catgirls on a spaceship 23,000,000 light years from Earth, it's harder to justify keeping in honorifics than if you’ve got a cast of high school students in modern-day Japan.
Are the honorifics plot-relevant?
Is there any good story-related reason for all the sans and kuns to be there? Is the central conflict of the VN about whether the protagonist and his best girl are ready to go first name-only? If so, you have a better case for keeping honorifics than if they're just there as subtle social shading.
Is the visual novel voiced?
This one's common sense. You’ll have an easier time not including honorifics if the reader isn’t hearing them in VO. And vice versa.
How annoying are the honorifics?
This one is totally subjective, but it needs to be asked. Some writers tend to favor narration over dialogue, so their scripts will have fewer honorifics to deal with. Other writers love the rhythms of slice-of-life dialogue, so their prose might be a minefield of sans and chans. Read the script aloud. How jarring is it to the ear?
Is this an OELVN?
Stop it. Just stop it already. You don’t need honorifics. You’re writing a novel in English for an English-speaking audience, for crissakes. Don’t make me come back there.
Run down the decision tree. Be honest with yourself. Is there enough evidence to make you reconsider your approach to this novel? Are you an anti-honorific type editing a VN set in feudal Japan, where one missing “sama” could mean the difference between life or death for the characters? Consider keeping them in. Are you a pro-honorific person translating a VN about competitive bread baking in Paris? Consider ditching them.
Full Disclosure
I’m a story-seeker. Given my druthers, I will choose to omit honorifics from a VN for the sake of more readable English prose. I’m fairly certain that if it’s possible to translate Murakami and Kurosawa into English without honorifics, it should be more than possible to do the same for some random high school moege.
I admit you might be losing a certain amount content by omitting those honorifics — clues about the social standing of various characters in relation to one another, not to mention their personalities — but as far as I'm concerned, it’s content that can either be (a) baked into the script via other contextual clues, or (b) written off as redundant — that is to say, most of what those honorifics are communicating will already be apparent through the rest of the dialogue and on-screen action.
I also admit that my sans-san approach won’t be the right one in every situation. Same goes for the opposite approach. Every work and every audience demands its own solution. Your job is to stop for a moment and ask yourself what that solution is.
And then be willing to listen to the answer.

There’s no getting around it. If you’re looking to edit visual novels, at some point you’re going to have roll up your sleeves, put on the rubber gloves, and get elbow-deep in some H. The good news is that if you come prepared, practice your technique, and set some clear boundaries, it can be a pleasurable experience for both you and the reader.

First, a disclaimer: I don’t like pineapple on my pizza, and I don’t like H-scenes in my VNs. It’s not a prudish thing; it’s a narrative thing. They’re rarely well crafted — you can feel all the hallmarks of the B-team being brought in to write them — and they almost never add plot/characterization that couldn’t have been handled better some other way. (I’ll pause here so you can mention Amane’s route from Grisaia, an exception that helps prove the rule.) Let’s be honest: they’re shoehorned in to help sell product. It’s built into the economics of the eroge genre. And honestly, that’s fine. I try to be sanguine about it and think of H-scenes as banner ads or TV commercials. They’re profit centers that help support the content I’m actually interested in. (I suspect more than a few developers feel the same way.)

Long story short, H-scenes ain’t going anywhere. So how do we deal with them? Go in with a game plan.

[Warning, there will be some NSFW language from this point forward. Sorry! It’s all part of seeing how the sausage is made.]

1. Do your research
In raw translation, sex scenes from a Japanese visual novel tend to be far from erotic. More often than not, they read like an obsessively detailed transcript of a gynecological exam. That’s not because the Japanese writing team suddenly forgot they were supposed to be penning a passionate sex scene. It’s just that what’s erotic in one culture isn’t always as erotic in another. It’s your job (along with the translator) to help bridge that cultural divide and come up with something that feels faithful to the original, yet still sexy in English.

Your first stop? Research. Read some English-language erotica so you can get a better sense of what works and what doesn’t. Sites like literotica.com even have stories broken out into fairly specific categories, so if you know you’ll be editing BDSM, threesome, and footjob scripts, you’ll have no problem finding what you need. (If you have all three in a single scene, you still might be in luck.) There’s also a category called “First Time,” which is more broadly useful, given how fixated many VNs are on virgins.

Read, read, and read some more. Pay attention to the verbs, the nouns, the pacing. Try to quickly form a model of what makes a sex scene successful, then look to carry those techniques over to your VN script.

2. Pack a box lunch
If you take nothing else away from this post, remember this: bring a big bag of dicks; you’ll need them. Better pack a few pussies while you’re at it.

By the time you’ve edited your third or fourth H-script, you’ll find you’ve run dry of good synonyms for the male and female genitalia. In KoiRizo, the raw script mostly used the word "thing" for the protag’s package, which ended up sounding childish and/or ambiguous in English. (I only kept it in a few instances where such a reaction might be appropriate — for example, when the route partner catches her very first glimpse of Lil’ Protag: “Is that your ... thing?”). The remainder of the original script was a mix of the clinical ("my mucous membrane”) and the hilarious (“my soiled meat stick”). As for ladyparts, the original script relied heavy on metaphor and indirect reference — lots of openings, entrances, gates, doors, depths, special places, overflowing pots of nectar, etc.

So what’s missing from the above? The common English erotica standbys: “dick” and “cock” for men, “pussy” for women. There’s a reason for that. KoiRizo complicated things by using the Japanese equivalents of these very sparingly, reserving them mainly for shock effect in dialogue — “e.g., OMG, she just said ‘cock!’ Things must be getting real.” Moreover, when these words were finally hauled out, the devs bleeped the VO and censored the text string (e.g., “p*ssy”). That meant it was very obvious when those words were being used and when they weren’t.

All of which presented quite a challenge to the team: if we were to preserve those “shocking” character moments, we couldn’t use the most common English terms 99% of the time. And so, I fell back on a shortlist of alternate references: pole, rod, erection, hard-on, manhood, etc. By the time I was done editing, however, this list felt far too limited; those words were overused pencils worn down to their nubs.

This is one of those areas where, in hindsight, I feel like I could have done a better job with KoiRizo. The takeaway: If I ever tackle a VN this H-heavy again — doubtful — I’ll come packing a much longer list of euphemisms.



3. Bring a raincoat
Compared to its English counterpart, Japanese erotica seems downright obsessed with fluids: saliva, vaginal secretions, semen, urine — you name it. The look, the sound, the feel, the taste, the smell, the volume. You’ll be describing a lot of liquids in a lot of ways, so get ready to break out the thesaurus. And an umbrella.

4. Embrace the improbable
Let’s admit it: VN sex is over-the-top ridiculous. In a matter of seconds, sheepish virgins turn into seasoned pornstars, cramming 20 orgasms and 40 positions into a quickie broom closet hookup. (Oh so much cramming.) This is the nature of the genre, so don’t fight it; embrace it. Trying to force realism onto a typical H-scene would be like trying to force realism onto a Dragon Ball Z fight: everyone still looks constipated, but no one’s having any fun. If you’re that desperate to edit sadly mundane sex scenes, wait for the VN version of Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs to come out. Till then, work with what you have.

I remember a tiny dustup a while back when another TL team supposedly wrote lubricant into an H-scene because they felt the acts described would be difficult or painful without it. It’s a minor thing, but if the original writer left the lube out, I’m inclined to do so too. These portions of the script are wish fulfillment at their best/worst, so just leave them be.

Except ...

5. Reject the impossible
... Except when the improbable becomes the impossible. More often than not, this is either the result of a mistranslation or an error by the original writers. (As an example of the latter, KoiRizo was haunted by an entity we dubbed “phantom Riho.” A couple of times, the devs would forget they were writing another girl’s scene and use Riho’s name for a line or two instead. We fixed this in our version, but still ...)

Anyway, as editor, it’s your job to keep an eye out for the impossible. Is the protag’s penis simultaneously in someone’s vagina, anus, mouth, and ear? Did the heroine’s hymen suddenly regenerate? (Starfish Girl is mah waifu!) Did a corded vibrator suddenly become a battery-operated one? Ask to have the TL double-checked and, if that still doesn’t resolve the issue, use your best judgement to fix the error while causing minimal disruption to the surrounding lines.

6. Set your limits
This is important. Know what you’re comfortable with going into a project and make those boundaries abundantly clear. Some VNs can venture into very unpleasant territory — rape, abuse, gore, catgirls, etc. — and it’s best to ask yourself up front if you could, in good conscience, commit to editing that sort of content. Set your limits early on, then make sure your team’s fully aware of them.

7. Have a sense of humor
At the end of the day, VNs are entertainment. Unless you’re editing Saya no Uta 2: Vom Harder, it’s probably okay to approach your H-scripts with a subtle sense of play. A decent chunk of your audience will either be fast-forwarding through these scenes outright, or paying far more attention to the visuals than the script.

So think of these times as exhibition games in your script editing schedule. They’re opportunities to spread your wings a little bit, try a few stylistic experiments — maybe even slip in a sly joke or two. And even if everything doesn’t quite work, we’ll still respect you in the morning.

I just had an extra big breakfast, so I thought I'd pull up a chair and solve one of the most hotly debated issues facing the English-speaking VN community today. No, no need for thanks. Just name a stadium or sandwich after me at some point. Or both.

Ready? Here we go. Honorifics or no honorifics? Should translated visual novels maintain the traditional Japanese cavalcade of name suffixes — san, kun, chan, sama, and so forth? Or should they adopt a more familiar Western approach, dropping honorifics entirely and/or replacing them with English titles — Mr., Mrs., Sir, etc. — only where situationally appropriate?
San? Or sans san?

I've thought long and hard on the matter and I think I've finally figured it out. Here's the answer you've all been waiting for.

ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?

Haven't you been reading this blog? Did you really think a self-professed amateur VN editor would suddenly crack the code wide open and save the day? I’m quite literally an idiot. My wife will back me up on that one. And besides, this isn't some question with an obvious answer, like "Should I put ketchup on my steak?" (Answer: No. And if you do, you're an awful person who probably pushes elderly nuns in front of buses when you think no one's looking, then steals their mangled nun panties.)
In fact, that question doesn't even have an answer, per se; it has a decision tree. Imagine your friend asks you, "Should I get a tattoo?" There are a lot of considerations to run through before you can give an answer. What kind of job do they have? Bankers and bartenders each have different leeway when it comes to full-sleeve tats. What's the context of their question? Is your friend asking you this over coffee? Or looking up at you from a vomit-filled toilet bowl in a way off-Strip Vegas casino? And what's the tattoo of? If it's Tweety Bird, then it's off to prison with them, along with all the steak-on-ketchup panty sniffers.
Same for honorifics. There's no one-size-fits-all answer — only questions and considerations. And the first big branch of that decision tree: Who are your readers and why do they read VNs?
The Battle Lines Are Drawn
By and large, we can break VN readers down into two camps: story-seekers and culture-seekers. It’s an overgeneralization, of course — there’s some drift and overlap between these two groups — but it will give us a useful starting point for our discussion.
Story-seekers tend to read visual novels for the plot, for the romance, for the giant mechs, for the faps, and for THE FEELS, MAN, THE FEELS. The fact that these stories are Japanese in origin is kinda cool, but secondary to the overall experience. As a group, they value readability over verisimilitude. They don’t get their stolen nun panties in a bunch because Ixrec’s translation of Rewrite doesn’t capture every last nuance of the Japanese, or even gets a few lines wrong at times. They just sit back and enjoy the ride. And for them, honorifics are often just weeaboo speedbumps that interfere with said ride.
Culture-seekers, on the other hand, tend to read VNs not only for the story, but to indulge their passion for Japanese culture. They might speak Japanese, or they might be in the process of learning to do so. Visual novels are often a means to an end: they read VNs in part to practice their Japanese. (And they practice Japanese to read VNs. Loopity-loopity-loop.) Culture-seekers enjoy the inherent Japanese-ness of the medium — seeing the subtle social interplay of honorifics at work, for example — so for them, stripping away “san” to please some Naruto-watching noobs is like throwing away part of the story.
As a translator or editor, you will inevitably piss off one of these camps. Sorry, that’s just how it is. You’re dealing with two groups of people who have inherently different motivations for reading the same work. And you can only translate/edit one way. Sucks, right? To extend my steak metaphor, it’s like owning a restaurant that, for logistical reasons, can only cook its steaks to one temperature — rare or well-done. And it’s up to you to pick which. If you go with rare, all the well-done lovers will give your little bistro one-star reviews on Yelp. And if you choose well-done, the folks who like their steaks blue and bloody will come at you with knives drawn.


In a way, this becomes sort of liberating. No matter what you do, you will annoy a good chunk of your audience. This is fait accompli. So you’re now free to do what you actually think is right for the work, knowing it won’t really affect the outcome much.
Of course, you’re also probably in one of those two camps yourself. (I know I am.) As such, you probably have an clear bias toward a particular approach — san or sans san. And you know what? That’s fine. Recognize your bias. Embrace it. Make friends with the fact that you prefer to translate/edit one way or the other. Then remember the advice I gave a few blog entries back: You are not your audience. Your close friends are not your audience. The message boards you follow are not your audience.
Your audience is your audience; its needs may differ from yours. And the novel is the novel; its needs may also differ from yours.
So here’s what I propose: Rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach to every VN, just accept that, all things being equal, you will probably prefer one approach to editing/translation over the other. And then leave yourself open to the possibility of changing that approach based on the specific needs of the VN and the audience for that VN. Handle it the same way you would that friend asking about the tattoo. Is getting inked right for them right now? And is including honorifics right for the audience and right for the novel?
Let’s walk through some questions you might ask yourself while making that decision:
Who’s the primary audience for the VN?
Are your readers primarily story-seekers or culture-seekers? Is your VN some niche title that appeals only to otakus, or is it a game with broad crossover appeal? A stronger case could be made for honorifics in the former situation; less so in the latter
What's the setting of the visual novel?
If your characters are all alien catgirls on a spaceship 23,000,000 light years from Earth, it's harder to justify keeping in honorifics than if you’ve got a cast of high school students in modern-day Japan.
Are the honorifics plot-relevant?
Is there any good story-related reason for all the sans and kuns to be there? Is the central conflict of the VN about whether the protagonist and his best girl are ready to go first name-only? If so, you have a better case for keeping honorifics than if they're just there as subtle social shading.
Is the visual novel voiced?
This one's common sense. You’ll have an easier time not including honorifics if the reader isn’t hearing them in VO. And vice versa.
How annoying are the honorifics?
This one is totally subjective, but it needs to be asked. Some writers tend to favor narration over dialogue, so their scripts will have fewer honorifics to deal with. Other writers love the rhythms of slice-of-life dialogue, so their prose might be a minefield of sans and chans. Read the script aloud. How jarring is it to the ear?
Is this an OELVN?
Stop it. Just stop it already. You don’t need honorifics. You’re writing a novel in English for an English-speaking audience, for crissakes. Don’t make me come back there.
Run down the decision tree. Be honest with yourself. Is there enough evidence to make you reconsider your approach to this novel? Are you an anti-honorific type editing a VN set in feudal Japan, where one missing “sama” could mean the difference between life or death for the characters? Consider keeping them in. Are you a pro-honorific person translating a VN about competitive bread baking in Paris? Consider ditching them.
Full Disclosure
I’m a story-seeker. Given my druthers, I will choose to omit honorifics from a VN for the sake of more readable English prose. I’m fairly certain that if it’s possible to translate Murakami and Kurosawa into English without honorifics, it should be more than possible to do the same for some random high school moege.
I admit you might be losing a certain amount content by omitting those honorifics — clues about the social standing of various characters in relation to one another, not to mention their personalities — but as far as I'm concerned, it’s content that can either be (a) baked into the script via other contextual clues, or (b) written off as redundant — that is to say, most of what those honorifics are communicating will already be apparent through the rest of the dialogue and on-screen action.
I also admit that my sans-san approach won’t be the right one in every situation. Same goes for the opposite approach. Every work and every audience demands its own solution. Your job is to stop for a moment and ask yourself what that solution is.
And then be willing to listen to the answer.

I just had an extra big breakfast, so I thought I'd pull up a chair and solve one of the most hotly debated issues facing the English-speaking VN community today. No, no need for thanks. Just name a stadium or sandwich after me at some point. Or both.

Ready? Here we go. Honorifics or no honorifics? Should translated visual novels maintain the traditional Japanese cavalcade of name suffixes — san, kun, chan, sama, and so forth? Or should they adopt a more familiar Western approach, dropping honorifics entirely and/or replacing them with English titles — Mr., Mrs., Sir, etc. — only where situationally appropriate?
San? Or sans san?

I've thought long and hard on the matter and I think I've finally figured it out. Here's the answer you've all been waiting for.

ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?

Haven't you been reading this blog? Did you really think a self-professed amateur VN editor would suddenly crack the code wide open and save the day? I’m quite literally an idiot. My wife will back me up on that one. And besides, this isn't some question with an obvious answer, like "Should I put ketchup on my steak?" (Answer: No. And if you do, you're an awful person who probably pushes elderly nuns in front of buses when you think no one's looking, then steals their mangled nun panties.)
In fact, that question doesn't even have an answer, per se; it has a decision tree. Imagine your friend asks you, "Should I get a tattoo?" There are a lot of considerations to run through before you can give an answer. What kind of job do they have? Bankers and bartenders each have different leeway when it comes to full-sleeve tats. What's the context of their question? Is your friend asking you this over coffee? Or looking up at you from a vomit-filled toilet bowl in a way off-Strip Vegas casino? And what's the tattoo of? If it's Tweety Bird, then it's off to prison with them, along with all the steak-on-ketchup panty sniffers.
Same for honorifics. There's no one-size-fits-all answer — only questions and considerations. And the first big branch of that decision tree: Who are your readers and why do they read VNs?
The Battle Lines Are Drawn
By and large, we can break VN readers down into two camps: story-seekers and culture-seekers. It’s an overgeneralization, of course — there’s some drift and overlap between these two groups — but it will give us a useful starting point for our discussion.
Story-seekers tend to read visual novels for the plot, for the romance, for the giant mechs, for the faps, and for THE FEELS, MAN, THE FEELS. The fact that these stories are Japanese in origin is kinda cool, but secondary to the overall experience. As a group, they value readability over verisimilitude. They don’t get their stolen nun panties in a bunch because Ixrec’s translation of Rewrite doesn’t capture every last nuance of the Japanese, or even gets a few lines wrong at times. They just sit back and enjoy the ride. And for them, honorifics are often just weeaboo speedbumps that interfere with said ride.
Culture-seekers, on the other hand, tend to read VNs not only for the story, but to indulge their passion for Japanese culture. They might speak Japanese, or they might be in the process of learning to do so. Visual novels are often a means to an end: they read VNs in part to practice their Japanese. (And they practice Japanese to read VNs. Loopity-loopity-loop.) Culture-seekers enjoy the inherent Japanese-ness of the medium — seeing the subtle social interplay of honorifics at work, for example — so for them, stripping away “san” to please some Naruto-watching noobs is like throwing away part of the story.
As a translator or editor, you will inevitably piss off one of these camps. Sorry, that’s just how it is. You’re dealing with two groups of people who have inherently different motivations for reading the same work. And you can only translate/edit one way. Sucks, right? To extend my steak metaphor, it’s like owning a restaurant that, for logistical reasons, can only cook its steaks to one temperature — rare or well-done. And it’s up to you to pick which. If you go with rare, all the well-done lovers will give your little bistro one-star reviews on Yelp. And if you choose well-done, the folks who like their steaks blue and bloody will come at you with knives drawn.


In a way, this becomes sort of liberating. No matter what you do, you will annoy a good chunk of your audience. This is fait accompli. So you’re now free to do what you actually think is right for the work, knowing it won’t really affect the outcome much.
Of course, you’re also probably in one of those two camps yourself. (I know I am.) As such, you probably have an clear bias toward a particular approach — san or sans san. And you know what? That’s fine. Recognize your bias. Embrace it. Make friends with the fact that you prefer to translate/edit one way or the other. Then remember the advice I gave a few blog entries back: You are not your audience. Your close friends are not your audience. The message boards you follow are not your audience.
Your audience is your audience; its needs may differ from yours. And the novel is the novel; its needs may also differ from yours.
So here’s what I propose: Rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach to every VN, just accept that, all things being equal, you will probably prefer one approach to editing/translation over the other. And then leave yourself open to the possibility of changing that approach based on the specific needs of the VN and the audience for that VN. Handle it the same way you would that friend asking about the tattoo. Is getting inked right for them right now? And is including honorifics right for the audience and right for the novel?
Let’s walk through some questions you might ask yourself while making that decision:
Who’s the primary audience for the VN?
Are your readers primarily story-seekers or culture-seekers? Is your VN some niche title that appeals only to otakus, or is it a game with broad crossover appeal? A stronger case could be made for honorifics in the former situation; less so in the latter
What's the setting of the visual novel?
If your characters are all alien catgirls on a spaceship 23,000,000 light years from Earth, it's harder to justify keeping in honorifics than if you’ve got a cast of high school students in modern-day Japan.
Are the honorifics plot-relevant?
Is there any good story-related reason for all the sans and kuns to be there? Is the central conflict of the VN about whether the protagonist and his best girl are ready to go first name-only? If so, you have a better case for keeping honorifics than if they're just there as subtle social shading.
Is the visual novel voiced?
This one's common sense. You’ll have an easier time not including honorifics if the reader isn’t hearing them in VO. And vice versa.
How annoying are the honorifics?
This one is totally subjective, but it needs to be asked. Some writers tend to favor narration over dialogue, so their scripts will have fewer honorifics to deal with. Other writers love the rhythms of slice-of-life dialogue, so their prose might be a minefield of sans and chans. Read the script aloud. How jarring is it to the ear?
Is this an OELVN?
Stop it. Just stop it already. You don’t need honorifics. You’re writing a novel in English for an English-speaking audience, for crissakes. Don’t make me come back there.
Run down the decision tree. Be honest with yourself. Is there enough evidence to make you reconsider your approach to this novel? Are you an anti-honorific type editing a VN set in feudal Japan, where one missing “sama” could mean the difference between life or death for the characters? Consider keeping them in. Are you a pro-honorific person translating a VN about competitive bread baking in Paris? Consider ditching them.
Full Disclosure
I’m a story-seeker. Given my druthers, I will choose to omit honorifics from a VN for the sake of more readable English prose. I’m fairly certain that if it’s possible to translate Murakami and Kurosawa into English without honorifics, it should be more than possible to do the same for some random high school moege.
I admit you might be losing a certain amount content by omitting those honorifics — clues about the social standing of various characters in relation to one another, not to mention their personalities — but as far as I'm concerned, it’s content that can either be (a) baked into the script via other contextual clues, or (b) written off as redundant — that is to say, most of what those honorifics are communicating will already be apparent through the rest of the dialogue and on-screen action.
I also admit that my sans-san approach won’t be the right one in every situation. Same goes for the opposite approach. Every work and every audience demands its own solution. Your job is to stop for a moment and ask yourself what that solution is.
And then be willing to listen to the answer.

I just had an extra big breakfast, so I thought I'd pull up a chair and solve one of the most hotly debated issues facing the English-speaking VN community today. No, no need for thanks. Just name a stadium or sandwich after me at some point. Or both.

Ready? Here we go. Honorifics or no honorifics? Should translated visual novels maintain the traditional Japanese cavalcade of name suffixes — san, kun, chan, sama, and so forth? Or should they adopt a more familiar Western approach, dropping honorifics entirely and/or replacing them with English titles — Mr., Mrs., Sir, etc. — only where situationally appropriate?
San? Or sans san?

I've thought long and hard on the matter and I think I've finally figured it out. Here's the answer you've all been waiting for.

ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?

Haven't you been reading this blog? Did you really think a self-professed amateur VN editor would suddenly crack the code wide open and save the day? I’m quite literally an idiot. My wife will back me up on that one. And besides, this isn't some question with an obvious answer, like "Should I put ketchup on my steak?" (Answer: No. And if you do, you're an awful person who probably pushes elderly nuns in front of buses when you think no one's looking, then steals their mangled nun panties.)
In fact, that question doesn't even have an answer, per se; it has a decision tree. Imagine your friend asks you, "Should I get a tattoo?" There are a lot of considerations to run through before you can give an answer. What kind of job do they have? Bankers and bartenders each have different leeway when it comes to full-sleeve tats. What's the context of their question? Is your friend asking you this over coffee? Or looking up at you from a vomit-filled toilet bowl in a way off-Strip Vegas casino? And what's the tattoo of? If it's Tweety Bird, then it's off to prison with them, along with all the steak-on-ketchup panty sniffers.
Same for honorifics. There's no one-size-fits-all answer — only questions and considerations. And the first big branch of that decision tree: Who are your readers and why do they read VNs?
The Battle Lines Are Drawn
By and large, we can break VN readers down into two camps: story-seekers and culture-seekers. It’s an overgeneralization, of course — there’s some drift and overlap between these two groups — but it will give us a useful starting point for our discussion.
Story-seekers tend to read visual novels for the plot, for the romance, for the giant mechs, for the faps, and for THE FEELS, MAN, THE FEELS. The fact that these stories are Japanese in origin is kinda cool, but secondary to the overall experience. As a group, they value readability over verisimilitude. They don’t get their stolen nun panties in a bunch because Ixrec’s translation of Rewrite doesn’t capture every last nuance of the Japanese, or even gets a few lines wrong at times. They just sit back and enjoy the ride. And for them, honorifics are often just weeaboo speedbumps that interfere with said ride.
Culture-seekers, on the other hand, tend to read VNs not only for the story, but to indulge their passion for Japanese culture. They might speak Japanese, or they might be in the process of learning to do so. Visual novels are often a means to an end: they read VNs in part to practice their Japanese. (And they practice Japanese to read VNs. Loopity-loopity-loop.) Culture-seekers enjoy the inherent Japanese-ness of the medium — seeing the subtle social interplay of honorifics at work, for example — so for them, stripping away “san” to please some Naruto-watching noobs is like throwing away part of the story.
As a translator or editor, you will inevitably piss off one of these camps. Sorry, that’s just how it is. You’re dealing with two groups of people who have inherently different motivations for reading the same work. And you can only translate/edit one way. Sucks, right? To extend my steak metaphor, it’s like owning a restaurant that, for logistical reasons, can only cook its steaks to one temperature — rare or well-done. And it’s up to you to pick which. If you go with rare, all the well-done lovers will give your little bistro one-star reviews on Yelp. And if you choose well-done, the folks who like their steaks blue and bloody will come at you with knives drawn.


In a way, this becomes sort of liberating. No matter what you do, you will annoy a good chunk of your audience. This is fait accompli. So you’re now free to do what you actually think is right for the work, knowing it won’t really affect the outcome much.
Of course, you’re also probably in one of those two camps yourself. (I know I am.) As such, you probably have an clear bias toward a particular approach — san or sans san. And you know what? That’s fine. Recognize your bias. Embrace it. Make friends with the fact that you prefer to translate/edit one way or the other. Then remember the advice I gave a few blog entries back: You are not your audience. Your close friends are not your audience. The message boards you follow are not your audience.
Your audience is your audience; its needs may differ from yours. And the novel is the novel; its needs may also differ from yours.
So here’s what I propose: Rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach to every VN, just accept that, all things being equal, you will probably prefer one approach to editing/translation over the other. And then leave yourself open to the possibility of changing that approach based on the specific needs of the VN and the audience for that VN. Handle it the same way you would that friend asking about the tattoo. Is getting inked right for them right now? And is including honorifics right for the audience and right for the novel?
Let’s walk through some questions you might ask yourself while making that decision:
Who’s the primary audience for the VN?
Are your readers primarily story-seekers or culture-seekers? Is your VN some niche title that appeals only to otakus, or is it a game with broad crossover appeal? A stronger case could be made for honorifics in the former situation; less so in the latter
What's the setting of the visual novel?
If your characters are all alien catgirls on a spaceship 23,000,000 light years from Earth, it's harder to justify keeping in honorifics than if you’ve got a cast of high school students in modern-day Japan.
Are the honorifics plot-relevant?
Is there any good story-related reason for all the sans and kuns to be there? Is the central conflict of the VN about whether the protagonist and his best girl are ready to go first name-only? If so, you have a better case for keeping honorifics than if they're just there as subtle social shading.
Is the visual novel voiced?
This one's common sense. You’ll have an easier time not including honorifics if the reader isn’t hearing them in VO. And vice versa.
How annoying are the honorifics?
This one is totally subjective, but it needs to be asked. Some writers tend to favor narration over dialogue, so their scripts will have fewer honorifics to deal with. Other writers love the rhythms of slice-of-life dialogue, so their prose might be a minefield of sans and chans. Read the script aloud. How jarring is it to the ear?
Is this an OELVN?
Stop it. Just stop it already. You don’t need honorifics. You’re writing a novel in English for an English-speaking audience, for crissakes. Don’t make me come back there.
Run down the decision tree. Be honest with yourself. Is there enough evidence to make you reconsider your approach to this novel? Are you an anti-honorific type editing a VN set in feudal Japan, where one missing “sama” could mean the difference between life or death for the characters? Consider keeping them in. Are you a pro-honorific person translating a VN about competitive bread baking in Paris? Consider ditching them.
Full Disclosure
I’m a story-seeker. Given my druthers, I will choose to omit honorifics from a VN for the sake of more readable English prose. I’m fairly certain that if it’s possible to translate Murakami and Kurosawa into English without honorifics, it should be more than possible to do the same for some random high school moege.
I admit you might be losing a certain amount content by omitting those honorifics — clues about the social standing of various characters in relation to one another, not to mention their personalities — but as far as I'm concerned, it’s content that can either be (a) baked into the script via other contextual clues, or (b) written off as redundant — that is to say, most of what those honorifics are communicating will already be apparent through the rest of the dialogue and on-screen action.
I also admit that my sans-san approach won’t be the right one in every situation. Same goes for the opposite approach. Every work and every audience demands its own solution. Your job is to stop for a moment and ask yourself what that solution is.
And then be willing to listen to the answer.

I just had an extra big breakfast, so I thought I'd pull up a chair and solve one of the most hotly debated issues facing the English-speaking VN community today. No, no need for thanks. Just name a stadium or sandwich after me at some point. Or both.

Ready? Here we go. Honorifics or no honorifics? Should translated visual novels maintain the traditional Japanese cavalcade of name suffixes — san, kun, chan, sama, and so forth? Or should they adopt a more familiar Western approach, dropping honorifics entirely and/or replacing them with English titles — Mr., Mrs., Sir, etc. — only where situationally appropriate?
San? Or sans san?

I've thought long and hard on the matter and I think I've finally figured it out. Here's the answer you've all been waiting for.

ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?

Haven't you been reading this blog? Did you really think a self-professed amateur VN editor would suddenly crack the code wide open and save the day? I’m quite literally an idiot. My wife will back me up on that one. And besides, this isn't some question with an obvious answer, like "Should I put ketchup on my steak?" (Answer: No. And if you do, you're an awful person who probably pushes elderly nuns in front of buses when you think no one's looking, then steals their mangled nun panties.)
In fact, that question doesn't even have an answer, per se; it has a decision tree. Imagine your friend asks you, "Should I get a tattoo?" There are a lot of considerations to run through before you can give an answer. What kind of job do they have? Bankers and bartenders each have different leeway when it comes to full-sleeve tats. What's the context of their question? Is your friend asking you this over coffee? Or looking up at you from a vomit-filled toilet bowl in a way off-Strip Vegas casino? And what's the tattoo of? If it's Tweety Bird, then it's off to prison with them, along with all the steak-on-ketchup panty sniffers.
Same for honorifics. There's no one-size-fits-all answer — only questions and considerations. And the first big branch of that decision tree: Who are your readers and why do they read VNs?
The Battle Lines Are Drawn
By and large, we can break VN readers down into two camps: story-seekers and culture-seekers. It’s an overgeneralization, of course — there’s some drift and overlap between these two groups — but it will give us a useful starting point for our discussion.
Story-seekers tend to read visual novels for the plot, for the romance, for the giant mechs, for the faps, and for THE FEELS, MAN, THE FEELS. The fact that these stories are Japanese in origin is kinda cool, but secondary to the overall experience. As a group, they value readability over verisimilitude. They don’t get their stolen nun panties in a bunch because Ixrec’s translation of Rewrite doesn’t capture every last nuance of the Japanese, or even gets a few lines wrong at times. They just sit back and enjoy the ride. And for them, honorifics are often just weeaboo speedbumps that interfere with said ride.
Culture-seekers, on the other hand, tend to read VNs not only for the story, but to indulge their passion for Japanese culture. They might speak Japanese, or they might be in the process of learning to do so. Visual novels are often a means to an end: they read VNs in part to practice their Japanese. (And they practice Japanese to read VNs. Loopity-loopity-loop.) Culture-seekers enjoy the inherent Japanese-ness of the medium — seeing the subtle social interplay of honorifics at work, for example — so for them, stripping away “san” to please some Naruto-watching noobs is like throwing away part of the story.
As a translator or editor, you will inevitably piss off one of these camps. Sorry, that’s just how it is. You’re dealing with two groups of people who have inherently different motivations for reading the same work. And you can only translate/edit one way. Sucks, right? To extend my steak metaphor, it’s like owning a restaurant that, for logistical reasons, can only cook its steaks to one temperature — rare or well-done. And it’s up to you to pick which. If you go with rare, all the well-done lovers will give your little bistro one-star reviews on Yelp. And if you choose well-done, the folks who like their steaks blue and bloody will come at you with knives drawn.


In a way, this becomes sort of liberating. No matter what you do, you will annoy a good chunk of your audience. This is fait accompli. So you’re now free to do what you actually think is right for the work, knowing it won’t really affect the outcome much.
Of course, you’re also probably in one of those two camps yourself. (I know I am.) As such, you probably have an clear bias toward a particular approach — san or sans san. And you know what? That’s fine. Recognize your bias. Embrace it. Make friends with the fact that you prefer to translate/edit one way or the other. Then remember the advice I gave a few blog entries back: You are not your audience. Your close friends are not your audience. The message boards you follow are not your audience.
Your audience is your audience; its needs may differ from yours. And the novel is the novel; its needs may also differ from yours.
So here’s what I propose: Rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach to every VN, just accept that, all things being equal, you will probably prefer one approach to editing/translation over the other. And then leave yourself open to the possibility of changing that approach based on the specific needs of the VN and the audience for that VN. Handle it the same way you would that friend asking about the tattoo. Is getting inked right for them right now? And is including honorifics right for the audience and right for the novel?
Let’s walk through some questions you might ask yourself while making that decision:
Who’s the primary audience for the VN?
Are your readers primarily story-seekers or culture-seekers? Is your VN some niche title that appeals only to otakus, or is it a game with broad crossover appeal? A stronger case could be made for honorifics in the former situation; less so in the latter
What's the setting of the visual novel?
If your characters are all alien catgirls on a spaceship 23,000,000 light years from Earth, it's harder to justify keeping in honorifics than if you’ve got a cast of high school students in modern-day Japan.
Are the honorifics plot-relevant?
Is there any good story-related reason for all the sans and kuns to be there? Is the central conflict of the VN about whether the protagonist and his best girl are ready to go first name-only? If so, you have a better case for keeping honorifics than if they're just there as subtle social shading.
Is the visual novel voiced?
This one's common sense. You’ll have an easier time not including honorifics if the reader isn’t hearing them in VO. And vice versa.
How annoying are the honorifics?
This one is totally subjective, but it needs to be asked. Some writers tend to favor narration over dialogue, so their scripts will have fewer honorifics to deal with. Other writers love the rhythms of slice-of-life dialogue, so their prose might be a minefield of sans and chans. Read the script aloud. How jarring is it to the ear?
Is this an OELVN?
Stop it. Just stop it already. You don’t need honorifics. You’re writing a novel in English for an English-speaking audience, for crissakes. Don’t make me come back there.
Run down the decision tree. Be honest with yourself. Is there enough evidence to make you reconsider your approach to this novel? Are you an anti-honorific type editing a VN set in feudal Japan, where one missing “sama” could mean the difference between life or death for the characters? Consider keeping them in. Are you a pro-honorific person translating a VN about competitive bread baking in Paris? Consider ditching them.
Full Disclosure
I’m a story-seeker. Given my druthers, I will choose to omit honorifics from a VN for the sake of more readable English prose. I’m fairly certain that if it’s possible to translate Murakami and Kurosawa into English without honorifics, it should be more than possible to do the same for some random high school moege.
I admit you might be losing a certain amount content by omitting those honorifics — clues about the social standing of various characters in relation to one another, not to mention their personalities — but as far as I'm concerned, it’s content that can either be (a) baked into the script via other contextual clues, or (b) written off as redundant — that is to say, most of what those honorifics are communicating will already be apparent through the rest of the dialogue and on-screen action.
I also admit that my sans-san approach won’t be the right one in every situation. Same goes for the opposite approach. Every work and every audience demands its own solution. Your job is to stop for a moment and ask yourself what that solution is.
And then be willing to listen to the answer.

I just had an extra big breakfast, so I thought I'd pull up a chair and solve one of the most hotly debated issues facing the English-speaking VN community today. No, no need for thanks. Just name a stadium or sandwich after me at some point. Or both.

Ready? Here we go. Honorifics or no honorifics? Should translated visual novels maintain the traditional Japanese cavalcade of name suffixes — san, kun, chan, sama, and so forth? Or should they adopt a more familiar Western approach, dropping honorifics entirely and/or replacing them with English titles — Mr., Mrs., Sir, etc. — only where situationally appropriate?
San? Or sans san?

I've thought long and hard on the matter and I think I've finally figured it out. Here's the answer you've all been waiting for.

ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?

Haven't you been reading this blog? Did you really think a self-professed amateur VN editor would suddenly crack the code wide open and save the day? I’m quite literally an idiot. My wife will back me up on that one. And besides, this isn't some question with an obvious answer, like "Should I put ketchup on my steak?" (Answer: No. And if you do, you're an awful person who probably pushes elderly nuns in front of buses when you think no one's looking, then steals their mangled nun panties.)
In fact, that question doesn't even have an answer, per se; it has a decision tree. Imagine your friend asks you, "Should I get a tattoo?" There are a lot of considerations to run through before you can give an answer. What kind of job do they have? Bankers and bartenders each have different leeway when it comes to full-sleeve tats. What's the context of their question? Is your friend asking you this over coffee? Or looking up at you from a vomit-filled toilet bowl in a way off-Strip Vegas casino? And what's the tattoo of? If it's Tweety Bird, then it's off to prison with them, along with all the steak-on-ketchup panty sniffers.
Same for honorifics. There's no one-size-fits-all answer — only questions and considerations. And the first big branch of that decision tree: Who are your readers and why do they read VNs?
The Battle Lines Are Drawn
By and large, we can break VN readers down into two camps: story-seekers and culture-seekers. It’s an overgeneralization, of course — there’s some drift and overlap between these two groups — but it will give us a useful starting point for our discussion.
Story-seekers tend to read visual novels for the plot, for the romance, for the giant mechs, for the faps, and for THE FEELS, MAN, THE FEELS. The fact that these stories are Japanese in origin is kinda cool, but secondary to the overall experience. As a group, they value readability over verisimilitude. They don’t get their stolen nun panties in a bunch because Ixrec’s translation of Rewrite doesn’t capture every last nuance of the Japanese, or even gets a few lines wrong at times. They just sit back and enjoy the ride. And for them, honorifics are often just weeaboo speedbumps that interfere with said ride.
Culture-seekers, on the other hand, tend to read VNs not only for the story, but to indulge their passion for Japanese culture. They might speak Japanese, or they might be in the process of learning to do so. Visual novels are often a means to an end: they read VNs in part to practice their Japanese. (And they practice Japanese to read VNs. Loopity-loopity-loop.) Culture-seekers enjoy the inherent Japanese-ness of the medium — seeing the subtle social interplay of honorifics at work, for example — so for them, stripping away “san” to please some Naruto-watching noobs is like throwing away part of the story.
As a translator or editor, you will inevitably piss off one of these camps. Sorry, that’s just how it is. You’re dealing with two groups of people who have inherently different motivations for reading the same work. And you can only translate/edit one way. Sucks, right? To extend my steak metaphor, it’s like owning a restaurant that, for logistical reasons, can only cook its steaks to one temperature — rare or well-done. And it’s up to you to pick which. If you go with rare, all the well-done lovers will give your little bistro one-star reviews on Yelp. And if you choose well-done, the folks who like their steaks blue and bloody will come at you with knives drawn.


In a way, this becomes sort of liberating. No matter what you do, you will annoy a good chunk of your audience. This is fait accompli. So you’re now free to do what you actually think is right for the work, knowing it won’t really affect the outcome much.
Of course, you’re also probably in one of those two camps yourself. (I know I am.) As such, you probably have an clear bias toward a particular approach — san or sans san. And you know what? That’s fine. Recognize your bias. Embrace it. Make friends with the fact that you prefer to translate/edit one way or the other. Then remember the advice I gave a few blog entries back: You are not your audience. Your close friends are not your audience. The message boards you follow are not your audience.
Your audience is your audience; its needs may differ from yours. And the novel is the novel; its needs may also differ from yours.
So here’s what I propose: Rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach to every VN, just accept that, all things being equal, you will probably prefer one approach to editing/translation over the other. And then leave yourself open to the possibility of changing that approach based on the specific needs of the VN and the audience for that VN. Handle it the same way you would that friend asking about the tattoo. Is getting inked right for them right now? And is including honorifics right for the audience and right for the novel?
Let’s walk through some questions you might ask yourself while making that decision:
Who’s the primary audience for the VN?
Are your readers primarily story-seekers or culture-seekers? Is your VN some niche title that appeals only to otakus, or is it a game with broad crossover appeal? A stronger case could be made for honorifics in the former situation; less so in the latter
What's the setting of the visual novel?
If your characters are all alien catgirls on a spaceship 23,000,000 light years from Earth, it's harder to justify keeping in honorifics than if you’ve got a cast of high school students in modern-day Japan.
Are the honorifics plot-relevant?
Is there any good story-related reason for all the sans and kuns to be there? Is the central conflict of the VN about whether the protagonist and his best girl are ready to go first name-only? If so, you have a better case for keeping honorifics than if they're just there as subtle social shading.
Is the visual novel voiced?
This one's common sense. You’ll have an easier time not including honorifics if the reader isn’t hearing them in VO. And vice versa.
How annoying are the honorifics?
This one is totally subjective, but it needs to be asked. Some writers tend to favor narration over dialogue, so their scripts will have fewer honorifics to deal with. Other writers love the rhythms of slice-of-life dialogue, so their prose might be a minefield of sans and chans. Read the script aloud. How jarring is it to the ear?
Is this an OELVN?
Stop it. Just stop it already. You don’t need honorifics. You’re writing a novel in English for an English-speaking audience, for crissakes. Don’t make me come back there.
Run down the decision tree. Be honest with yourself. Is there enough evidence to make you reconsider your approach to this novel? Are you an anti-honorific type editing a VN set in feudal Japan, where one missing “sama” could mean the difference between life or death for the characters? Consider keeping them in. Are you a pro-honorific person translating a VN about competitive bread baking in Paris? Consider ditching them.
Full Disclosure
I’m a story-seeker. Given my druthers, I will choose to omit honorifics from a VN for the sake of more readable English prose. I’m fairly certain that if it’s possible to translate Murakami and Kurosawa into English without honorifics, it should be more than possible to do the same for some random high school moege.
I admit you might be losing a certain amount content by omitting those honorifics — clues about the social standing of various characters in relation to one another, not to mention their personalities — but as far as I'm concerned, it’s content that can either be (a) baked into the script via other contextual clues, or (b) written off as redundant — that is to say, most of what those honorifics are communicating will already be apparent through the rest of the dialogue and on-screen action.
I also admit that my sans-san approach won’t be the right one in every situation. Same goes for the opposite approach. Every work and every audience demands its own solution. Your job is to stop for a moment and ask yourself what that solution is.
And then be willing to listen to the answer.

I just had an extra big breakfast, so I thought I'd pull up a chair and solve one of the most hotly debated issues facing the English-speaking VN community today. No, no need for thanks. Just name a stadium or sandwich after me at some point. Or both.

Ready? Here we go. Honorifics or no honorifics? Should translated visual novels maintain the traditional Japanese cavalcade of name suffixes — san, kun, chan, sama, and so forth? Or should they adopt a more familiar Western approach, dropping honorifics entirely and/or replacing them with English titles — Mr., Mrs., Sir, etc. — only where situationally appropriate?
San? Or sans san?

I've thought long and hard on the matter and I think I've finally figured it out. Here's the answer you've all been waiting for.

ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?

Haven't you been reading this blog? Did you really think a self-professed amateur VN editor would suddenly crack the code wide open and save the day? I’m quite literally an idiot. My wife will back me up on that one. And besides, this isn't some question with an obvious answer, like "Should I put ketchup on my steak?" (Answer: No. And if you do, you're an awful person who probably pushes elderly nuns in front of buses when you think no one's looking, then steals their mangled nun panties.)
In fact, that question doesn't even have an answer, per se; it has a decision tree. Imagine your friend asks you, "Should I get a tattoo?" There are a lot of considerations to run through before you can give an answer. What kind of job do they have? Bankers and bartenders each have different leeway when it comes to full-sleeve tats. What's the context of their question? Is your friend asking you this over coffee? Or looking up at you from a vomit-filled toilet bowl in a way off-Strip Vegas casino? And what's the tattoo of? If it's Tweety Bird, then it's off to prison with them, along with all the steak-on-ketchup panty sniffers.
Same for honorifics. There's no one-size-fits-all answer — only questions and considerations. And the first big branch of that decision tree: Who are your readers and why do they read VNs?
The Battle Lines Are Drawn
By and large, we can break VN readers down into two camps: story-seekers and culture-seekers. It’s an overgeneralization, of course — there’s some drift and overlap between these two groups — but it will give us a useful starting point for our discussion.
Story-seekers tend to read visual novels for the plot, for the romance, for the giant mechs, for the faps, and for THE FEELS, MAN, THE FEELS. The fact that these stories are Japanese in origin is kinda cool, but secondary to the overall experience. As a group, they value readability over verisimilitude. They don’t get their stolen nun panties in a bunch because Ixrec’s translation of Rewrite doesn’t capture every last nuance of the Japanese, or even gets a few lines wrong at times. They just sit back and enjoy the ride. And for them, honorifics are often just weeaboo speedbumps that interfere with said ride.
Culture-seekers, on the other hand, tend to read VNs not only for the story, but to indulge their passion for Japanese culture. They might speak Japanese, or they might be in the process of learning to do so. Visual novels are often a means to an end: they read VNs in part to practice their Japanese. (And they practice Japanese to read VNs. Loopity-loopity-loop.) Culture-seekers enjoy the inherent Japanese-ness of the medium — seeing the subtle social interplay of honorifics at work, for example — so for them, stripping away “san” to please some Naruto-watching noobs is like throwing away part of the story.
As a translator or editor, you will inevitably piss off one of these camps. Sorry, that’s just how it is. You’re dealing with two groups of people who have inherently different motivations for reading the same work. And you can only translate/edit one way. Sucks, right? To extend my steak metaphor, it’s like owning a restaurant that, for logistical reasons, can only cook its steaks to one temperature — rare or well-done. And it’s up to you to pick which. If you go with rare, all the well-done lovers will give your little bistro one-star reviews on Yelp. And if you choose well-done, the folks who like their steaks blue and bloody will come at you with knives drawn.


In a way, this becomes sort of liberating. No matter what you do, you will annoy a good chunk of your audience. This is fait accompli. So you’re now free to do what you actually think is right for the work, knowing it won’t really affect the outcome much.
Of course, you’re also probably in one of those two camps yourself. (I know I am.) As such, you probably have an clear bias toward a particular approach — san or sans san. And you know what? That’s fine. Recognize your bias. Embrace it. Make friends with the fact that you prefer to translate/edit one way or the other. Then remember the advice I gave a few blog entries back: You are not your audience. Your close friends are not your audience. The message boards you follow are not your audience.
Your audience is your audience; its needs may differ from yours. And the novel is the novel; its needs may also differ from yours.
So here’s what I propose: Rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach to every VN, just accept that, all things being equal, you will probably prefer one approach to editing/translation over the other. And then leave yourself open to the possibility of changing that approach based on the specific needs of the VN and the audience for that VN. Handle it the same way you would that friend asking about the tattoo. Is getting inked right for them right now? And is including honorifics right for the audience and right for the novel?
Let’s walk through some questions you might ask yourself while making that decision:
Who’s the primary audience for the VN?
Are your readers primarily story-seekers or culture-seekers? Is your VN some niche title that appeals only to otakus, or is it a game with broad crossover appeal? A stronger case could be made for honorifics in the former situation; less so in the latter
What's the setting of the visual novel?
If your characters are all alien catgirls on a spaceship 23,000,000 light years from Earth, it's harder to justify keeping in honorifics than if you’ve got a cast of high school students in modern-day Japan.
Are the honorifics plot-relevant?
Is there any good story-related reason for all the sans and kuns to be there? Is the central conflict of the VN about whether the protagonist and his best girl are ready to go first name-only? If so, you have a better case for keeping honorifics than if they're just there as subtle social shading.
Is the visual novel voiced?
This one's common sense. You’ll have an easier time not including honorifics if the reader isn’t hearing them in VO. And vice versa.
How annoying are the honorifics?
This one is totally subjective, but it needs to be asked. Some writers tend to favor narration over dialogue, so their scripts will have fewer honorifics to deal with. Other writers love the rhythms of slice-of-life dialogue, so their prose might be a minefield of sans and chans. Read the script aloud. How jarring is it to the ear?
Is this an OELVN?
Stop it. Just stop it already. You don’t need honorifics. You’re writing a novel in English for an English-speaking audience, for crissakes. Don’t make me come back there.
Run down the decision tree. Be honest with yourself. Is there enough evidence to make you reconsider your approach to this novel? Are you an anti-honorific type editing a VN set in feudal Japan, where one missing “sama” could mean the difference between life or death for the characters? Consider keeping them in. Are you a pro-honorific person translating a VN about competitive bread baking in Paris? Consider ditching them.
Full Disclosure
I’m a story-seeker. Given my druthers, I will choose to omit honorifics from a VN for the sake of more readable English prose. I’m fairly certain that if it’s possible to translate Murakami and Kurosawa into English without honorifics, it should be more than possible to do the same for some random high school moege.
I admit you might be losing a certain amount content by omitting those honorifics — clues about the social standing of various characters in relation to one another, not to mention their personalities — but as far as I'm concerned, it’s content that can either be (a) baked into the script via other contextual clues, or (b) written off as redundant — that is to say, most of what those honorifics are communicating will already be apparent through the rest of the dialogue and on-screen action.
I also admit that my sans-san approach won’t be the right one in every situation. Same goes for the opposite approach. Every work and every audience demands its own solution. Your job is to stop for a moment and ask yourself what that solution is.
And then be willing to listen to the answer.

If you’re the image editor for a VN translation, you’ll probably spend at least half your time setting English type. Lots of it. (The other half will be spent laboriously retouching out all the Japanese text you’re about to replace.) Sounds simple on the surface, right? Any pixel monkey can copy/paste from a translation document.
But there’s a lot more to good typesetting than just clicking with text tool and banging away on the keyboard. Just like good prose, there’s a certain rhythm to good type. A practiced designer will make numerous small adjustments along the way that allow the to reader glide effortlessly through whatever’s being said. Reading good type should be like driving on a well-paved road.
And the one thing all good display type has in common: someone took the time to kern it.
The Basics of Kerning
I won’t go into a detailed discussion of kerning here — the terminology, the history, the fact that it sounds like something you’d have to pay an escort extra for. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, there are lots of sites out there for you to read. Better yet, buy yourself The Elements of Typographic Style, the best book about type you could ever hope to own. Call it an early Christmas present to yourself. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that kerning means to adjust the empty space between any two adjacent characters, either bringing them closer together or pushing them father apart.
And why would you want to do that? Otherwise, you’ll have gaps and crashes in your type that’ll make things feel ever so slightly off.
To illustrate, I browsed over to a free font site and downloaded a typeface at random. (There’s a very good reason I did this, rather than using some industry-standard font like Helvetica or Times Roman. I’ll get to that in a minute.) Downloading, downloading … done! Okay, let’s set some type.

Here we have a few words set in Font X — name redacted to protect the innocent. At first glance, everything seems fine. But then you look closer and start noticing little things. Like what are these weird gaps between the first two letters of some words? Some are almost as wide as the full space between words.

And hey, what about these letters over here that are more or less crashing into each other? That can’t be good, right?

Nope. These are problems. They need to be fixed.
Kerning Pairs
The reason I picked a free font is because most professional typefaces (aka, “ones you pay a lot of money for”) are designed to avoid the majority of such issues. Once a typographer has crafted all the characters for a font, he or she will then spend countless hours specifying “kerning pairs” for it — basically, instructions on how close each letter should sit next to every other letter. (Here’s how close A should be to B, here’s how close A should be to b, etc.) While some letter pairings may look good at default spacing, others will need to pull tighter or push father out to look right. Professional fonts will often contain hundreds of these kerning pairs. It’s mind-numbing work that takes far more time than most amateur typographers are willing to put into a freebie font project.
That work still needs to get done, however, but now it’s on your shoulders instead. And, since most fan translation projects use free fonts for budgetary reasons, odds are you’ll have a whole lot of mess to clean up. Congratulations! Thankfully, once you’ve learned how, it’s pretty easy stuff.
I work in Photoshop, so I’ll be showing its kerning interface here. If you use another program, it likely has something similar. Here’s Photoshop’s character palette, with the kerning field highlighted:

The "0" you see there means there’s no kerning currently being applied to the characters on either side of your text cursor. Make this number negative, and the two letters will start pulling closer together. Make it positive, and they’ll start pushing farther apart. (Photoshop measures this in units 1/1000 ems, but that’s bar trivia you don’t really need to remember. Just know that in most cases, you’ll be entering numbers in the range of -100 to +100.) You can see the results of some sample values below.

In Photoshop, you also have the option of “Metrics” (apply whatever kerning pairs the typographer included in the font, if any) or “Optical” (let Photoshop guess what looks good, basically). Play around to get a feel for things, then advance your cursor through your type, letter pair by letter pair, and adjust this value until the two letters are the right distance apart. Rinse and repeat. And what’s the “right” distance? The one that looks right, of course. It’s a subjective thing, and this is where practice and design experience come into play. 
Like The Sands Through The Hourglass
One of the first art directors I worked under offered me this analogy, which I’ve always rather liked: Imagine the negative space between letters as vases lined up in a row. They’re all different shapes, these vases, but you want each to be able to hold an equal amount of sand (or M&Ms or whatever). Kern until your vases all look like they could all hold the same amount. This is an imprecise rule, of course, and you’ll often want to make your “vases” bigger or smaller for visual effect, but it gives a beginner a good baseline approach.
So let’s take that approach here. Let’s go through, fix all the obvious gaps and crashes we noted earlier, then make smaller adjustments to even out the text overall. (We call this giving the type an even “color.”) After some quick fiddling, we end up with something like this before and after:


It’s subtle, but the "after" type just feels nicer overall. And if your text is a UI element that some poor reader will spend countless hours staring at, you want to make sure it’s as nice as you can manage. Because the longer you spend with something, the more obvious and annoying its flaws become. (Said every roommate ever.)
The good news is you don’t need to do this everywhere. It’d be insanity to kern entire sentences or paragraphs of text, especially since the effect is barely perceptible at those point sizes. You only really need to worry about kerning display type — things like buttons, headlines, title screens, etc. If your type is over 16pt, it probably needs to be kerned. The good news is, as you learn the keyboard shortcuts for your particular application/platform, you’ll be able to breeze through a piece of type in a matter of seconds. In fact, a lot of designers find sitting down and kerning type to be mindlessly relaxing, like knitting or playing Minesweeper or making fun of the animations in Fallout 4.
Mind Your Gaps
So that’s kerning in a nutshell kernel. It’s the absolute easiest way to step up your type game, and it’s quick enough that there’s no reason not to do it. As a bonus, there’s a fun little online game out there to let you practice your kerning skills in hypothetical situations and compare them to a professional designer’s solution. It’s a fun way to kill some time at work while you boost your skills.

How do you eat an entire whale? One bite at a time. Preferably with Cholula.
How do you edit/translate/whatever a visual novel? One line at a time. Preferably with bourbon.
Whether you’re a fan of the final product or not, one of the things that impresses me most about MDZ’s fan translation of Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort is that it got released, period. As in, if you were so inclined, you could download the installer right now, patch the original Japanese game, and go play the thing on your new-fangled Windows Pee-Cee. No demos, no one-route partial patches. The whole damned VN in English, finished on schedule and out there in the world.
The project didn’t stall. It didn’t wind up in no-updates-in-six-months-but-we-think-they’re-still-working-on-it hell. It didn’t climb into that white panel van with Little Busters EX, never to be heard from again. The nice man was lying to you, Little Busters EX — there were no cute little puppies in the back. What were you thinking?!
The KoiRizo team did nothing particularly special to make this happen. We just ate the whale one bite at a time.
The rhythm method
By his own account, MDZ worked very methodically on the project, spending an average of 30 minutes every day translating scripts into English. Not when he felt like it. Not when inspiration struck. Not when enough people harassed him with all-caps emails asking why the HELL hadn’t there been any progress updates on the KoiRizo tracker lately. He made it an expected part of his routine, like brushing his teeth or eating dinner. He scheduled regular translation sessions between classes or before heading out in the morning.
He did a little bit. Every. Single. Day.
There’s a word for that: consistency. That’s what gets things done in the real world, not 48-hour marathons every random.randint(1,6) weekends fueled by Red Bull, Hot Pockets, and intense self-loathing. Consistency keeps you from getting burned out. Consistency lets you make reasonable schedules and estimates, then stick to them. Consistency is like goddamned black magic.
Over the course of the project, MDZ had consistency in spades. If he can maintain that approach to life, I have a feeling he’ll be successful at whatever he puts his mind to after college.
When I came on board as an editor, I kept a somewhat similar schedule. I resolved to set aside my commuting time each workday for editing. And so for 40 minutes in the morning and 40 minutes in the evening, Monday through Friday, I’d park my butt in a train seat, break out my laptop, and just edit.
Weekdays were reserved for my family. If you’re married with kids, you know there is no such thing as free time on weekends. If you’re not married and don’t have kids, please tell me what the outside world is like. I hear they came out with a PlayStation 2? That’s gotta be pretty awesome.
Anyway, that’s what I ended up doing. Edit every single workday. For six months. Until it was done.
(Six months? That long to edit a medium-length visual novel? Yeah, that long. KoiRizo weighs in at 36,000+ lines. Over six months, that works out to about 1,400 lines a week, or 210 lines per hour. That’s an edited line every 17 seconds or so, with most of the lines needing substantial polishing/rewriting. I have no idea what pace other VN editors work at, but I felt like this was one I could maintain over the long haul. Call it the distance runner’s lope.)

Special topics in calamity physics
So why all this rambling about whales and consistency? Because I just got back from vacation a few days ago and I’ve been surprised at how long it’s taken me to get my head back into the various projects I’ve been working on (or even writing this blog). And then I got to wondering how often something small like that snowballs into a stalled or even failed project. A missed day turns into a skipped week turns into a skipped month turns into a dead translation.
Which then got me thinking about the coefficient of friction.
It’s basic physics, which I excelled at (failing repeatedly). In layman’s terms, it’s a ratio (μ) that gives you a sense how much force two surfaces exert on each other and, therefore, how much force you need to exert to get something moving from a dead stop. Wooden block on ice? Low coefficient of friction. Wooden block on shag carpet? High coefficient of friction ... and a senseless crime against tasteful décor. Once you overcome that initial friction, it takes comparatively little force to keep an object in motion.
I can easily imagine there’s a coefficient of friction between us and our work, some quantifiable level of resistance that needs be overcome before we get our asses in gear and be productive. And unlike the one in Physics 101, which is constant for any two materials, this one is different every single day. It depends on a bunch of different factors: how interested we are in our projects, how appreciated we feel, what other projects we’ve got going on at the same time, how much sleep we’ve gotten, what else is going on in our lives, whether or not the Mets are currently in the World Series, etc.
Let’s call it the coefficient of slackitude.
Once we get started on a project and make it part of our everyday routine, we can largely ignore this number. We’ve overcome the initial slackitude and, with moderate effort, can keep things rolling along fairly smoothly. But each time we let things coast to a stop, even for a few days, we’ve got to overcome the slackitude all over again. And since that value is variable, it might be much harder the second time around. In fact, it probably will be.
Eventually, we’ll fail to do so. And our project will die.
The takeaway
So other than the fact that I had no business being anywhere near a physics classroom, what can we take away from my incoherent ramblings? A couple things:
The easiest way to make sure your project gets finished is to stick to a regular schedule. Eat the whale a little at a time — every day if you can. Minimize the gaps. Avoid having to face off against that nasty coefficient of slackitude more than once. The easiest way to make sure your project gets started at all is to pick a time when that coefficient of slackitude is low — when you’re excited by the prospect, when you’re well-rested, when you have relatively few competing interests. When you can focus. Use that time to build your momentum, so when your interest wanes or real life intrudes — it always does and it always will — the project is so embedded in your routine that you can just ride it out. We need more finished translations in the world. So pull up a chair and eat your whale. Do it for your team. Do it for yourself. Do it for poor Little Busters EX, drugged and ball-gagged in a basement somewhere, forever wondering when it’ll finally get to see the puppies.

If you’re the image editor for a VN translation, you’ll probably spend at least half your time setting English type. Lots of it. (The other half will be spent laboriously retouching out all the Japanese text you’re about to replace.) Sounds simple on the surface, right? Any pixel monkey can copy/paste from a translation document.
But there’s a lot more to good typesetting than just clicking with text tool and banging away on the keyboard. Just like good prose, there’s a certain rhythm to good type. A practiced designer will make numerous small adjustments along the way that allow the to reader glide effortlessly through whatever’s being said. Reading good type should be like driving on a well-paved road.
And the one thing all good display type has in common: someone took the time to kern it.
The Basics of Kerning
I won’t go into a detailed discussion of kerning here — the terminology, the history, the fact that it sounds like something you’d have to pay an escort extra for. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, there are lots of sites out there for you to read. Better yet, buy yourself The Elements of Typographic Style, the best book about type you could ever hope to own. Call it an early Christmas present to yourself. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that kerning means to adjust the empty space between any two adjacent characters, either bringing them closer together or pushing them father apart.
And why would you want to do that? Otherwise, you’ll have gaps and crashes in your type that’ll make things feel ever so slightly off.
To illustrate, I browsed over to a free font site and downloaded a typeface at random. (There’s a very good reason I did this, rather than using some industry-standard font like Helvetica or Times Roman. I’ll get to that in a minute.) Downloading, downloading … done! Okay, let’s set some type.

Here we have a few words set in Font X — name redacted to protect the innocent. At first glance, everything seems fine. But then you look closer and start noticing little things. Like what are these weird gaps between the first two letters of some words? Some are almost as wide as the full space between words.

And hey, what about these letters over here that are more or less crashing into each other? That can’t be good, right?

Nope. These are problems. They need to be fixed.
Kerning Pairs
The reason I picked a free font is because most professional typefaces (aka, “ones you pay a lot of money for”) are designed to avoid the majority of such issues. Once a typographer has crafted all the characters for a font, he or she will then spend countless hours specifying “kerning pairs” for it — basically, instructions on how close each letter should sit next to every other letter. (Here’s how close A should be to B, here’s how close A should be to b, etc.) While some letter pairings may look good at default spacing, others will need to pull tighter or push father out to look right. Professional fonts will often contain hundreds of these kerning pairs. It’s mind-numbing work that takes far more time than most amateur typographers are willing to put into a freebie font project.
That work still needs to get done, however, but now it’s on your shoulders instead. And, since most fan translation projects use free fonts for budgetary reasons, odds are you’ll have a whole lot of mess to clean up. Congratulations! Thankfully, once you’ve learned how, it’s pretty easy stuff.
I work in Photoshop, so I’ll be showing its kerning interface here. If you use another program, it likely has something similar. Here’s Photoshop’s character palette, with the kerning field highlighted:

The "0" you see there means there’s no kerning currently being applied to the characters on either side of your text cursor. Make this number negative, and the two letters will start pulling closer together. Make it positive, and they’ll start pushing farther apart. (Photoshop measures this in units 1/1000 ems, but that’s bar trivia you don’t really need to remember. Just know that in most cases, you’ll be entering numbers in the range of -100 to +100.) You can see the results of some sample values below.

In Photoshop, you also have the option of “Metrics” (apply whatever kerning pairs the typographer included in the font, if any) or “Optical” (let Photoshop guess what looks good, basically). Play around to get a feel for things, then advance your cursor through your type, letter pair by letter pair, and adjust this value until the two letters are the right distance apart. Rinse and repeat. And what’s the “right” distance? The one that looks right, of course. It’s a subjective thing, and this is where practice and design experience come into play. 
Like The Sands Through The Hourglass
One of the first art directors I worked under offered me this analogy, which I’ve always rather liked: Imagine the negative space between letters as vases lined up in a row. They’re all different shapes, these vases, but you want each to be able to hold an equal amount of sand (or M&Ms or whatever). Kern until your vases all look like they could all hold the same amount. This is an imprecise rule, of course, and you’ll often want to make your “vases” bigger or smaller for visual effect, but it gives a beginner a good baseline approach.
So let’s take that approach here. Let’s go through, fix all the obvious gaps and crashes we noted earlier, then make smaller adjustments to even out the text overall. (We call this giving the type an even “color.”) After some quick fiddling, we end up with something like this before and after:


It’s subtle, but the "after" type just feels nicer overall. And if your text is a UI element that some poor reader will spend countless hours staring at, you want to make sure it’s as nice as you can manage. Because the longer you spend with something, the more obvious and annoying its flaws become. (Said every roommate ever.)
The good news is you don’t need to do this everywhere. It’d be insanity to kern entire sentences or paragraphs of text, especially since the effect is barely perceptible at those point sizes. You only really need to worry about kerning display type — things like buttons, headlines, title screens, etc. If your type is over 16pt, it probably needs to be kerned. The good news is, as you learn the keyboard shortcuts for your particular application/platform, you’ll be able to breeze through a piece of type in a matter of seconds. In fact, a lot of designers find sitting down and kerning type to be mindlessly relaxing, like knitting or playing Minesweeper or making fun of the animations in Fallout 4.
Mind Your Gaps
So that’s kerning in a nutshell kernel. It’s the absolute easiest way to step up your type game, and it’s quick enough that there’s no reason not to do it. As a bonus, there’s a fun little online game out there to let you practice your kerning skills in hypothetical situations and compare them to a professional designer’s solution. It’s a fun way to kill some time at work while you boost your skills.

If you’re the image editor for a VN translation, you’ll probably spend at least half your time setting English type. Lots of it. (The other half will be spent laboriously retouching out all the Japanese text you’re about to replace.) Sounds simple on the surface, right? Any pixel monkey can copy/paste from a translation document.
But there’s a lot more to good typesetting than just clicking with text tool and banging away on the keyboard. Just like good prose, there’s a certain rhythm to good type. A practiced designer will make numerous small adjustments along the way that allow the to reader glide effortlessly through whatever’s being said. Reading good type should be like driving on a well-paved road.
And the one thing all good display type has in common: someone took the time to kern it.
The Basics of Kerning
I won’t go into a detailed discussion of kerning here — the terminology, the history, the fact that it sounds like something you’d have to pay an escort extra for. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, there are lots of sites out there for you to read. Better yet, buy yourself The Elements of Typographic Style, the best book about type you could ever hope to own. Call it an early Christmas present to yourself. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that kerning means to adjust the empty space between any two adjacent characters, either bringing them closer together or pushing them father apart.
And why would you want to do that? Otherwise, you’ll have gaps and crashes in your type that’ll make things feel ever so slightly off.
To illustrate, I browsed over to a free font site and downloaded a typeface at random. (There’s a very good reason I did this, rather than using some industry-standard font like Helvetica or Times Roman. I’ll get to that in a minute.) Downloading, downloading … done! Okay, let’s set some type.

Here we have a few words set in Font X — name redacted to protect the innocent. At first glance, everything seems fine. But then you look closer and start noticing little things. Like what are these weird gaps between the first two letters of some words? Some are almost as wide as the full space between words.

And hey, what about these letters over here that are more or less crashing into each other? That can’t be good, right?

Nope. These are problems. They need to be fixed.
Kerning Pairs
The reason I picked a free font is because most professional typefaces (aka, “ones you pay a lot of money for”) are designed to avoid the majority of such issues. Once a typographer has crafted all the characters for a font, he or she will then spend countless hours specifying “kerning pairs” for it — basically, instructions on how close each letter should sit next to every other letter. (Here’s how close A should be to B, here’s how close A should be to b, etc.) While some letter pairings may look good at default spacing, others will need to pull tighter or push father out to look right. Professional fonts will often contain hundreds of these kerning pairs. It’s mind-numbing work that takes far more time than most amateur typographers are willing to put into a freebie font project.
That work still needs to get done, however, but now it’s on your shoulders instead. And, since most fan translation projects use free fonts for budgetary reasons, odds are you’ll have a whole lot of mess to clean up. Congratulations! Thankfully, once you’ve learned how, it’s pretty easy stuff.
I work in Photoshop, so I’ll be showing its kerning interface here. If you use another program, it likely has something similar. Here’s Photoshop’s character palette, with the kerning field highlighted:

The "0" you see there means there’s no kerning currently being applied to the characters on either side of your text cursor. Make this number negative, and the two letters will start pulling closer together. Make it positive, and they’ll start pushing farther apart. (Photoshop measures this in units 1/1000 ems, but that’s bar trivia you don’t really need to remember. Just know that in most cases, you’ll be entering numbers in the range of -100 to +100.) You can see the results of some sample values below.

In Photoshop, you also have the option of “Metrics” (apply whatever kerning pairs the typographer included in the font, if any) or “Optical” (let Photoshop guess what looks good, basically). Play around to get a feel for things, then advance your cursor through your type, letter pair by letter pair, and adjust this value until the two letters are the right distance apart. Rinse and repeat. And what’s the “right” distance? The one that looks right, of course. It’s a subjective thing, and this is where practice and design experience come into play. 
Like The Sands Through The Hourglass
One of the first art directors I worked under offered me this analogy, which I’ve always rather liked: Imagine the negative space between letters as vases lined up in a row. They’re all different shapes, these vases, but you want each to be able to hold an equal amount of sand (or M&Ms or whatever). Kern until your vases all look like they could all hold the same amount. This is an imprecise rule, of course, and you’ll often want to make your “vases” bigger or smaller for visual effect, but it gives a beginner a good baseline approach.
So let’s take that approach here. Let’s go through, fix all the obvious gaps and crashes we noted earlier, then make smaller adjustments to even out the text overall. (We call this giving the type an even “color.”) After some quick fiddling, we end up with something like this before and after:


It’s subtle, but the "after" type just feels nicer overall. And if your text is a UI element that some poor reader will spend countless hours staring at, you want to make sure it’s as nice as you can manage. Because the longer you spend with something, the more obvious and annoying its flaws become. (Said every roommate ever.)
The good news is you don’t need to do this everywhere. It’d be insanity to kern entire sentences or paragraphs of text, especially since the effect is barely perceptible at those point sizes. You only really need to worry about kerning display type — things like buttons, headlines, title screens, etc. If your type is over 16pt, it probably needs to be kerned. The good news is, as you learn the keyboard shortcuts for your particular application/platform, you’ll be able to breeze through a piece of type in a matter of seconds. In fact, a lot of designers find sitting down and kerning type to be mindlessly relaxing, like knitting or playing Minesweeper or making fun of the animations in Fallout 4.
Mind Your Gaps
So that’s kerning in a nutshell kernel. It’s the absolute easiest way to step up your type game, and it’s quick enough that there’s no reason not to do it. As a bonus, there’s a fun little online game out there to let you practice your kerning skills in hypothetical situations and compare them to a professional designer’s solution. It’s a fun way to kill some time at work while you boost your skills.

If you’re the image editor for a VN translation, you’ll probably spend at least half your time setting English type. Lots of it. (The other half will be spent laboriously retouching out all the Japanese text you’re about to replace.) Sounds simple on the surface, right? Any pixel monkey can copy/paste from a translation document.
But there’s a lot more to good typesetting than just clicking with text tool and banging away on the keyboard. Just like good prose, there’s a certain rhythm to good type. A practiced designer will make numerous small adjustments along the way that allow the to reader glide effortlessly through whatever’s being said. Reading good type should be like driving on a well-paved road.
And the one thing all good display type has in common: someone took the time to kern it.
The Basics of Kerning
I won’t go into a detailed discussion of kerning here — the terminology, the history, the fact that it sounds like something you’d have to pay an escort extra for. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, there are lots of sites out there for you to read. Better yet, buy yourself The Elements of Typographic Style, the best book about type you could ever hope to own. Call it an early Christmas present to yourself. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that kerning means to adjust the empty space between any two adjacent characters, either bringing them closer together or pushing them father apart.
And why would you want to do that? Otherwise, you’ll have gaps and crashes in your type that’ll make things feel ever so slightly off.
To illustrate, I browsed over to a free font site and downloaded a typeface at random. (There’s a very good reason I did this, rather than using some industry-standard font like Helvetica or Times Roman. I’ll get to that in a minute.) Downloading, downloading … done! Okay, let’s set some type.

Here we have a few words set in Font X — name redacted to protect the innocent. At first glance, everything seems fine. But then you look closer and start noticing little things. Like what are these weird gaps between the first two letters of some words? Some are almost as wide as the full space between words.

And hey, what about these letters over here that are more or less crashing into each other? That can’t be good, right?

Nope. These are problems. They need to be fixed.
Kerning Pairs
The reason I picked a free font is because most professional typefaces (aka, “ones you pay a lot of money for”) are designed to avoid the majority of such issues. Once a typographer has crafted all the characters for a font, he or she will then spend countless hours specifying “kerning pairs” for it — basically, instructions on how close each letter should sit next to every other letter. (Here’s how close A should be to B, here’s how close A should be to b, etc.) While some letter pairings may look good at default spacing, others will need to pull tighter or push father out to look right. Professional fonts will often contain hundreds of these kerning pairs. It’s mind-numbing work that takes far more time than most amateur typographers are willing to put into a freebie font project.
That work still needs to get done, however, but now it’s on your shoulders instead. And, since most fan translation projects use free fonts for budgetary reasons, odds are you’ll have a whole lot of mess to clean up. Congratulations! Thankfully, once you’ve learned how, it’s pretty easy stuff.
I work in Photoshop, so I’ll be showing its kerning interface here. If you use another program, it likely has something similar. Here’s Photoshop’s character palette, with the kerning field highlighted:

The "0" you see there means there’s no kerning currently being applied to the characters on either side of your text cursor. Make this number negative, and the two letters will start pulling closer together. Make it positive, and they’ll start pushing farther apart. (Photoshop measures this in units 1/1000 ems, but that’s bar trivia you don’t really need to remember. Just know that in most cases, you’ll be entering numbers in the range of -100 to +100.) You can see the results of some sample values below.

In Photoshop, you also have the option of “Metrics” (apply whatever kerning pairs the typographer included in the font, if any) or “Optical” (let Photoshop guess what looks good, basically). Play around to get a feel for things, then advance your cursor through your type, letter pair by letter pair, and adjust this value until the two letters are the right distance apart. Rinse and repeat. And what’s the “right” distance? The one that looks right, of course. It’s a subjective thing, and this is where practice and design experience come into play. 
Like The Sands Through The Hourglass
One of the first art directors I worked under offered me this analogy, which I’ve always rather liked: Imagine the negative space between letters as vases lined up in a row. They’re all different shapes, these vases, but you want each to be able to hold an equal amount of sand (or M&Ms or whatever). Kern until your vases all look like they could all hold the same amount. This is an imprecise rule, of course, and you’ll often want to make your “vases” bigger or smaller for visual effect, but it gives a beginner a good baseline approach.
So let’s take that approach here. Let’s go through, fix all the obvious gaps and crashes we noted earlier, then make smaller adjustments to even out the text overall. (We call this giving the type an even “color.”) After some quick fiddling, we end up with something like this before and after:


It’s subtle, but the "after" type just feels nicer overall. And if your text is a UI element that some poor reader will spend countless hours staring at, you want to make sure it’s as nice as you can manage. Because the longer you spend with something, the more obvious and annoying its flaws become. (Said every roommate ever.)
The good news is you don’t need to do this everywhere. It’d be insanity to kern entire sentences or paragraphs of text, especially since the effect is barely perceptible at those point sizes. You only really need to worry about kerning display type — things like buttons, headlines, title screens, etc. If your type is over 16pt, it probably needs to be kerned. The good news is, as you learn the keyboard shortcuts for your particular application/platform, you’ll be able to breeze through a piece of type in a matter of seconds. In fact, a lot of designers find sitting down and kerning type to be mindlessly relaxing, like knitting or playing Minesweeper or making fun of the animations in Fallout 4.
Mind Your Gaps
So that’s kerning in a nutshell kernel. It’s the absolute easiest way to step up your type game, and it’s quick enough that there’s no reason not to do it. As a bonus, there’s a fun little online game out there to let you practice your kerning skills in hypothetical situations and compare them to a professional designer’s solution. It’s a fun way to kill some time at work while you boost your skills.

If you’re the image editor for a VN translation, you’ll probably spend at least half your time setting English type. Lots of it. (The other half will be spent laboriously retouching out all the Japanese text you’re about to replace.) Sounds simple on the surface, right? Any pixel monkey can copy/paste from a translation document.
But there’s a lot more to good typesetting than just clicking with text tool and banging away on the keyboard. Just like good prose, there’s a certain rhythm to good type. A practiced designer will make numerous small adjustments along the way that allow the to reader glide effortlessly through whatever’s being said. Reading good type should be like driving on a well-paved road.
And the one thing all good display type has in common: someone took the time to kern it.
The Basics of Kerning
I won’t go into a detailed discussion of kerning here — the terminology, the history, the fact that it sounds like something you’d have to pay an escort extra for. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, there are lots of sites out there for you to read. Better yet, buy yourself The Elements of Typographic Style, the best book about type you could ever hope to own. Call it an early Christmas present to yourself. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that kerning means to adjust the empty space between any two adjacent characters, either bringing them closer together or pushing them father apart.
And why would you want to do that? Otherwise, you’ll have gaps and crashes in your type that’ll make things feel ever so slightly off.
To illustrate, I browsed over to a free font site and downloaded a typeface at random. (There’s a very good reason I did this, rather than using some industry-standard font like Helvetica or Times Roman. I’ll get to that in a minute.) Downloading, downloading … done! Okay, let’s set some type.

Here we have a few words set in Font X — name redacted to protect the innocent. At first glance, everything seems fine. But then you look closer and start noticing little things. Like what are these weird gaps between the first two letters of some words? Some are almost as wide as the full space between words.

And hey, what about these letters over here that are more or less crashing into each other? That can’t be good, right?

Nope. These are problems. They need to be fixed.
Kerning Pairs
The reason I picked a free font is because most professional typefaces (aka, “ones you pay a lot of money for”) are designed to avoid the majority of such issues. Once a typographer has crafted all the characters for a font, he or she will then spend countless hours specifying “kerning pairs” for it — basically, instructions on how close each letter should sit next to every other letter. (Here’s how close A should be to B, here’s how close A should be to b, etc.) While some letter pairings may look good at default spacing, others will need to pull tighter or push father out to look right. Professional fonts will often contain hundreds of these kerning pairs. It’s mind-numbing work that takes far more time than most amateur typographers are willing to put into a freebie font project.
That work still needs to get done, however, but now it’s on your shoulders instead. And, since most fan translation projects use free fonts for budgetary reasons, odds are you’ll have a whole lot of mess to clean up. Congratulations! Thankfully, once you’ve learned how, it’s pretty easy stuff.
I work in Photoshop, so I’ll be showing its kerning interface here. If you use another program, it likely has something similar. Here’s Photoshop’s character palette, with the kerning field highlighted:

The "0" you see there means there’s no kerning currently being applied to the characters on either side of your text cursor. Make this number negative, and the two letters will start pulling closer together. Make it positive, and they’ll start pushing farther apart. (Photoshop measures this in units 1/1000 ems, but that’s bar trivia you don’t really need to remember. Just know that in most cases, you’ll be entering numbers in the range of -100 to +100.) You can see the results of some sample values below.

In Photoshop, you also have the option of “Metrics” (apply whatever kerning pairs the typographer included in the font, if any) or “Optical” (let Photoshop guess what looks good, basically). Play around to get a feel for things, then advance your cursor through your type, letter pair by letter pair, and adjust this value until the two letters are the right distance apart. Rinse and repeat. And what’s the “right” distance? The one that looks right, of course. It’s a subjective thing, and this is where practice and design experience come into play. 
Like The Sands Through The Hourglass
One of the first art directors I worked under offered me this analogy, which I’ve always rather liked: Imagine the negative space between letters as vases lined up in a row. They’re all different shapes, these vases, but you want each to be able to hold an equal amount of sand (or M&Ms or whatever). Kern until your vases all look like they could all hold the same amount. This is an imprecise rule, of course, and you’ll often want to make your “vases” bigger or smaller for visual effect, but it gives a beginner a good baseline approach.
So let’s take that approach here. Let’s go through, fix all the obvious gaps and crashes we noted earlier, then make smaller adjustments to even out the text overall. (We call this giving the type an even “color.”) After some quick fiddling, we end up with something like this before and after:


It’s subtle, but the "after" type just feels nicer overall. And if your text is a UI element that some poor reader will spend countless hours staring at, you want to make sure it’s as nice as you can manage. Because the longer you spend with something, the more obvious and annoying its flaws become. (Said every roommate ever.)
The good news is you don’t need to do this everywhere. It’d be insanity to kern entire sentences or paragraphs of text, especially since the effect is barely perceptible at those point sizes. You only really need to worry about kerning display type — things like buttons, headlines, title screens, etc. If your type is over 16pt, it probably needs to be kerned. The good news is, as you learn the keyboard shortcuts for your particular application/platform, you’ll be able to breeze through a piece of type in a matter of seconds. In fact, a lot of designers find sitting down and kerning type to be mindlessly relaxing, like knitting or playing Minesweeper or making fun of the animations in Fallout 4.
Mind Your Gaps
So that’s kerning in a nutshell kernel. It’s the absolute easiest way to step up your type game, and it’s quick enough that there’s no reason not to do it. As a bonus, there’s a fun little online game out there to let you practice your kerning skills in hypothetical situations and compare them to a professional designer’s solution. It’s a fun way to kill some time at work while you boost your skills.

If you’re the image editor for a VN translation, you’ll probably spend at least half your time setting English type. Lots of it. (The other half will be spent laboriously retouching out all the Japanese text you’re about to replace.) Sounds simple on the surface, right? Any pixel monkey can copy/paste from a translation document.
But there’s a lot more to good typesetting than just clicking with text tool and banging away on the keyboard. Just like good prose, there’s a certain rhythm to good type. A practiced designer will make numerous small adjustments along the way that allow the to reader glide effortlessly through whatever’s being said. Reading good type should be like driving on a well-paved road.
And the one thing all good display type has in common: someone took the time to kern it.
The Basics of Kerning
I won’t go into a detailed discussion of kerning here — the terminology, the history, the fact that it sounds like something you’d have to pay an escort extra for. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, there are lots of sites out there for you to read. Better yet, buy yourself The Elements of Typographic Style, the best book about type you could ever hope to own. Call it an early Christmas present to yourself. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that kerning means to adjust the empty space between any two adjacent characters, either bringing them closer together or pushing them father apart.
And why would you want to do that? Otherwise, you’ll have gaps and crashes in your type that’ll make things feel ever so slightly off.
To illustrate, I browsed over to a free font site and downloaded a typeface at random. (There’s a very good reason I did this, rather than using some industry-standard font like Helvetica or Times Roman. I’ll get to that in a minute.) Downloading, downloading … done! Okay, let’s set some type.

Here we have a few words set in Font X — name redacted to protect the innocent. At first glance, everything seems fine. But then you look closer and start noticing little things. Like what are these weird gaps between the first two letters of some words? Some are almost as wide as the full space between words.

And hey, what about these letters over here that are more or less crashing into each other? That can’t be good, right?

Nope. These are problems. They need to be fixed.
Kerning Pairs
The reason I picked a free font is because most professional typefaces (aka, “ones you pay a lot of money for”) are designed to avoid the majority of such issues. Once a typographer has crafted all the characters for a font, he or she will then spend countless hours specifying “kerning pairs” for it — basically, instructions on how close each letter should sit next to every other letter. (Here’s how close A should be to B, here’s how close A should be to b, etc.) While some letter pairings may look good at default spacing, others will need to pull tighter or push father out to look right. Professional fonts will often contain hundreds of these kerning pairs. It’s mind-numbing work that takes far more time than most amateur typographers are willing to put into a freebie font project.
That work still needs to get done, however, but now it’s on your shoulders instead. And, since most fan translation projects use free fonts for budgetary reasons, odds are you’ll have a whole lot of mess to clean up. Congratulations! Thankfully, once you’ve learned how, it’s pretty easy stuff.
I work in Photoshop, so I’ll be showing its kerning interface here. If you use another program, it likely has something similar. Here’s Photoshop’s character palette, with the kerning field highlighted:

The "0" you see there means there’s no kerning currently being applied to the characters on either side of your text cursor. Make this number negative, and the two letters will start pulling closer together. Make it positive, and they’ll start pushing farther apart. (Photoshop measures this in units 1/1000 ems, but that’s bar trivia you don’t really need to remember. Just know that in most cases, you’ll be entering numbers in the range of -100 to +100.) You can see the results of some sample values below.

In Photoshop, you also have the option of “Metrics” (apply whatever kerning pairs the typographer included in the font, if any) or “Optical” (let Photoshop guess what looks good, basically). Play around to get a feel for things, then advance your cursor through your type, letter pair by letter pair, and adjust this value until the two letters are the right distance apart. Rinse and repeat. And what’s the “right” distance? The one that looks right, of course. It’s a subjective thing, and this is where practice and design experience come into play. 
Like The Sands Through The Hourglass
One of the first art directors I worked under offered me this analogy, which I’ve always rather liked: Imagine the negative space between letters as vases lined up in a row. They’re all different shapes, these vases, but you want each to be able to hold an equal amount of sand (or M&Ms or whatever). Kern until your vases all look like they could all hold the same amount. This is an imprecise rule, of course, and you’ll often want to make your “vases” bigger or smaller for visual effect, but it gives a beginner a good baseline approach.
So let’s take that approach here. Let’s go through, fix all the obvious gaps and crashes we noted earlier, then make smaller adjustments to even out the text overall. (We call this giving the type an even “color.”) After some quick fiddling, we end up with something like this before and after:


It’s subtle, but the "after" type just feels nicer overall. And if your text is a UI element that some poor reader will spend countless hours staring at, you want to make sure it’s as nice as you can manage. Because the longer you spend with something, the more obvious and annoying its flaws become. (Said every roommate ever.)
The good news is you don’t need to do this everywhere. It’d be insanity to kern entire sentences or paragraphs of text, especially since the effect is barely perceptible at those point sizes. You only really need to worry about kerning display type — things like buttons, headlines, title screens, etc. If your type is over 16pt, it probably needs to be kerned. The good news is, as you learn the keyboard shortcuts for your particular application/platform, you’ll be able to breeze through a piece of type in a matter of seconds. In fact, a lot of designers find sitting down and kerning type to be mindlessly relaxing, like knitting or playing Minesweeper or making fun of the animations in Fallout 4.
Mind Your Gaps
So that’s kerning in a nutshell kernel. It’s the absolute easiest way to step up your type game, and it’s quick enough that there’s no reason not to do it. As a bonus, there’s a fun little online game out there to let you practice your kerning skills in hypothetical situations and compare them to a professional designer’s solution. It’s a fun way to kill some time at work while you boost your skills.

This blog is all about owning my mistakes and putting them on public display, so let’s do this. And yeah, I knew this one was going to come back and bite me in the ass. This was my albatross. This was my giant ass-biting albatross.
The great “tricky” debacle of 2015
So there’s this word that shows up in the English translation of Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort. If you’ve read it, you might have noticed it once or twice.
“Tricky.”
Umi, the main heroine, falls back on this word a lot to describe the protagonist. She uses it when he’s being nice. And when he’s being a jerk. And when he’s chewing food. And any other opportunity she can think of. Basically, I think she gets paid 100 yen every time she manages to work that word into a sentence. And let me tell you: girl is pulling down bank.
Of course, this is a translation, so she’s not actually saying “tricky.” She’s saying something similar in Japanese. And therein lies a tale of woe and sorrow.
The backstory
But let’s rewind a bit first.
When I came aboard the KoiRizo team, it was to edit a single route: Nagisa’s. Makes sense — I was a first-time VN editor, and Nagisa’s route was the shortest in the game. Moreover, it was an unlockable, which meant that comparatively few people would end up reading it. Other editors were already hacking away at most of the remaining routes anyway, so that was all fine by me.
As I worked my way through Nagisa’s scripts, I saw the word “tricky” pop up once or twice in Umi’s dialogue as a personal insult and it just seemed ... odd to me. Tough math problems are tricky. Opening a stubborn jar of peanut butter is tricky. People? Less so. I’m an editor, though, not a translator, so I did what I was supposed to do: flagged it for TLC review, left a comment with my concerns, edited the line as best I could, then moved along. The translator on the project had made it clear he wouldn’t be reviewing any edits until all the routes were finished being edited, so that’s about all I could do at the time.
When I finished cleaning up Nagisa’s route, I was asked if I wouldn’t mind tackling Shiori’s scripts as well, which no other editor had gotten around to yet. “Sure,” I said, and set about tidying that up as well. The word “tricky” popped up a couple more times, so I did the same thing: flagged it, reiterated my concerns, then kept on editing.
I finished Shiori, and was asked if I’d pick up the common route and Umi’s route; the editing on both of these had apparently stalled. Okay, what had started out as a quickie project for me was slowly turning into something much more time-consuming. I could see that. But I was still having fun, so I agreed. I started with the common route, where Umi has more screen time, which meant I started seeing the word “tricky” a little more often.
And I started to worry.
I flagged it, left a comment along the lines of “See my earlier notes on tricky,” and kept editing. I was determined not to get hung up on one silly word. It was becoming clear that this was sort of a catchphrase word for Umi, and I didn’t want to change the translation in my scripts if all the other editors’ scripts were keeping it as is. It’d be like if a screenwriter on The Simpsons decided that “D’oh!” sounded dumb, so Homer should say “Ooops!” instead — but only on the episodes he/she worked on.
Anyway, I finished the common route and moved onto Umi’s. And lo, I gazed into a bottomless abyss of trickiness.

You sly dumbass, you.
Now let’s talk about the actual word. In Japanese, it’s “ずるい” — “zurui.” And, true to its definition, zurui’s a tricky word to pin down.
It’s often translated as “unfair.” (Or so I’ve been told. Again, I’m an editor, not a translator. I took a Japanese class or two a few years back, so I have a basic familiarity with the rudiments of grammar and vocabulary. I’m good for: “Hello, I only speak a little Japanese. Sorry! What time is it? Where is the train? I am a very cute peach.” And that’s about it.) But there’s a little more nuance to it than that. Getting cancer is unfair. Having your advisor take credit for your thesis is unfair. “Zurui” implies a level of deviousness, impishness, slyness, craftiness, and yes, even trickiness. Someone who’s being “zurui” knows they’re getting away with something — and they’re okay with that.
Moreover, it has a secondary meaning of being miserly, which is something that definitely applies to Soutarou, the protagonist of KoiRizo. I have to imagine that wordplay was not lost on the writers ... or the characters.
There’s no one good English word to capture all those layers of meaning. When Umi uses this word to describe the protagonist in KoiRizo, it’s clear from context that her emotional shading varies from line to line. Sometimes she’s straight-up pissed at him and is telling him off: “You jackass.” Other times, she’s more of a late-game tsundere and says it playfully, even affectionately: “You sly dog you.” But she uses the same Japanese word every single time. Sometimes she’ll even say it six or seven times in a row without taking a breath.
“Zurui. Zurui. Zurui. Zurui. Zurui. ZURUI!”
It was her catchphrase. And in pretty much every instance, it had been translated as “tricky.”
If the word only appeared once or twice in KoiRizo, I could have swapped in the contextually appropriate English replacements and been done with it. (I actually did this in a handful of places throughout the VN, usually when it was clear she was at one extreme of the word or the other.) But given how often it showed up, I felt somehow obligated to honor authorial intent. This was Umi’s pet phrase for this guy she’d fallen in love with. At one point, I think she even uses it as all the parts of speech in a single sentence. If I started changing “zurui” to different words every time, she’d lose a fairly important character quirk.
After looking at all the options, the translator’s choice of “tricky” started seeming like it wasn’t a half-bad compromise after all. It got across that Umi thought the protag was dealing from the bottom of the emotional deck, but it also had a playful, teasing quality. It was never the best word in any particular instance, but it seemed like it might be flexible enough to be just sorta kinda okay in all instances.
That argument makes sense, right? I thought so at the time, anyway. And so I left “tricky” as it was.
Boy, was I wrong.

Mea culpa
I overthought it, plain and simple. I forgot my personal rule of writing and editing: Make the journey as frictionless for the readers as possible. Don’t let them get snagged on odd phrasings or slightly off words. Keep them immersed in the story.
I’d forgotten how jarring that “tricky” word seemed those first few times I saw it in translation. As the months passed, some sort of editing Stockholm Syndrome set in and I actually started thinking it might be an acceptable option.
In short, I messed up.
When I read Umineko for the first time, Battler’s use (and abuse) of the word “useless” seemed so ill-fitting to me in English prose that I almost gave up reading the VN right then and there. But now, I sort of understand how the Witch Hunt team might have, over time, come to see this ungainly adjective as the best compromise for their main character’s catchphrase. It doesn’t make me like it much more, but I can see how they ended up there. (But don’t get me started on “turn the chessboard over” vs. “turn the chessboard around.” The latter works; the former leaves you with a bunch of chess pieces on the ground.)
So here's the deal: It doesn’t matter that I had to make literally hundreds of judgment calls like this over the course of editing KoiRizo — what to do with Yuuhi’s numerous nicknames for the protagonist, as just one example — and 99% of them turned out okay (I hope).
What matters is there’s a big lump of tricky sitting in the middle of the visual novel. And it doesn't work.
I signed off on it. And I take full responsibility for that.
So what to do? Not much, to be honest. It’s one of those things I’d love to revisit if given the chance, but a 2.0 KoiRizo patch seems unlikely at this time. MDZ keeps his own counsel, but he seems to have moved onto other pursuits.
And that, as they say, is that.
Postscript
As I mentioned, the original intent of this blog was to put a spotlight on my many missteps as a first-time VN editor. That hasn’t changed. I might also try to throw in some helpful life advice from time to time, but I’m mainly happy to let my blunders serve as good object lessons for other aspiring editors.
That means you should feel free to discuss any boneheaded decisions you think I might have made. Odds are I’ll own up to them. I've got a very thick skin, after all. I just ask two things:
1. This blog is about editing. If you have issues with someone’s translation choices, I kindly ask that you take it elsewhere. I hear Fuwa has really nice forums for that sort of thing, y'know? But if you have issues with how I edited someone's translation, then bring it on.
2. Please don’t be a giant pixelated dick about it. No one likes a pixel pick.

I know what you're thinking - 'Rooke has news? He must be taking a leave from the site.' Well... HA! Not a chance, bub. No no no no no. I must annoy Tay, and I cannot do that while off in the never never.
I merely thought I might highlight the day's news. Keeping up with the world is important if you want to remain learned and engaged. PS: Please don't hurt me  
Technology:
'Driverless cars can now ‘see’ around corners,' is the first headline I see, an enviable trait lacking in inferior, organic organisms. This new ability is truly wondrous and will be of great benefit to everybody’s safety… until the sensor breaks. Not like you’ll notice, because the light on the dashboard that glows green when there’s a problem with the sensors will also be broken. But it's not like you’ll care, because the cars ability to tell its left from its right will also have taken a vacation, causing your lucky self to be driven straight off a mountain pass to your briefly thrilling but ultimately painful doom. Nobody at the manufacturer will know what caused this weird phenomena, and your death will be written off as a ‘software glitch, ain’t that just weird ahahaha.’
No thank you, I’ll walk.
More technology:
‘Volvo cars get advanced kangaroo avoidance tech in Australia’ – it’s called drivers with a working set of eyes, hands, and feet.
Politics:
‘Malcolm Turnbull’s (Australia’s current Prime Minister) visit to Indonesia could reset our relationship with our sometimes-beloved cousins to the North.’ What blessed voodoo is this? The ability to reset relationships at will? How can I get my roguish, rugged hands on whatever it is he's obtained?
Just last week he was busy flaunting his newfound powers when he ‘reset the Government’s relationship with science.’ It's just freakish. And convenient. And enviable. Mostly enviable. Because I’m sure most people have an ex-partner they’d wish to reset their relationship with... after they cocked up badly like so:
 
Social Issues:
'An all-female, Russian astronaut crew was asked (by journalists) how they’d cope without makeup and men.' One of the astronauts (or cosmonauts) replied 'we are doing work, when you’re doing work you don’t think about men and women’. At this point every man listening scoffed and choked. Why? Well, take a look at the dude opposite you, the one enjoying a burger and some fries. Is he thinking about how delicious all that fried oil is, and how he's going to die young and full of regret? Of course not, he's thinking about sex. The guy who’s on his cell, in the cinema, arguing with the tax office while having shoes thrown at him, well he’s thinking about sex too. A man could be in the middle of the Arctic, during the worst blizzard of the century, being threatened by a man wielding a machete and with 3 Timberwolves snarling at his feet and he would still be thinking about sex. This idea of thinking about 'work' when doing 'work' is alien, and foreign, and clearly too radical to take off.
Sometimes I weep for real journalism 
Health:
A recent study produced this headline: 'Why do 55% of women report a lack of interest in sex?' Because of their partner’s appearance. Too easy. Next.  
World news:
‘US releases plan for solar flares and space weather disaster’ - Aims to launch the first of many strongly worded letters into space early next year. That will show them the US is not to be trifled with.
Entertainment:
'Fifty Shades Darker’ release date delayed?' Are you heartbroken? I know I am…
Feel Good:
And we end on a happy note. ‘A 97 year old woman who was forced to leave high school 8 decades ago when her mother fell ill, broke down in tears this week as she was presented with an honorary diploma from her alma mater.’ A wonderful moment for someone who sacrificed selflessly for her whole life. 
Now, don't we all feel so much more informed?