By how it was described in the novels (not features in screencaps) it really felt like it was a brutal bloodbath when they got into the Keep of Saint Emmanuel. Could they possibly have declared/announced this earlier in the battle? Maybe not, maybe there's logistical reasoning behind it. Nonetheless, while I didn't feel so much for the mass suicides at the end of the battle (unfortunately), I did get the sense that the battle preceding was bloodier than its manga counterpart. Sometimes I do have to wonder things like this.

Arslan you are so funny.

JEBDIDHDISH GUISCARD?!

Why... did you want to know, Guiscard? Does the truth matter? The truth is what you paint it as, no? True or no, you can use it for propaganda, right?

God I sound like Andragoras. Ew.

I must say that Guiscard is a character I don't really... get.

I kinda wanna know how these things are used... I suppose it doesn't matter, the description is just there for Vibes, but still.

I want the deets, Tanaka.

“these words shone with a great light” is such an ironic description, I'm not gonna lie.

So this is where Parsians thought Rukhnabad came from! Taking notes, taking notes... (I have AU Thoughts™ but not enough brain juice to elaborate immediately, maybe if somebody asks about it...)

Oh, I see what you mean now, but the term 'half-breed' is offensive, so please don't use that to describe someone who is mixed race. (Just want to edit and add, this anon has been in touch to apologise, it was a problem with automatic translation and they didn’t know.)

Anyway, yes, Jaswant's eye colour is pretty striking, isn't it? As for the canon colour... Yes, if you run the (Chinese) text of the novel through Google Translate, it does come back as 'agate-coloured', but that may not be accurate. Agate comes in a wide variety of colours so it'd be an unusual choice as a descriptor for eye colour, unless it's reference to the patterns common to agate and not a colour. Plus, the text does seem to specifically indicate pupils (the black circle in the middle of your eyes) rather then the iris (the coloured outer circle). So what colour is it implying? I'm not sure, because I'm not equipped with enough language skills to accurately translate it! I did look up '瑪瑙' and in Chinese it can also translate to 'carnelian', a brownish-red mineral, while in both Chinese and Japanese it's one additional character away from the word for 'onyx', which would have made more sense.

Perhaps it's more of a poetic/literary description as opposed to literal? (I did search for "agate-colored pupils" and out of three results, two are what I assume to be light novel translations... though of course I don't know whether they translated the original phrase accurately or not, either!) I do feel that Tanaka is usually quite straightforward when describing the appearance of his characters, though. Maybe the colour of 'agate' is more standardised in this context.

Rukhnabad Translations went with 'dark eyes' in their fan translation. (Tagging @kingarslan who may be able to give more insight here; I definitely feel like I'm missing something and I'm curious about this line in the original Japanese.)

...I had to go back and check because I didn’t really remember writing this at all x_x It seems Arakawa did just take some artistic liberties giving him the blue/green eyes.

And as far as I recall, Gieve and Arslan are the only Parsian characters ever explicitly mentioned as having an eye color that wasn’t just “dark”. I’ve made the joke to my friends several times that Arslan’s blue eyes get compared to stars in the night sky very often, as opposed to Gieve’s which are supposed to be a bit brighter, I think.

Have you ever wanted to hear the S1 E03 argument between Kubard and Shapur in Farsi? I found the dubbed episodes and this was the first one I downloaded. I haven’t watched much of it yet, but I can tell you that so far, I like Daryun’s voice the best (although he’s been renamed to Dariush!). It’s very slow to download, I can upload some more clips of other characters talking later.

(lying face down in the dirt) it’s done