#ch74

trigun reference let’s go

also he can just do that?

this is one of the times where Fairy Tail gets so incredibly archaic with its phrasing-- genuinely, it’s a very good sprinkle of foreshadow.

Here, the King refers to someone as ‘Old Friend’. Lucy assumes he’s talking about Loke-- but he’s talking to Lucy. He’s calling Lucy ‘Old Friend” as a substitute to ‘you’, as that’s his verbal mannerism. He also refers to Lucy directly as ‘Old Friend’ when he arrives during Tartaros. 

This is Lucy’s first time meeting him-- and he refers to her as an old friend. This might be a hint to the Heartfilias in general, and Anna. The King considers Lucy an extension of the Heartfilia history with the Celestial Spirits. 

This is all... well, I have mixed feelings, because it really misses the vague nuance in the language and changes the meaning a little too far for my liking. It’s hard to really translate this, so fair I guess. 

but here in the translated-- the King uses a lot of thee and thou-- which are second-person pronouns completely absently in the original text. Here he doesn’t say ‘you have broken the rule’, he says ‘according to our agreement with humans, we cannot do this,’ then ‘It was indirect, but the result was the same’, again here there is no direct referral. He is not speaking to Loke, he is talking to Lucy, to tell her why Loke is facing this punishment. (I don’t fully translate the sentences because it’ll be long, but you get my point--) he doesn’t refer to Loke directly until the last part, where he specifically calls him by name. ‘And due to this, Leo the Lion, you have been denied return to the celestial realm.’ 

And here-- here, he doesn’t say Old Friend. He says ‘kisama 貴様 ’, the first time he actually uses a second-person pronoun. It’s an old way of saying it, so he’s not being rude, but he specifically uses his title and then a pronoun for him.

It’s hard to capture the nuance, so I don’t blame them for this mistranslations-- but here, he doesn’t say ‘if you speak thus unto my old friend’, (which would mistakenly imply he was talking about Loke,) he says ‘if you (old friend) are going so far to say this, then...’ which means he’s talking to Lucy, directly. Not talking to Lucy about Loke. 

Lucy is the Old friend he speaks of, and this is given to us right here, in our faces, to hint of a further, more personal history between Celestial Spirits and the Heartfilia family. 

I deserve it. The fandom deserves it. Nakyum deserves it. Seungho deserves it.