#e064

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不甲斐ない / fugainai "worthless”

I do want to emphasize this, because when Yuudias says that he lost his friends because he was ‘worthless’ - he fully means it. It doesn’t translate to not being “good enough” or “strong enough” or anything meant to imply he was lacking in a skill.

No, Yuudias full on called himself useless, pathetic, and worthless. That’s what this word means. He was truly blaming himself for everything.

親友 / shinyuu “best friend”

This is more akin to a level of best friend that’s above what is usual. Like if someone was your “friend-soulmate” in a sense.

The Legend of the Crane Wife / Tsuru no Onegaeshi

When Tremolo stumbles upon Phaser in the middle of the night working over a loom, this is a direct reference to a Japanese myth known as The Legend of the Crane Wife.

There are a lot of variations of this story, as usual, but I’ll recount the one I’m most familiar with:

A human man saves a crane from a trap. In gratitude, the crane turns into a beautiful woman and shows up at his doorstep to become his wife. The man, not knowing that this woman is the crane he saved, welcomes her into his home, but tells her that he is not wealthy, and that she would not live a lavish life with him. The woman says she has a way to make money and to not worry about it.

They live for several years together, and the crane wife makes many beautiful kimonos for the man to sell at the market, which in turn makes them wealthy. However, she looks thinner and more sickly every time she completes one. When she works, she always does it in the middle of the night, and tells the man to never look inside the room.

One day, the man is overcome by his curiosity, and looks into the room. Working over the loom is not a human woman, but a beautiful crane, who plucks her own feathers in order to weave the beautiful kimonos.

The crane, upon being discovered, tells the man that she cannot be with him any longer, and flies away to never come back.

As to what this means in terms of Tremolo and Phaser... your guess is as good as mine. I snuck some looks at Japanese forums and fansites, but it seems like everyone is also a little baffled as to what exactly it implies. 

Personally, I think it was Phaser subconsciously trying to repress his space dragon blood for Tremolo’s sake, since he was afraid of aliens, but who knows. I still don’t understand why he made those scrolls.

Perhaps this is something they will go over in the future.

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Happy end of the arc once again! What a wild ride this arc was - but I had a lot of fun watching it! There was maybe only a single episode that I felt a little ambivalent on, but not a single one I disliked at all.

Phaser and Tremolo were standout characters for me, although mainly moreso do to their heavy Chinese coding. I have a certain bone to pick with anime consistently making characters with Chinese undertones the villain, but regardless...

I’m interested in learning more about space dragons in the future, considering they created the universe (or were there when that happened), it seems like!