you ask this question and then you hear a rumbling noise that grows steadily louder. you look up and just then i burst in through the wall kool-aid man style, screaming, with huge bundles labelled "my opinions on saimon" under my arms

the universal rule is this: the first character in a series who makes me shed a tear is my favorite for life. with this in mind, it is likely only the fact that MEMORY came out after LIVE that keeps saimon from being my favorite for life, because whenever I want to feel like throwing up a lung I just think about Those Scenes in MEMORY for five minutes. case in point thinking about those scenes in MEMORY for long enough to write this response did in fact make me want to throw up a lung

the thing about saimon that elevates him to me isn't just that he is way, way funnier than people give him credit for (but he is, btw), but the overarching theme of kindness as legacy, and a way of preserving the memory of someone you loved

it's the living through perhaps the most painful loss a person can experience and instead of letting it harden you for good -- and it is painted in broad strokes in MEMORY, but we know that the loss of Tsubaki made him spiral into nihilistic alcoholism for two years -- making a resolution to honor their memory through kindness and love.

so tl;dr my favorite thing about saimon is the last line of the First Note blurb for tcw:
so that the light you give to me may reach someone else in turn.
((jakkal go listen to kenshi yonezu's lemon and think about saimon and try not to throw up a lung challenge (failed). even now you remain my light))

anyway. i am not going to make any hard predictions for Karma, but based on the BoU opening show drama and the recent Animedia interview, I think we're looking at a case of Saimon feeling his age, or at least the age difference between him and a lot of the cast, which I'm very excited to potentially see play out! my only complaint about saimon as-canon is that he should be at least 10 years older, frankly.
there's also the fact that he feels he has an obligation to carry forth tsubaki's wish, and the fear that he may be failing to do so (again, possibly with the worry about the passage of time), which plays interestingly with the proposition amprule are going to be bringing in.

(i think people tend to over-simplify the idea of tsubaki's sacrifice, because it's not just "oh she died for nothing so saimon should hate phantometal" but i do not have the time or inclination to get into it now lol)

WWW thank you the most i can hope to be is entertaining

i guess the tl;dr is that think people think that there's an alternate universe where different teams won RTL and the plot became a high-octane action film where they storm alter trigger headquarters and beat the villains and... like... imma be real i do not think that has ever been in the cards, even if other teams had won. paradox live is, and always has been, an episodic ensemble piece about characters sitting around and talking about their personal problems in between taking part in fancy singing contests.

like... to wit, i've seen people kenta's plot in survive MUST directly tied to alter trigger but like... there's no evidence that the director is anyone but just a shitty guy who took advantage of kenta. like more may come out later, but at the moment? he's just a dude, and the purpose he serves is to help make a point about the characters' having complicated feelings on being abused more than he's a breadcrumb series of hint to a sci-fi action movie conspiracy.

the sci-fi stuff in paradox live is a plot device, not a plot. it is a backdrop for characters to have problems against. this is never going to be an action series, and we know this because when the anime tried to do that it actively pissed in the eyes of everything that makes the series enjoyable lol

thank you!!

i have been up and down this block since day 1 and i promise if you actually zoom out a little bit -- and i'm never going to claim that everything is perfectly fair and balanced, and I am definitely sympathetic to people who are sad about losing, and I do think some people are celebrating too preemptively -- i do think that people really do worry too much.

i wonder if part of it may be from how many people got into the series in RTL, which unlike stage battle and bou, did have knockouts? who can say.

i have further thoughts on what people seem to expect vs reality, but i will spare you that, lol. thank you very much for your kind words!

Kenta is always a series of decisions because while you can literally translate his words, you have to do a bit of juggling to convey the way they come across.

What he literally says is:
能書きばっか締め直せよふんどし

Which you could literally translate as "all you do is talk yourself up; tighten up your fundoshi back up"

the important word that makes this hard to directly translate while keeping the meaning clear to an english speaker is fundoshi, which is traditional Japanese underwear, and specifically the idiomatic phrase ふんどしを締めてかかる -- literally "[tie/fasten] one's fundoshi", meaning to stop messing around and get to serious work. I read this, coming from Kenta, as being deliberately a bit crass.

So in order to kind of get across that level of childish provocation, that's why I translate it in this context as 'nut the fuck up', lol.
The problem is that this then kind of makes "all you do is talk yourself up" kind of feel like a weird precedent (it sounds fine in Japanese, I just think a direct translation kind of parses weirdly in English) so I scooted it around to refocus the translation of the line being about running your mouth instead of doing the work, especially in the context of being @ cozmez. Coming back to it a week later I do feel like I could probably find a better phrasing, but there was a logic to my twiddling, lol.
(But the "nut up" is staying, i stand by that one ww)

That's fine!

When I say "don't snitch", I mean things like... do not (for example) post links to phanto.moe in the replies of official tweets or on other OFFICIAL social medias (e.x. commenting on a post on the official English facebook, or their Bilibili account, or on an official YouTube video). And hopefully this goes without saying, but don't like, write in to ask Gcrest or Avex's official emails to ask if it's okay to translate this that or the next thing (which... if you know why that's not a hypothetical and is a thing I've really seen happen in a fandom, you know).

Just don't put me in a position where Gcrest or Avex don't have plausible deniability to look the other way.

I believe it was (first?) mentioned in the Animate pamphlets from 2020*, but Anne's pet bird also came up again in the character trivia shorts they posted in the leadup to REVOLUTION! It's a Java sparrow named Tamago.

(*I had to piece translations for profile stuff of out a bunch of apparently-now-deleted tweets, photos, and privatters, so the part that mentions Anne's sparrow never made the cut because I could never personally verify the phrasing.
I'd love to eventually revise my translations of this material but I don't feel like paying $4 per pamphlet for five year old sheets of paper that mostly says stuff I already know, lol.)