ぼっち・ざ・ろっく! (IMC) - Volume 4

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Volume 4

Start Date: May 31
Previous Part: Volume 3
Next Part: coming soon

Reading:

Start Date Chapter Start
Page
Page
Count
May 31 colour 2 6
39 9 9
40 19 8
Jun 07 41 27 8
42 35 9
Jun 14 43 45 8
44 53 10
Jun 21 45 63 10
46 75 8
Jun 28 47 83 9
48 93 8
Jul 05 49 101 10
50 113 6

Vocab Sheet

Discussion Rules

  • Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current section(s) and any content in future sections.
  • When asking for help, please mention the volume and page number. Also mention what version of the book you are reading.
  • Don’t be afraid of asking questions, even if they seem embarrassing at first. All of us are here to learn.
  • To you lurkers out there: Join the conversation, it’s fun! :durtle:
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Chapter 39-40

Start Date Chapter Start
Page
Page
Count
May 31 colour 2 6
39 9 9
40 19 8

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Chapter 39’s title image is from “Koitsura Aiteru” by Nigami 17th birthday!!

Chapter 40’s doesn’t seem to be anything in particular, though.

No other notes. Uh… Azabu-Juban (page 14) is an area of Tokyo that’s seen as being particularly posh and upper-class. The Glastonbury Festival (page 25).

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i would normally do the week’s reading in a day but i kinda feel like spreading it out a bit this week… i’ll get it done though

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ok i lied i read it all today. 大槻先輩 really climbing up my character rankings though it’s possible I just like tsunderes.

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Really?? Well that mangaka has some imagination for sure then

I thought so too, but I guess it’s a fairly standard manga-style pose.

What? Someone who draws manga has imagination? That’s crazy talk.

Eruption and rapid nucleation of pressurized gas

That’s gotta be the closest they got to breaking copyright, “no that’s not mentos that’s actually mentosu, it looks like メントス but we were actually talking about メントス”

also apparently they have ラムネ flavor which is cool, I forgot how to open those so it’s a mystery again!

Pork loin


Not again with the copyright, I was wondering what ロイン could have been but then I remembered that messaging service or whatever called LINE. Maybe they called it that before and I just forgot

More pork loin

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Yeah, I’m pretty sure they did, but I’m having trouble finding where it was now. Maybe we need Chris with his searchable database of all manga. :stuck_out_tongue:

Though I did discover while looking that Bocchi’s phone provider is named SoftPunk, which amuses me.

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Chapter 41-42

Start Date Chapter Start
Page
Page
Count
Jun 07 41 27 8
42 35 9

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Chapter forty-one’s title image is from “MATATABISTEP” by Passepied

Chapter forty-two’s is a real-world location instead, for a change. It’s, uh… here.

It seems to me like there’s always one chapter each volume that is genuinely painful to read, and well, for this volume it’s chapter 41. Starting with page 27, ロッキンジャポン is a reference to Rock in Japan, Japan’s biggest outdoor rock festival. ヴォルグ is likely a reference to Vogue magazine (which is normally rendered ヴォーグ in the real world).

Page 32, in the first panel, 熱血大陸 is, so far as I can tell, a reference to 情熱大陸 (the sound effects in the background of that panel are reportedly a representation of the show’s theme song). カンボジア宮殿 is カンブリア宮殿.

Page 33, fourth panel, ひたち海浜公園 was, at the time, the location of the Rock in Japan festival. It has since moved to 蘇我スポーツ公園 in Chiba.

Sixth panel of the same page, Kita makes a pair of rapid-fire references that I would never have spotted if I didn’t have someone else pointing them out to me: 香水 was a hugely popular song that topped the charts in Japan in 2020, while うっせえわ (rendered うるせぇばっか here) was a hugely infamous song that almost triggered a moral panic among the pearl-clutchers. No idea whether those are actually references or not, but it does go some way towards explaining what on Earth she’s going on about in this bubble.

Page 34, はっけよい and のこった are both calls in sumo matches used by the referee towards the wrestlers. What she’s getting at in this panel, though, is anyone’s guess.

Moving on to the next chapter (at last!), on page 37 third panel, クリップパイプ is a reference to CreepHyp, who (as per Ryo’s narration), got their start in Shimokitazawa Daisy Bar.

Page 39, I don’t need to observe that “Hard Opp” is Hard Off, right? 徳川埋蔵金, towards the end of Ryo’s solid wall of text in the seventh panel, is a reference to a Japanese urban legend that the Tokugawa Shogunate reportedly buried a vast amount of gold, possibly somewhere on Mount Akagi.

Page 40, Speed Cobra is a real kick drum pedal which allows you to operate a kick drum with both feet (so, I guess you use your other other foot for the hi-hat, then?). Sixth panel, ぼっちのグルメ references 孤独のグルメ. In the following panel, I’ve already mentioned this before, but ビレパン is Village Vanguard.

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Hey I can do that too! :slight_smile:
Volume 3 p.18

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Chapter 42

I appreciate the not-breaking-a-copyright rule but not sure I would like to eat at a restaurant called WcDonalds :open_mouth:

Edited to hide didn't notice it was hidden


Bocchi predicted Wcdonald’s?! Beat them to it by about 7 months when this volume released

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Not sure what you’re referencing here, but WcDonald’s has long been a bland-name version of the name used in anime. Internet says the first appearence was in a 1983 episode of an anime called Cat’s Eye.

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Oh cool I didn’t know it went that far back, as for the Wcdonald’s in my post, despite the katakana it was a promotional thing they did in the west, it was in Canada at least maybe US too. They had some wack WcDonald’s nugget sauce or something and drew those characters in a manga style on the paper bags

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Wikipedia says they ran the campaign in Japan too, starting in 2023. And is still ongoing. (And in 2009 too.) And also France and the Philippines.

Point is, the name of the campaign comes from its usage in anime, rather than the other way around. :slightly_smiling_face:

Plodding through, first chapter had some kind of difficult bits especially where Bocchi started ranting (I started and quickly gave up there) … also it was a depressing chapter lol so hoping the second chapter is easier and more sunny. I think I got the gist of it though (School overhyped and Bocchi bombed), right?

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I find this super annoying as someone who doesn’t know all the actual names of Japanese brands and stores. If I remember correctly, Kita uses イソスタ instead of インスタ, which is fine because I know it. But I don’t exactly know all these clothing brands, stores, etc., so sometimes I have no idea what the real world equivalent is.

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Yeah. Apparently even after playing in the band for almost a year, Bocchi and Kita are still considered bad players, for some reason.

I do my best to research them for my notes posts, though sometimes the simple fact that something is supposed to be a bland name slips through my attention.

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