This week’s title image comes from 盛者必衰の理、お断り, by KANA-BOON. Unfortunately the only online version of the original music video I can find is on Tiktok…
KANA-BOON is one of the bands referenced in the first episode of the anime, in one of the posters on the wall of Bocchi’s wardrobe. It’s the cover of their album なんでもねだり
On page 26, Ryo and Nijika’s school is possibly Shimokitazawa Seitoku High School. Bocchi’s school appears to be entirely fictional - or at least, I can’t find one with that name. I can find a ramen shop with that name, though. As for Bocchi’s 県外 residence, it’s not entirely a spoiler, but it hasn’t been mentioned yet, sooo… clues later in the anime indicate that it’s somewhere in this area, though I haven’t been able to pin it down precisely quite yet. It only takes about 90 minutes to get to Shimo-Kitazawa Station from there, so presumably her school is further away. And perhaps some distance from a train station.
Nijika’s money box which partly appears on page 32 is shaped like an old-style Japan Post box. You can buy a money box just like it (though currently I’m struggling to come up with a link to one that’s not just a cheap-looking knockoff, like this).
For anyone following along with the anime, this chapter covers the first half of episode two, however the cold open is from the next chapter.
And in other news, this is an odd-numbered week, so it’s time for the first “Are we ready to speed up yet?” poll! Namely, do we want to accelerate from one chapter per week to two chapters per week? I’m pretty sure I know what the result of this one is gonna be, but I said I’d ask, so I’m gonna ask. Plus, I herd all y’all liek polls.
I try to read without stopping to break everything apart and I manage to follow the plot but I miss some of the jokes and references.
For instance I’m not sure I get the 禁句 thing on page 29. Is the joke that Ryo puts curse words on her lyrics and so Bocchi should be the one writing them?
Also why isn’t Bocchi leveraging her popular YouTube account to sell tickets? It may be stressful for her but it beats having to do バイト…
No, it’s just that Bocchi has words which are taboo to her - as detailed on the previous page - and since Bocchi is the only one who knows all of them, it’s safest if Bocchi does the lyrics.
It’s fairly apparent from the video description shown on page 8 that her YouTube persona is practically an entirely different person. She probably doesn’t want to mix her online and offline worlds together. Also, perhaps it simply never occurs to her.
This was a pretty funny chapter, I really liked the whole sequence of events where Bocchi was being hilarious about the part time stuff. Her trying to give them her wedding fund, being awkward at a miso restaurant, and her in court getting the death penalty really caught me off guard
I was also wondering about these two parts in the chapter if anybody has any ideas (I think I got it formatted right this time! But I don’t got the page numbers.)
I don’t fully understand what Bocchi is saying here, I was thinking maybe since they suggested she handles the songs with swears in it, she’s like “I spent all that spare time in the library for this?”
の here is the “noun placeholder” usage of the particle, similar to “one” as in the phrase “there’s an insane-looking one mixed up in there too”. The も is just the regular “also, too” type も.
I’d say this is the trope of the loner kid sitting in the library filling notebooks with their own poetry and/or song lyrics. (Also, 禁句 aren’t swears, but rather words that are taboo - in this case, taboo to Bocchi, like 青春 or ロマンス or whatever.)
Close - I think it’s more like ”All that time I spent in the library (writing song lyrics etc) during my free periods, was it all preparation (布石) for this moment?"
Can I ask what’s with the “Rem” tab of the vocab sheet? I accidentally used that once instead of Ch3 today, and they seem to have different definitions? Like on page 29 布石 is listed as “strategic arrangement of go stones; opening moves” in the Rem tab which was confusing and I didn’t realise the correct definition was in the Ch3 tab until after reading the above post.
The bubbles in the bottom panel are her inner monologue (she’s not saying this out loud), right? Am I getting it right that in the top panel she was about to suggest that Ryo and her could do things together and in the bottom panel she is listing reasons why that would never work?
Ah, okay, so the left-hand bubble is something along the lines of “I’m the only one who is コミュ症” (or more literally that only one of them is コミュ症) and maybe that she doesn’t dare to enter the kind of clothes stores that Ryo likes?
I guess the whole clothes store thing was confusing me into thinking she wanted to go shopping together
Oh yeah, I agree with the “someone who is” part, but now I’m confused about the clothes stores again.
In the second panel, she was talking about second-hand clothing stores and I thought she meant there that she (Bocchi) actually visits those (I don’t know, I was thinking that maybe those are more approachable for loners). In the third panel she says 洋服屋さん so those are not second-hand clothes, right? I was thinking that she meant that Ryo visits a different kind of store than she does. But maybe I’m wrong.
