"Flesh&Blood" Pirate Series Reading Club 🏴‍☠ ⛵

Big update to the table finished! I’ve generally cleaned up the information as I found more on how some of this stuff was distributed and added two major sections: Chara Birthday Fair Premium Sheets (found under the Chara Birthday Fair dropdown) and Drama CDs. @ekg: do you know what’s contained on the Special Talk Drama CDs? Is is just the cast chatting with each other or something, or is there some sort of story content?

(Thinking on it, I’m not 100% sure that some of the separate entries I listed for some of the Drama CDs are accurate. For example, I listed the tracks for the Navigation CD separately based on name, but they could definitely be all one story. No way to verify until someone can confirm whether they’re separate stories or not.)

I may have accidentally ordered more stuff while I was doing research, so I should be able to fill in/verify some of this info in like, a month. The only short story I know exists but don’t have a title for is for the one released in 2022’s Chara Birthday Fair issue; I did pick that up with my purchases, so I should be able to fill that in no problem when that arrives. Presumably there will also be another story released on a premium sheet for 2022, but I don’t think those have been distributed yet since I haven’t seen any listings so far.

There are only three bits of merch so far where I’m unable to say what kind of F&B content they contain: the seven Special Talk Drama CDs, some other Drama CD-adjacent thing (there are multiple of these, this is just one example), and this booklet.

I have the tracks from the Special Talk CDs, but my listening skills are pretty subpar, so I’m hoping ekg or someone can help me there. The second set of items, what looks like Drama CD-adjacent booklets, are all surprisingly expensive; like, the average secondhand price I’ve seen is 3000-4000 yen, if not more. I did pick up the one linked since it was the cheapest one I could find, just for science’s sake. :microscope: And the last booklet in the list I also picked up, so we’ll see.

I need to double-check all the names, but as far as I can tell there’s no duplicates among all the bonus stories? So we’re looking at a potential minimum of 72 extra F&B shorts (not including the Drama CDs), and that’s just for the stuff I could find browsing auction sites. :exploding_head: And of those 72, the only ones that’re widely and easily available are 予感, which is included with the digital copy of F&B volume 1 (I assume it’s the same 予感; once again, will need to verify. It seems pretty likely, though.) and the three stories included in the three キャラ文庫 anthologies.

I’d like for there to be an easy way for people to access these, since the vast, vast majority are part of promo booklets and such. :thinking:

Ah, and one thing I forgot to type up earlier, some fun facts from the character artbook I noticed while flipping through it!

Fun Facts
  • Height and weight for the characters are given in, unusually for a Japanese publication, feet/inches and pounds. I suppose this is 松岡先生 trying to be regionally accurate?
  • Blood types are listed for all the characters, but since that’s such a Japanese thing, everyone’s besides Kaito’s and Kazuya’s are guesses on Kaito’s part based on their personality or whatever. :rofl:
  • There are short thoughts on each character from the author given. I haven’t read any yet for fear of spoilers. :X
  • Vicente and I share a birthday! Well, almost. His birthday in the book is given as 1/22, but it’s noted that he was actually born on 1/21, and his father changed his birthday to be 1/22 so that it honored St. Vincent (presumably this guy).
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I don’t think anyone’s mentioned it, but I found a neat resource we might be able to use: 和英海洋辞典&辞書Japanese-English Ocean Dictionary

It looks like a J-E dictionary specifically for nautical terms! I was trying to double-check the pronunciation of 起錨, since I noticed it was uncertain in our table; the site gives the pronunciation as おきいかり.

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Ooooh that’s amazing! Thanks for mentioning it here :star_struck:


On an unrelated note, I have turned the volume thread OPs into wikis as well, so please feel free to add anything you think should go there. I also added the BookWalker percentages to the Vol. 3 thread OP.

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This is great stuff. I added the link to the top of the more general links of nautical vocab and terminology. There’s quite a bit of links there now, so I think we should be able to make our way around ships and sailing by now! :sailboat: :smile_cat:

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Almost forgot to reply, but basically, the extras contain 1-2 tracks of the cast talking + some of the background music (which is quite unusual). It’s free wheeling cast commentary on the story and the characters. Very entertaining honesty. Also, can be hard to listen to sometimes, as seiyuu in a group tend speak at once! XD But, great training in more natural speech for sure.

Ngl, I love listening to Freetalk CDs/ Special Talk CDs. ^>^

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I just finished Vol. 3, and it’s getting better and better :rofl:

I need to take a break now because I have quite the bookclub pile at the moment, but I will get back to the series as soon as I can. In the meantime, please feel free to continue and to use the thread for Vol. 4 that I prepared:

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I’m also taking a short break to catch up with my other book club books. ^_^; Plus folks like @ekg are still trooping along with volume 3, and I wanted to hear all their thoughts on that one as well. :3

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Yaaa, erm, ahem, two days ago I said I’d take a break, but yesterday evening I started Vol. 4 nonetheless :joy_cat:

Looks like the Light Novel Bug finally grabbed hold of me after 5 years of studying Japanese :crazy_face:

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I appreciate the thought! :heart: But you don’t have to hold anything back for my sake. I’m slowly catching up to you two. ^>^ :sailboat:

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I’m pretty far behind on my other book club book, so it all works out. :sweat_smile:

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I come with more merch pics today! My quest to acquire as many bonus stories as I can continues! My sweet table will be updated as well with any new information I’ve gleaned~

Merch Pics, round 2

First up is what should be the last of the Chara Birthday Fair booklets + premium sheets I was missing. 2022’s premium sheet will be distributed sometime in mid November, so that’s no included here. While I haven’t done a word-for-word comparison or anything, it’s pretty safe to say that the short story 予感 found in the top left booklet there is the same 予感 found in digital editions of F&B vol. 1. Bottom right is a little art board thing that was distributed for 2022.

(Premium sheets are the four outliers that just have a big F&B picture on the front.)

These next two pictures are of a book jacket that was included with copies of vol. 25 (2012年 01月号) of the 小説Chara magazine. I should’ve put it on one my books for a picture, thinking about it now. :thinking:


Next up are three random booklets. First on the left is some sort of mail-order booklet, middle is associated with the drama CDs in some way (still have no idea how these booklets were distributed), and the right is, as far as I can tell, manga-ized bites of novels Chara was publishing at the time. (See the thread for vol. 2 for inside F&B pics!) Anyone else think it’s neat that the Gloria gets its own crest here?

(@ekg, please let me know if you know any more information about that middle booklet and its siblings. I think it’s an entire section of my bonus stories table that I’ll need to add, but I don’t know a whole lot about how exactly these are related to the drama CDs. One saving grace is that at least all these booklets, as far as I can tell, have the story name on the front.)

Below are more Chara Collection EXTRA books; I still don’t have all the ones with an F&B story, but I’m getting close. Bottom right book is not part of the EXTRA series; it was distributed at an event called AGF2015 (anyone know what this is/stands for?), but I included it here since it was called Chara Collection 2015.

Finally, I managed to get my hands on a couple of copies of 小説Chara (bottom row). It’s one of Chara’s magazines that publishes mostly stuff from their novel authors, though there’s a manga story in there here or there, and some of the novel shorts have pictures with them. (F&B does not in all three of these. It’s probably for the best; a good chunk of the pictures I saw while flipping through were extremely vanilla sex scenes/slightly risque making out or the like. :see_no_evil:)

The top row are pages from two different F&B stories from two different magazines that an enterprising seller sliced from their magazine and sold. (It’s actually a good deal; the magazines are thick, and I don’t necessarily care about having access to the full thing. Plus issues of 小説Chara are really expensive secondhand for some reason.) (The top left cutout, for the story 舟遊び, is actually from the bottom left magazine; I accidentally got two copies of it.)

A question for all you folks still reading with me: the fronts of these magazines advertise author name + their series + illustrator, and the illustrator is always prefixed with CUT+. Does anyone know what this could stand for? It’s not just F&B, but all of them on these covers.

My goal is to start checking publication dates on some of these short stories to see if our little reading club is far enough along to be able to read them. If we are, I will make them available so we can all read!

Edit: @ekg, after looking into things a bit more on both secondhand listings and the BLCD Wiki you sent me before, I think the mysterious ドラマCD小冊子 I mentioned in my pictures above (it’s a green book) is linked to the Special Talk drama CDs. Secondhand listings link most booklets with a Special Talk CD, and it would also explain why the average price of a booklet is so high. Not sure how the booklets were distributed, though, if they came with the CDs or were an extra step you had to take to acquire; I haven’t found any info on the BLCD Wiki yet.

Updated the table with the new info; the ドラマCD小冊子 are listed under the Drama CD section.

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I went to Strasbourg the other day, and I found Jeoffrey and Nigel! :grin: :rofl:

(That’s a sweets shop called “The Pirate’s Candies”)

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This is great! :joy: Man, I see barrels full of candy in there! What was in the treasure chest just through the doors? :eyes:

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Haha I admit I didn’t even enter the store :woman_shrugging: I am not that interested in these types of candies, and so I was really content with the two figures outside.

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By the way, as the list of persons and places is pretty long for each volume, I was thinking of moving these

image

to their respective volumes. That would make editing them a bit easier, I guess…
I will leave the nautical terminology here though, as this is not so much dependent on the volume.

What do you think? Any objections?

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I think it makes sense. Go for it! :+1: As you say, the list has gotten too long by now! XD And it’s only going to get longer. :eyes: Better to keep things in each volume thread. :slight_smile:

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All done! I put the lists at the very end because I think that will make editing them a tad easier.

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Another merch update post~ Though that’s not going to be the main focus of this post. Not a very large haul to show off this time; I’ve done a pretty thorough job of collecting the majority of bonus stories, and’ve been focusing on the stuff that’s more expensive and/or rarer. (I can talk about it endlessly if anyone cares.)

F&B merch pt.3 + shelf of stuff

First up is a grab-bag of stuff. From top-left: two more special talk Drama CD booklets; they each contain one story. A Kaito and Vicente mousepad. The 鍵盤 story booklet, F&B volume 7, and a Nigel shikishi. (I now have a shikishi of Jeoffrey, Nigel, Kaito, and Vicente. :3)

Chunkier books here. From top-left: the Lovers Anthology book, which I believe was only sold at an exhibition celebrating the publisher Chara’s 25th anniversary. The 2017 volume of Chara Collection Extra, which, notably, is hardback. (And doesn’t list its year on the spine, which makes me frown when it’s lined up with its brethren.) Vol. 17 of 小説chara, which I recently pulled a quote from for our F&B vol. 5 thread. :3

First on the bottom row is a book of interviews with BL writers. I thought it was super interesting that 松岡先生 got to be interviewed, and I plan on reading through and dropping cool facts here later. :sparkles: And finally the 2018 volume of Chara Collection Extra.

Finally, here’s a lineup of all my 松岡なつき stuff! Note the 松岡 specifier; far left, for example, is a whole stack of 同人誌 written for HKドラグネット. Most of it is F&B-related; let me know if you’d like to know what any book is in particular. I’ve featured most here before, but not all.

(So, side note: those HKドラグネット doujin I mentioned are a treasure trove of information regarding 松岡. I can confirm, for one, that she is サブローサ, as speculated in my first merch post, based on the info in those. I plan on doing a write-up at a later time; I’ve only just flipped through them briefly to see what I had.)

Okey-dokey, so. I’ve been investigating all these bonus stories and stuff for F&B for a while now, and I’d definitely love to include them in our book club when the time arrives. There’s an absolute pile of them, and I was thinking it’d be a ton of fun for us all to read them and makes notes for future F&B enthusiasts, most notably when in the books’ timelines they take place, since the earliest of these bonus short stories were written long after F&B itself started.

Because of that last point, it’s tough to know now what’s safe to read regarding potential spoilers unless we read by publication date. In order to best determine that, I made a reference chart with main F&B volume release dates:

Volume Resease Dates

Volume Release Dates

Volume # Release Date Extra Notes
1 2001/7/22
2 2002/1/23
3 2002/6/23
4 2003/1/23
5 2003/6/23
6 2004/1/30
7 2004/11/27
8 2005/6/29
9 2006/2/25
10 2007/6/23
11 2008/3/25
12 2009/3/12
13 2009/6/25
14 2010/3/12
15 2010/6/26
16 2010/10/27
17 2011/3/1
18 2011/6/25 Gaiden 1 was published after this vol
19 2012/6/27 王と夜啼鳥 was published after this vol
20 2013/6/27
21 2013/10/26
22 2014/6/1
23 2014/10/30 Gaiden 2 was published after this vol
24 2015/6/27
Gaiden 1 2011/11/26
王と夜啼鳥 2012/11/01
Gaiden 2 2015/2/27

(Sorry this is really tall.) As you can see from the above, 松岡先生 is a really prolific author; she averaged about 2 F&B book releases a year, and actually managed 3 in 2010. (This is to say nothing of her previous work. Based on my research, the woman’s a writing machine; it’s ridiculous.)

I’m thinking the best way to keep track of all the info might be via spreadsheet, probably hosted on Google for us all to see/edit. Ordering all the bonus material by date published, since there’s so many different sources. As far as I can tell, the earliest bonus story (one that I don’t own yet :S) was published in 2004 (when F&B volume 6 was published), and it all just kind of goes from there. So we’re actually pretty close to potential bonus-reading time.

So what do you guys think? Is this something you’d be interested in? I figured we could have a separate, bonus story discussion-only thread to host it all in, that way the stuff doesn’t get mixed up/lost in the main volume discussion. I can definitely post and let people know when we’re due to read a bonus story; I also plan on making all the ones I own available for others to read.

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ooh that’s such an impressive collection! (that Nigel shikishi :eyes: )

I’m totally down! It’s amazing how much extra content this series has.

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This is amazing, what with all the history research and stuff! Nowadays we can simply use Wikipedia to research all these facts, but Wikipedia only started in January 2001, so there probably wasn’t that much information about the historical figures from the 16th century, I would expect :exploding_head:

Please feel free to add a link to the OP if you decide to turn this into a Google spreadsheet.

Sure, why not! BTW I assume these stories are also written by 松岡先生? Or are they stories written by fans?

How long are those stories? Would it make sense to have one thread per story? I think this might significantly reduce the confusion of mixing different stories in one thread as people will potentially read at very different times, and so comments will get mixed over time. Threads are cheap :grin:, and we don’t really use that many for this club compared to e.g. some long-running manga clubs with one thread per chapter, so I don’t see a need to be frugal on threads here. We could interleave the story threads with the volume threads in the OP and make it clear which order they can safely be read in. (And once we read the stories, we can even adjust their position based on what we then know is required knowledge for them.)

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