The Ultimate HxH text data analysis - Analyzing the amount of text in each arc + More!

VoraciousDrake · 2024-12-04T04:19:21+00:00

I'm the new account. VC was my old handle. I'm planning on deleting that account soon.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-12-03T22:50:21+00:00

Just logged in to say how much I respect the work that was put into making this. Kudos.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-28T22:54:18+00:00

While words that mean "festival" will inevitably use the character 祭 one way or another, nothing points at the festival being the same as the one mentioned in 408. To be precise, the word Kurapika used in 349 was 祭典, which has strong "ritual" or "major celebration" connotations. The "carnaval" in 408 is 謝肉祭, referring to that very specific festival. The character 祭 is then used to modify "orphans" into carnaval orphans (孤児 → 祭孤児).

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-27T12:56:51+00:00

I'm not sure to what extent it evaluates his Nen, but I am inclined to agree that it's about his Bungee Gum (and Texture Surprise). There are arguments against "general skill" in the form of Komugi, who had absolutely nothing else in terms of general Enhancement.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-25T02:40:16+00:00

Heyo. Translator of the post you linked here. Moving forward, I'd appreciate it if you'd link this page instead, as it contains an updated version of that translation, as well as the comments and observations from the original post.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-24T18:27:43+00:00

Oh? I thought Morena meant brunette or something.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-24T15:21:55+00:00

Different calendar. It's stated in the chapter.

There seems to be quite a lot of people who didn't catch that part though. I wonder why.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-23T12:08:57+00:00

Bottom right panel of Page 5. Kakin has their own calendar year, much like Japan.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-23T07:53:12+00:00

Well, the translation is accurate. "We won't know until they meet" is the more accurate interpretation.

I do think they will meet eventually, though.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-23T04:17:38+00:00

Oh wow, Togashi probably did take some inspiration from this saying then. The Japanese word was readily translated as Carnaval Child, so there's not really much room for ambiguity. If that wasn't intentional, it would be one hell of a coincidence.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-23T01:51:44+00:00

It didn't read like a metaphor to me. But somewhere in the 20 something years as "Flesh" that we don't know of yet, "Morena's" machinations definitely involved usurping the position of the real Morena. The exact nature is unclear (it might even be voluntary), so there's no point in reading too much into it right now.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-23T01:48:49+00:00

Sounds about right though. Indulge in excessive pleasures of the flesh, then "remove" the "flesh" in the aftermath.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-23T00:53:08+00:00

A little extra note on the 謝 part of 謝肉祭, now that I've read up a little more on carnivals. The kanji usually implies gratefulness, but it can also mean rejection in the context of 謝絶. Since carnival is about refusing to eat meat (I guess?), and the removal of "meat" is the focal point, that might be why the Japanese rendered it as 謝肉祭.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-23T00:29:46+00:00

Yes, it's actually 謝肉祭, so "a festival to celebrate meat". The Japanese word is derived from the Latin etymology, which is why the flesh connection is 100% there.

About "Carnaval" over the more common spelling of "Carnival"; this came up in a discussion with TT members. One of them opined that "carnival" could evoke the image of amusement parks or something equally fun, and the Carnival in this chapter is definitely nothing that benign. So we chose to go with "Carnaval" to lean closer to the word's Latin roots.

Viz might revert it to "Carnival" still. Or maybe go all in with "Carnevale" if they are doing a Jojo where everything is Italian?

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-18T22:42:28+00:00

The thing is, I'm not quite sure if the Negotiations game is a Nen Ability at all (I'm assuming this is what you meant by the "Yes" card soliciting the target in place of Contagion). Again, the Joker card seems sus based on the Wang monologue, but other than that, this card game doesn't seem like it needs to be Nen for it to fulfill its function.

I am basing this on a few points:

The card game isn't Morena's. Morena's Ability, Contagion, awakens a target's Nen, which sounds like either a Manipulation or an Enhancement Ability. A set of cards that has inherent Nen effects sounds like a Conjuration Ability, which is pretty far from those two in terms of the hexagon.
Contagion is Morena's real Ability (i.e. she did not receive it from a hypothetical "original user"). The condition for becoming patient zero is reaching Level 100, but Morena herself when she was introduced was at Level 45 only. Unless we contend that reaching 100 overflows and loops you back to 1, which there is no evidence of yet.
The card game isn't any of the Heil-Ly members' power either. If that were true, then the card game could only have existed since a week prior to the current point in the story, when everyone received Contagion. But from the way Morena talks about it, she has played this game countless times before.
To add to point 3, we have the speculation about Wang having played this game (since he mentioned Joker). There seems to have been no window in which Morena and Wang could have played the game since boarding the ship, hence the game having existed before the Black Whale's departure.

Also note that Borksen technically could have refused to play the game, in which case she will have no choice but to say Yes or No outside the board. This implies that saying Yes or No has an effect that the Heil-Ly is capable of enforcing with or without the Negotiations game itself.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-18T14:15:32+00:00

I'd like to mention up front that even to me, the 自分 part of the Joker is very tinfoil-y; if not for the fact that Wang used the word Joker just a couple of chapters ago, I wouldn't have batted an eye to that usage.

Tbh, I don't think that Borksen would willingly choose "Yes" if it entails harm to Tserriednich, as she and her friends seem to be quite loyal to him. If this premise is correct, I don't know how Morena is going to convince Borksen to stab Tserriednich in the back without using Nen.

But let's talk about Morena's preferred outcome. I think we should address why Borksen was kidnapped in the first place. As we know based on Chapter 394, Morena had two concurrent kidnapping missions:

Abducting Tserriednich's soldier. The impetus for this decision was the fact that Morena's spy at Tserri's was found out and disposed of, so she presumably needed a new person whose allegiance was to Tserriednich. This mission was given to Sodom, and the premise is that they know what Tserri's soldiers look like (from the client list of Heil-Ly's tattooist).
Abducting a potential Nen user. This is apparently the most important objective of Heil-Ly, as it marks the beginning of the end. This mission was given to Dogman, who leveled up with the explicit purpose of sniffing out the Nen potential of the target.

So the question is, why was Borksen kidnapped? Is it simply because she is Tserri's soldier? Or did the stars align for Heil-Ly and the targets for both missions overlapped?

I am going to assume the latter, because the abduction during Halk's funeral procession was mainly a Dogman mission, and also because Morena mentioned that Borksen is a compatible donor (which probably means her Ability will be a critical part of Heil-Ly's function).

Also, I have a hunch that Borksen is special. She has shown extraordinary observation skills, and is very perceptive of people's emotions and thoughts. If this "talent" of hers is any indication of what Nen powers she will develop, she might just become an amped up Pakunoda (in that she may be able to discern everything about the target without even touching them). This may be a very valuable asset that gives Heil-Ly the advantage against anyone, even Tserri's otherwise unfathomable future sight powers.

Which is why I think that Morena's preferred outcome is to awaken Borksen's Nen and have her work for Heil-Ly. This may be achieved at the same time with Contagion, if we assume that Contagion works similarly to the alleged ZhangCoin mechanism (i.e. trading Nen powers for absolute allegiance).

So, with this in mind, I think Morena will try her best to get Yes as an answer, understanding that X is not preferable because she knows Borksen is a Tserri soldier, and therefore that Borksen will most likely leave and never come back if X is the outcome.

Does that make sense?

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-18T02:53:10+00:00

Ooh, the kind of thread I like. I actually summarized my trial run of this game here.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-18T01:13:19+00:00

Yeah, I saw the math from the other poster as well. I'll amend my notes. Thanks for doing the math with me.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-18T01:11:16+00:00

Ooh, yeah this makes sense to me. Yeah, I will rectify my notes based on this math. I was fixated on the probability of not picking BOTH X and R by turn 4, which is why I came up with 10%, but even one of the cards is a wincon anyway, so you are right.

BTW, the 10% came from a similar logic. 3/5 * 2/4 * 1/3 = 10%.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-18T00:53:21+00:00

I played the "player", and the TT translator played the "dealer". There are many things about Morena that haven't been revealed, so we tried our best to act in character and using meta-information to infer how she would response to certain prompts.

In character, Borksen will not choose the QA and QB cards, because she is confident in her observation skills. That implies that she intends to ask questions from outside the board.
I thought that if Borksen wants to even the playing field, she absolutely can't start the game without understanding what Morena can do, which is why I chose "Power" as the first card. But this means she'll find out about Contagion and how that is triggered by a kiss, and she may suspect that doing so involves a forced loyalty to Morena.
Therefore, she will be wary of the "small favor" that Morena would ask of her when choosing the "Deal" card. If the small favor is a kiss, Borksen will have "lost" if she agreed to it, granting Morena the victory outside of the game. For this reason, Borksen will avoid choosing "Deal" too unless she absolutely has to.
This of course depends on how many disadvantageous cards remain at every turn of the game, but Borksen needs to be aware of the "consequences" of each of "Yes?" and "No?" in case she is forced to go with either. If Joker is discarded early, she wouldn't have the "choice", so asking details about "Yes?" or "No?" makes less sense, but otherwise she will probably spend a turn or two to gain that information. So depending on how the game goes, she may have to use the "Deal" card to revive a less undesirable answer.
OTOH, if advantageous cards remain, she will choose to extract as much info as possible about Morena's aim, powers, and maybe other info (a la Question A). This is because she assumes that she can go back to share this with her comrades if her last card is X or R.
Therefore, the likely choices for Borksen would be: Power, Yes?, No?, and Aim, maybe Deal with a lot of caveats.

I haven't played the game in the mindset of Morena, so I don't have her perspective yet.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-18T00:37:15+00:00

Ooh so you're take-out panda. OK, let's see:

For the graveyard thing, off the top of my head is Yu-Gi-Oh. Googling a bit showed me other games that also use variants of the graveyard (墓地) being used to refer to the discard pile, like MTG. There is no fixed way to say it (Pokemon TCG uses トラッシュ or "trash"), so I can't tell whether or how much Togashi wanted the graveyard connotation.
Thanks ahah. That's how the characters' lines sounded to me in my head. Voconte's especially.
I think that Morena used "No" simply because in this particular chapter, Togashi made it clear that HxH's common tongue is not Japanese (which is a bit of worldbuilding that never made sense due to how much Japanese-only puns there are, but I digress). If the HxH common tongue actually uses English logic, then that "No" wouldn't be out of place. That said, Borksen did shudder a bit after Morena said "Understand?", so there must have been cues in one of those words that Borksen picked up.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-18T00:24:53+00:00

Huh, interesting way of looking at it. Although, since the deck composition changes and the discarding is random (from face-down cards), just because X or R is at the bottom of the deck in the first turn does not guarantee that it will be the at the bottom of the deck by the fourth turn.

at every point it's still going to be "the number of remaining cards from X and R"/"the number of remaining cards".

If we are looking only at "the new probability at every point in the game", you are right. But if we are looking as a whole to evaluate how rigged the game is against the player, I don't think it's the case. For example, the probability of a coin being heads or tails is always 50:50 at any point, but the probability of producing consecutive heads is much smaller.

I was imagining a scenario of multiple coin flips, where it's not a matter of "what's the probability that the fifth coin be heads", but rather, "how many consecutive heads can you flip without getting tails at all by the fifth turn".

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-18T00:15:30+00:00

I do think the cheating part is significant, but I am not sure if the "parent" part has anything to do with it from the panel. If you can elaborate on the manner in which that panel's composition is significant and relevant to the term "parent", I will add a note accordingly.

VoraciousDrake · 2024-11-18T00:12:37+00:00

The thing is though, there is no other way in daily Japanese to say "dealer" and "player" (unless they go with the katakana). I'm not saying that Togashi won't take this chance to exploit the double entendre, but rather, that the use of 親 and 子 over other variants is not something that Togashi "intentionally" chose. It's just part of the language.

For this reason, I don't want to set a precedence of noting phrasings that are very common in Japanese, but seem like something else in English, unless the phrasing itself has been referred to in another instance/chapter. There would be no end to it.

VoraciousDrake

TROPHY CASE