Steven Paul (75:15)
I mean, there's not a lot of, like, I guess aside from what we already discussed with the last page, there's. It's not really like, oh, let's. Let's dig into all the mysteries that this chapter has. Like, it's a pretty straightforward chapter. You know, it gets you from point A to point B. And. And I. I thought it was very satisfying in. In that regard. I have this. This. This concept in my head of, like, there's a. There's a graph. Each chapter is like a graph and with an X and a Y axis. And so the. The Y axis is the amount of time that passes until the end of the chapter. So, you know, it will go in a linear fashion, and then the X axis going across is like the amount of Information. So you start the chapter at point A, and then you end in point Z. And how far that is depends on how much the chapter covers. And each within that, that graph. Each line of dialogue that Oda writes, every little bubble is like a certain length. It's like a horizontal bar. Like, think of it like. Like Tetris pieces or Jenga blocks or something. And those that block contains how much context, like, how much information and how much context this line has. And every line is adjacent to the one that comes before it. And you stitch them together to, you know, to have a conversation where, you know, characters are talking. And ideally, you want there to be, like, a certain amount of overlap between each line of dialogue because that means, okay, character A says something and character B is responding to that. And you can see the logic progressing from point to point. And this chapter, I think, does a really good job of that. Like, it's. It's very. Feels very satisfying to read because the conversations are very cohesive and together. What Oda has not done very often, or not often enough, in my opinion, since. For the past, like, let's say, 10 or 15 years, you know, in. In the. In the post timeskip era is a lot of times because he's in such a rush to get from wherever he is to, like, get. We need to get further through the story. We need to get further through the story. And I have fewer pages than usual, and I have to, like, be picky. I have to be choosy about. What I show is he starts stacking these dialogue boxes in ways where they're not necessarily even connected. Sometimes there. There's like, a gap between them. That's the place where there's no context and the reader actually has to fill in the blanks on their own to understand why we went from this line of dialogue to that line of dialogue. And it's because he's in such a rush that he doesn't have time to, like, flesh it out. And it's, you know, it can be really frustrating. I think about that a lot. The reason why this is a thing that I think about is because it is so crucial to the, you know, the act of translation of, like, how. How much of, you know, how much of the difference of styles from the Japanese to the English is due to language and how much of it is due to the style of the author. And I can, you know, I can help with the language stuff because that's kind of my job is to like to. To know, okay, where is the, you know, where is the conversation, like, where are there gaps? What, what does this signify? These are things that, you know, when you work with Japanese and English, which are very different languages, you learn how to, to do these things. But, like, these big context gaps like Oda sometimes does, where, like, characters are just saying random things and, like, you're like, does this have anything to do with the thing before? No, it's like it's different scene or it's a different. You know, he's like, trying to make so many points that he doesn't take the time to actually make all of them count. And this was an example of, like, a chapter where he really sat and he was like, all right, this whole scene, like, with, with Jarl and Loki and Harold, where, you know, the, like, Harold is. He's explaining, like, what's going on, like, what, you know, his, his. His wishes that have. Have been ruined through his own, you know, mistakes and through the manipulations that have been placed on him. And what, you know, the, the, the, the. The priorities should be Elbaf's future and all this stuff. Like, you know, he really lets you have all the. That emotion across. And that's where I felt like. It felt like an old school chapter of one piece in that respect, where, like, you know, I, I couldn't look at it and point out any part where I was like, well, I wish they had talked a little bit more about this. Like, I, I feel like we really got everything we need to know in this scene. So I thought this was a really, really great, satisfying chapter. Just great, good dialogue, good emotional moments and. And whatnot. So I loved it.
