I’ve been watching Delicious in Dungeon lately. Ten out of ten, no notes, except that name. It doesn’t roll off the tongue very well in English. The anime is generally very well translated overall (I’m watching on Netflix, and if it has a subs option, I couldn’t find it at a glance, and I don’t care enough about subs vs. dubs to spend more than five seconds looking, so fuck it, dubbed it is), and even does a good job of using current English slang and idioms in a way that feels fairly natural, though I worry that as early as the 2030s people saying “cringe” is going to make this feel like a period piece.
But for some reason they went with “Delicious in Dungeon” instead of something nearly identical but with better flow, like “Delicious Dungeon” or “Dungeon Delicious.” “Delicious in Dungeon” doesn’t come up directly in the story except that the narrator will sometimes say the title at the end of an episode as a bookend, which works with any title that has the word “dungeon” and “delicious” in it (and if you called it “Dungeon Cooking” instead, all you’d have to do is slightly rework the narration to fix the segues). I wonder if it’s supposed to have the same cadence as “Dungeons and Dragons?” But if so, it doesn’t, the syllables are wrong and using the “in” instead of the “and” throws off the usual “it’s like D&D but” title where you do two alliterative nouns separated by an “and.” Starships and Sorcerers doesn’t have the cadence, but the [noun] and [noun] format makes it recognizable and the nouns used signal some kind of space fantasy setting. If you really want the D&D reference, go with Dumplings and Dragons.
And it reminds me of K-On! The title itself is untranslated (I don’t know if K-On! even means anything in Japanese? It doesn’t sound like a full Japanese word), but the name of the rock band that the main characters are in is named “After School Tea Time,” after the fact that they meet as a club after school and spent a lot of the early episodes using their club as basically an excuse to fuck around having tea and snacks after school. But whereas “After School Tea Time” sounds like an anime with an overly literal translation, “Tea After School” is a good name for a band.
Both of these shows have perfectly good English translations but for some reason they fall apart on proper nouns.
Also this blog updates on Fridays now because my Patreon updates on Wednesdays and I want a Discord bot to be able to post both of them to the same channel without doubling up on two posts the same day. And also if you want to read my thoughts on TTRPGs and game design, those are on Patreon these days. I am now a professional game designer, so I don’t mind charging roughly $0.25 per post for my thoughts on that subject, whereas this blog is mostly my dumping ground for video games and anime and other stuff where I am just a guy.
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