Okay, that's it! Hope you guys enjoy next week's chapter, by the way! I just finished translating it! At this time, all I can say it was indeed a chapter with pages in it!!

Another neat facet of manga TL (for certain pubs): Save things like, Yokohama's Chinatown and places where forcefully TLing things to English would be too weird, EVERYTHING legible is translated.

Did you notice this bit in ch.17?? It might be more legible in print, ha ha...!

The "Make me!" was more like "I don't wanna!" in JP, but given the overall context of their tiny background fight, the sarcastic "make me" (implication being: I won't listen to you + I know you can't make me) felt like pretty good functional equivalence to me.

"Not helping, Shade!" is a TL I just personally like. The JP's "Now isn't the time to be saying stuff like that!" and I thought the EN phrase aligned with the intention pretty cleanly there. It's always nice to find EN that captures the whole nuance seemingly effortlessly.

Similarly: "Got it!"

The JP's "The thing the girl threw!" But this one was more about what a native EN speaker might say. "Got it" implies the she's catching something falling, and the rest of the nuance was clear from context and visuals.

Right???

Nah, it's okay! It's probably awkward to ask anyway....!

Er, creeping a bit sorry (late creeping, even) but it wasn’t due to the pay or my performance, but internal bureaucratic reasons. I’m definitely very sad I wasn’t able to see my two J+ series to completion :(

Yeah I think that’s probably how it was for most people, so no worries (a shame we couldn’t explain it in the chapter… so that falls on us, really)! I’m glad you found the explanation helpful though!

A shame we can't explain this detail in EN without making the foreshadowing excessively heavy or TLing his name to something Englishy that matches that meaning (NEVER EVER WOULD DO THAT, BTW.). But yeah, I hope the explanation made sense >_< sorry if it was a bit hard to follow.

On a side not, his FULL name, 瑠璃彦唐草 (Rurihiko Karakusa) is written almost the exact same as the flower name above, with the exception of the "彦" (hiko) part added to his first name.

The only "sneaky" part of it is that his stage name, read in Japanese order, is Karakusa Ruri, and this first name isn't written the same exact way as the flower. But it's still likely something many Japanese readers picked up on!

When we first learn about "Ruri Karakusa," his name is written as ルリ唐草 (flipping to "first name + last name" order for our purposes), which is the exact SAME reading as 瑠璃唐草 (rurikarakusa), one of the Japanese names for the flower, Baby Blue Eyes.

No u!!!