Fallen Brides: Merce — You'd Think There Could Have Been SOME Attempt At Continuity

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In case anyone missed my last post, this update is a day late because of a prolonged power outage.

Merce's story won the poll, so here's another 2,500 words of it. The plot is moving at a fairly brisk pace. I hope you all enjoy it.

As Always, comments and corrections are appreciated.

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A Brief Delay

Merce's chapter of Fallen Brides won the poll by a wide margin, so I'll continue translating that next. Both other choices will be on the next poll (which, for a bit of variety, will not have any Fallen Brides on it).

I had planned to post the second part of it earlier this afternoon, but there was no power on my street for most of the day, so I wasn't able to work in the morning. As a result, it will be up early Thursday afternoon instead. Future updates will continue on Wednesdays as usual.

A New Poll

Sorry this update is late. Between travel and the upcoming holidays, my schedule's been kind of a mess. I am, however, back with a new poll. As promised, it has three options: Merce's chapter of Fallen Brides; the World Guide II short from the last poll; and The Imperator Doesn't Sleep, a novella from the same author as Baphomet Complex. (Which I really need to put together a second draft of at some point.)

As before, I will post more of my translation of whichever story gets the most votes every Wednesday from now until it's finished. After that I'll make another poll. The next poll will include both stories that fail to win this one, as well as a new story. I'll be counting the votes next Monday morning.

Vote Here

A Hill Where Love Grows

Case 5: Merce

The Imperator Doesn't Sleep

I honestly wanted to include a larger section of Imperator and add somewhat to Hill. If I have time, I'll do another bit of each and update this post and the Pastebins Thursday night.

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Fallen Brides: Ebook

This week's update isn't much. It's also early, because I'll be traveling for the rest of this week. Expect me back next Wednesday with the next poll and samples for all the stories on it.

In the meantime, ebook links are now in the sidebar to right. The version of Fallen Brides you see there is a new file with corrections, standardized terminology, illustrations and a linked table of contents. It includes all four chapters I have translated so far, and also "Until She Falls" as an appendix. I will update it with additional chapters as they are finished and add additional books to the sidebar as I get to them.

Fallen Brides: Koyoi — Complete

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Koyoi's chapter, totaling just over 17,000 words, is now complete. The text below includes the full story, with formatting, corrections, and the illustration.

Next week will be a fully formatted ebook (with a linked table of contents) of all the Fallen Brides stories so far. I may also post the new poll at that time, but it also might take another week for me to get all the samples ready.

The next poll will include the World Guide II story from the last poll, another Fallen Brides chapter, and a story from another book. If anyone has specific requests for what they want the latter two to be, feel free to post them in the comments and I'll consider them.

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Fallen Brides: Koyoi — Consistent Characterization?

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Fallen Brides: Koyoi — 75%

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Due to personal issues, this week's update is a bit late and a bit short (about 2,300 words). Next week's should be back to normal, and two more should finish the story.

I've tried adding spaces between paragraphs because Blogger's formatting options are kind of awful and adding HTML to make them register as paragraphs is worse, but the base text doesn't have them because it's formatted for making into an ebook, so I may have missed a break somewhere. Hopefully it's easier to read now.

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Fallen Brides: Koyoi — More Than Halfway There

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Here's your weekly Fallen Brides update. It's a couple hundred words longer than last week's, but this is a long section, so it doesn't end on as good a breaking point.

This section finishes up Koyoi's flashbacks, and starts on what I'm sure all of you knew was coming.

It occurs to me that I should probably have mentioned this before, but Shinonome, Koyoi, and Tasogare mean "daybreak," "evening," and "twilight," respectively.

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Fallen Brides: Koyoi — Cliffhanger

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Here's another weekly update. It's a bit late in the day, but it's 3,000+ words to make up for it.

Other than that, there's not much to say, except that I now have an official English copy of the encyclopedia, and have elected to follow its translations of key terms for the sake of clarity. (In practice, this really just means that "Dark Lord" becomes "Overlord.")

Thank you to Dan for continuing to point out typos and other errors.

See you all again with another update next Wednesday.

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Fallem Brides: Koyoi — Foreshadowing And Payoff On the Same Page

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As promised, I'm back with another weekly update. Koyoi's story won the vote almost 4 to 1, so that's the one I'll be translating for now. If you wanted the World Guide 2 story, don't worry, there will be another vote once this story is finished, and it will be on the poll.

I should note that Koyoi speaks with an accent. I would normally try to represent this in the text, but a real-world accent would be out of place in the setting, and my attempts at inventing something looked abysmal, so I ended up not. (I can at least rest easy that I am in good company, as I've seen a number of well-received literary translations take this route.) So, just keep that in mind as you read while I think on what to do about it.

As always, any comments or corrections are welcome. See you again next Wednesday.
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A New Update Schedule (For Real This Time), and a Choice

I'm terribly sorry I haven't posted anything here in over month. As most of you have probably guessed by now, I tend to get caught up in one project at a time and forget about everything else. That causes a mess, so I'm switching over to a more rigid schedule to get some work done on everything at a regular pace and, hopefully, also make some time for things that might actually help pay the bills.

Because there's so much MGE material, I want to make sure I'm working on the stories that people are interested in first. As a result, I've decided to put it up to a vote. I've translated the first 2,000+ words of two different stories, and made a strawpoll. Vote for whichever one most interests you. The one with the most votes by Sunday evening is the winner, and I'll post updates to that translation here every Wednesday at around this time. When it's finished, I'll make another poll with the story that didn't win, plus a new story. If no one votes, the people I play fighting games with decide without reading either.

Vote here.

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Let's Play Another Story of Fallen Maidens, Part 3

Another update. These should be faster now that I've figured out how to get the game to record in OBS and don't have to play through every section multiple times to make sure I haven't missed any dialogue. (The game has a bad habit of advancing text even when it's minimized and another window is selected.)

This update brings us another ending, another possible transformation, and two more species of monster. It also advances Eristia's character a bit, with some human-monster interaction that doesn't revolve around sex. (Not something we've gotten to see a lot of in any of the fiction I've translated so far.)

To reiterate a response to a question on the previous update: I am translating the entire game script (to the best of my knowledge; I've been trying to get all the different lines for examining things, but I can't guarantee I won't miss one somewhere), but actually patching English into the game is way beyond my coding ability. If anyone does know how to do that with RPG Maker games, they are free to use my translation to make a patch.

I any case, I recommend playing along if you can (or just playing if you read Japanese, because then you wouldn't need this LP), because the various animations and music do add to the game's character.

As always, any feedback is appreciated.

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Let's Play Another Story of Fallen Maidens, Part 2

I'm back with the second, longer installment of the translation / screenshot LP of the new MGE game. This one gets more into the meat of the game, as well as its core gimmick.

Expect additional updates regularly.

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Let's Play Another Story of Fallen Maidens, Part 1

So, an MGE RPG Maker game came out a few days ago (you can find it on DLsite), and it's a sequel to Fallen Maidens. Since I just finished translating the short from that book, and I've already done three of the eight Fallen Brides stories, I decided to do a screenshot LP. I'll be translating the full script as I go, so feel free to play along.

My summary of events will be in italics and justified right; translated text from the game will be as normal. Let me know what you think.

Now, without further ado, let's play Another Story of Fallen Maidens: The Falling Hero and the Magic Sword of Truth.

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World Guide I Short Story — "Until She Falls"

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Well, it's been a little while since I posted something new. To make up for it, here's a complete translation of "Until She Falls," the short story from the end of World Guide I. Although it was actually written before Fallen Brides, it effectively serves as a sequel to Wilmarina's chapter. It's also about half as long as a Fallen Brides chapter, clocking in at just over 12,000 words.

Next on the list for MGE stories is the short from the end of World Guide II, by Strange. If you like weresheep or you're getting tired of corruption stories, it's probably for you. I don't think I'll post it all at once like I did with this, but expect a short delay while I work up a good chunk to start with and get some other projects sorted.

Comment if you have any specific requests for after that, although it won't necessarily determine what I choose to translate.

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Fallen Brides: Wilmarina — The Much-Needed Second Draft That Took Far Too Long to Write

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EPUB

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So, that took quite a bit longer than I'd hoped, but I've finished the second draft of Wilmarina's chapter. This one really needed it: I've fixed the formatting, corrected a number of straight-up errors, and improved a lot of awkward wordings. It was simultaneously encouraging to see how far I've come, and embarrassing to see how bad I was. Even if you've read the first draft (or if you gave up on it because the translation was a mess), I recommend reading this version if you're at all interested.

As for future MGE translations, I have a complete draft of "Until She Falls," the story from the first World Guide, but it's not all typed yet. It's about half the length of a Fallen Brides chapter. You could consider it a followup to Wilmarina's chapter, although it was actually written first.

I'm hoping to get back onto a better schedule soon, but my manga translations (check out Yagyuu Juubei Dies if crazy action is your thing) are taking up a lot of my time, as are my professional commitments (which are mostly looking for more of them at the moment, unfortunately).

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Fallen Brides: Sasha — In Conclusion

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Well, there were actually a few fewer pages left than I remembered, so this updated concludes Sasha's chapter of Fallen Brides. It spends more time on what Lescatié looks like under monster rule than any of the other chapters so far, so that may be of interest to some of you. Otherwise it's all denoument. Like the other chapters, it gives the impression that the author was only interested in writing Elt's relationship with one woman (plus the two girls, in this case) and pays only grudging lip service to the idea that he theoretically ends up with all of them.

Next up will be either the next chapter, Primera's, which is written by Strange (who wrote Baphomet Complex) and called "Lonely in the Moonlight," or the short story from the end of World Guide I, which is by The Dullahan's Groom (who wrote Wilmarina's chapter) and has a titled I am still debating what to do with (literally, it's something like "Until She Falls Into [being a] Succubus"). The latter also deals with the events in Lescatié and is a little less than half the length of a chapter of Fallen Brides. If you would prefer I translate a short story from one of the other books (the two Diaries of the Age of Monster Love and Afterschool Alice Tale) next instead, feel free to leave a comment.

No ebook version of this chapter just yet because I'm working on editing the previous two chapters (especially Wilmarina's, which badly needs it) and releasing them together with improved formatting and a linked table of contents.

Also, as regards the image, (below, with the text) I have never been so infuriated by an artist's refusal to draw a man's eyes. Kenkou Cross is even willing to draw them for some nameless guys in the illustrations to the print edition of the encyclopedia, so I really can't imagine why they wouldn't do it for an actual character in an image printed after an entire paragraph about that character's eyes.

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Fallen Brides: Sasha — The 10,000 Word Sex Scene, Concluded

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Back as promised (first self-imposed deadline I've actually made in a while) with another 2,600 words. This update concludes the sex scene that has taken up slightly more than half of the story so far, but there are still another ten pages to go, so expect me back with some of that in another two weeks.

I also recently acquired a copy of the latest MGE novella by Strange, Imperator ha nemuranai. (The Imperator Doesn't Sleep) The only KC illustration is the cover, but it's about the same length as Baphomet Complex, or maybe a little shorter, so you can expect to see that at some point.

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Fallen Brides: Sasha — Back From Thesis Hell

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So, it's been four months since my last update. Sorry. Really wasn't planning on that. I had a bit of computer trouble, then I really had to focus on my masters thesis, and then classes started up again, so I really didn't have any time to think about my translation projects. The thesis is done and handed in now, at least, so I can finally get back to work.

By way of apology, here's another 4,000-odd words of Fallen Brides. About two-thirds of the way through the chapter now. Expect actual regular updates for the first time in approximately forever, at least until the end of this chapter. After that I'll probably pause to work up a long section to start the next one before I post it again.

I'm trying out a slightly more domesticating style this time around, (moving speaker tags to where they would usually go in English, etc.) so let me know what you think.

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