Back to the Vaults Sneak Peak (August 2005)

Hey gang! It still stuns me that my company thought we could do with one less person. And with vacations needing to be taken, someone has to pick up the slack. But enough whinging. Since my last sneak peak went over well, I figured I’d provide another sneak peek at what I’m working on for my next Back to the Vaults piece.

Yeah, it is The Slayers (or Slayers if you will). My recent Community Anime Reviews rescue post for the series put me in the mood to rewatch it. I was supposed to work today, but since it is my normal day off and I didn’t feel good, I just sloughed off. I’ll pay for that tomorrow. 😭 However, it did allow me to get a lot more watched than I normally would have. As such, I’ve just finished the second DVD.

I’ll probably comment on this more in my actual review. However, early on, Lina is given a nickname and I couldn’t remember what the Japanese term actually was. The English version called her “Dragon Spooker”, then failed to make an acronym out of “SPOOKER”(dragon step past out of clear revulsion). <slow clap>

The Japanese term is “doramata”, which is an abbreviation of “Doragon mo mataide tooru), which translates to “Even a dragon would step over it.” It is a sorta-pun on a Japanese saying, replacing “dragon” with “cat” (neko). For the cat idiom, it means the thing is so unappealing, a cat would step over it. However, in Lina’s case, it means that she’s so dangerous, dragons would avoid even stepping on her. 

Regardless, while reading MODERN comments in places about how brilliantly brilliant this bit of brilliant adaptation is, I also saw people crying about the nerf given to Lina in the first story. Woof. Guess they never read the original novel. They’d have a stroke and heart attack at the same time.

Anyway, it is fun to rewatch after so many years. Further, now that I’m an old man, I see way more flaws than I did before. But we’ll save that for the actual piece. It could be a long one. 😂