Uchuu Kyoudai – 45

After what feels like months of watching Hibot struggle for his life, we finally get a “normal” episode of Space Brothers. For the series’ standards, it is an uneventful episode. It’s meant to build up for later, and introduce the upcoming arc, which will focus on Mutta again as he travels to the USA in order to meet the top astronauts out there. A teaser line-up showed quite a few different characters, so that really sounds promising here!

In the meantime they also took their chance to give Sharon some character with her husband. They’re two people with a great passion for watching the starts that came together. It’s a nice little detail, but nothing more. What caught my eye the most about this episode was how she reacted when she learned what Hibito went through: they didn’t provide the full details for the fear of confusion.

Still, this series has a habit of a lot of dead very inspiring people. There’s Brian, then there is Sharon’s husband, and didn’t Serika’s father also die? Death plays a very big role in this series, but in a different way from normal. And the thing is that I keep thinking that this will be some hint for the future, but in the end everyone manages to survive.. It’s quite annoying, but well played from the creators. Just know that you can’t keep pulling stuff like this…

Also, did they spell Nanba Mutta as “Namba Mutta”? Is that his official English spelling? It’s a bit weird to have that ‘m’ there in Romanji.
Rating: 5/8 (Great)

4 thoughts on “Uchuu Kyoudai – 45

  1. The “m” isn’t unnatural at all. In actuality, the lone “n” character in Japanese changes pronounciation based on the sound of the next letter/character that comes after it. You sometimes see “senpai” spelled “sempai” because the lips are closed when you make the “p” sound and that drags back into the “n” character’s pronunciation. Interestingly, words like “honya” make the “n” sound like a vowel, as the “y” sound doesn’t close any part of your mouth at all. This also applies to the next word in a sentence, like if you were to say, “hon o kaimasu” (I will buy a book). The “n” in “hon” sounds like a vowel because of the particle “o/wo” in the sentence. If a word/sentence ends in “n” with nothing after it, however, it just sounds like an “n.” Because it sounds like an “m” when you sound out Nanba’s name, I’m guessing they took that to be an “m” when they romanized it.

    Usually, romaji is consistent with its spelling, but because there are many kinds of romanization, it’s not that strange to see them get mixed and used differently, depending on who is writing.

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