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Katanagatari Discussion Thread

Agnaa

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So I've finally gotten around to reading the Katanagatari novels, and it seems like I'll need to overhaul a lot of the verse.

Seems like the LN and anime aren't different enough for us to be allowed to have both, so the profiles will need to be based on the novels exclusively.

I'm only 7 books through so far, but Sabi's 8-B island feat and Nanami's mountain feat are both nonexistent. We didn't see their fight on the island or get the impression it destroyed the island, so that can't be used. And Nanami's feat just doesn't exist. She just killed all of the villagers, the mountain wasn't destroyed. Mt. Shirei was destroyed, but it turns out that this was essentially a chain reaction; Akuto Bita kept the mountain intact, so when Nanami took that for herself the mountain collapsed over 15 minutes.

So far I've found a slightly better speed feat that I've got calced here, and I think Ginkaku has a really strong case for SoL not being an "exaggeration".

Hax-wise I think it'll turn out to be a wash, or maybe slightly improved hax. Some abilities don't function as indexed with the novel descriptions, and the anime cut out some bits of hax that the novel had. I've taken 14 pages of notes so far so I obviously can't go over every little detail, but the profiles will essentially need to be rebuilt from LN statements, maybe only keeping descriptions/summaries/pictures.

So uhh... Discuss the series in general! Feel free to ask about any specific feat/statement you want me to check for from the first 9 episodes (book for the last 3 is arriving in about 2 weeks).
 
Following. As a side note considering what you've mentioned, how different would the two versions have to be to warrant separate profiles?

If only because I'll be sad if any of the stuff I've done goes to waste and get nixed
 
I didn't really understand the "different enough for separate profiles" rule last time I talked about this with ya. Turns out it's mostly a plot thing.

And since the LNs and anime pretty much follow the same plot, it's a no-go on separating them :v

Really wish they could be kept but them's the rules.
 
Wow Nanami is insane in the novels. Turns out that even without Akuto Bita her durability is so high that Shichika cannot damage her, but her own "full strength" is even higher, to the point that taking a single step tears off all her skin, destroys her muscles, and breaks her bones. She also gets some really nutty instinctive reaction feats, still being able to fight with the blood vessels in her brain having bursted, and with her having almost lost consciousness.
 
Also, Shichika gets multiple explicit statements of being able to hit someone on the other side of the planet with Ryuuryoku Kakou. So that's neat, and might lend more credence to Hakutou Kaigan's ridiculous range.
 
Oooooh I'm excited

Question though, I've seen examples in the past, though I tragically can't remember the specific topic, where an anime adaptation was considered valid material for profiles if it followed the same plot as the ln, and brought new information to light without contradicted what's already established.

With that in mind, would the anime showing the levels of destruction caused by Hakuhei and Nanami, which either occurred off-page in the light novel or just weren't addressed, not simply count as expanded information?
 
I think that only happens if there's extensive input from the original author, and I don't think that's the case here, but I can try looking into it further.

As far as I can tell his only contribution was writing the audio book series that was released with the anime. So we'd treat that as canon but I don't think we'd treat nonexistent anime feats as canon. (But we might be able to use distances from the anime visuals for feats we hear about in the LN).

EDIT: Nisio also said this in an interview:
– What did you think of the already finished first episode?

I’m not able to say very much as this is something people will watch for themselves, but what impressed me the most was the fact that “Take-san’s drawings are able to move. Even when animated, they’re still very appealing”. That left quite an impact. I had thought the appeal of Take-san’s art was in her still pictures, so I was very surprised by the skill and attention shown by WHITE FOX.

The action, one of the main themes of the work, is incredibly cool, so please look forward to this as well.
Which I think implies that he didn't have a ton of editorial control over the creation of the anime, like with a lot of his series that have been animated. Seems like he was brought on just for additional content, while the rest of it was left to the studio.
 
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Wow, I started reading Kyotou Yasuri, the audiobook prequel, and it is ******* insane. This somewhat spoilery picture should get across what I mean.

Apparently Mutsue Yasuri is 6 different people.

This is going to make the profile/scaling really confusing...

It also seems like Katanagatari's getting a full-on Supergenius now, so that's neat.
 
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Not really clones, they're all very different. One's an extremely skinny man, one's an extremely fat man, one's an extremely muscly man, one's an extremely pale woman, one's a young boy who seems to simultaneously be 1000 years old, and one's a giant spotted dog.

From the initial scene they're presented in they can each appear in different locations and talk to each other, but from a later scene they can swap places seemlessly, and they all seem to share the same knowledge.

I'll probably need to finish all chapters to know whether it's transformation, teleportation, or something weirder.
 
Just found a really good feat that I'll need help calcing:
As she continued her surveillance, Sabi Kokken crouched down. She had not grown tired of standing. If she so desired, she could have stood there for one or two years, without moving a muscle. So then why did she crouch down? It was to pick up a perfectly ordinary tree branch by her feet.

As she spoke the unspeakable without a thought for where her loyalties lay, whose plans she acted by, who she betrayed, or who she was allied with, Kokken raised the stick into an overhead stance with a fluid motion.

Although Sabi Kokken was famed as a master of the sword, she did not wear a sword outside of tournaments and other formal occasions. She had no need to carry one otherwise. Any long and thin object, be it a stick or a roll of paper, became a sword in her hands.

Then, without pausing in her monologue, without concentrating, and without hesitating she casually brought down the stick, her sword.

It was no special move or secret technique. It was nothing more than a simple swing. It was the same basic swing that was taught in every swordsmanship dojo. But Kokken’s destructive power and range were dramatic and enormous.

A gale almost like a typhoon swept through the battle between Hida Takahito and Yasuri Mutsue, even reaching Head. It was a large-scale disaster. The earth cleaved and the heavens parted. The carpet of soldiers was torn off the ground. Not a single blade of grass was left standing in the wake of the massive destruction that Sabi Kokken’s single swing had wrought. It was beyond comparison to Hida Takahito’s firepower. It was purely destructive power.

A pale woman sluggishly rose from what was no longer a battlefield, but only a bare crater the size of a lake.
There's a small but real chance that it ends up scaling to some of the main Katanagatari cast.

EDIT: Okay yeah, I'd really appreciate it if other people read this. If not for its amazing writing, then so I have other people to discuss the weird scaling implications with. There's stuff pointing towards, like, tier 7 5-year-old Meisai.
 
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I need to read it, any idea where I can access it?

And yeah I remember someone talking about the Sabi family being insane, and I was thinking "what are you talking about, we only ever see Hakuhei"
 
You can find them here https://swordtranslations.wordpress.com/

Towazugatari is also translated there, but it isn't very interesting. It's mostly characters just talking about their personal philosophies; stuff that we already hear a lot about in the show itself.
 
Thank you very kindly.

Also any idea whether that one side story that explained more about Shikizaki Kiki and Hitei's powers and how they worked was canon?
 
So that was one of 15 crossover stories in a series Nisio wrote. So far only 6 of them have been translated, so it's pretty hard to say right now.

But I think that since the timelines between the different series probably don't match up that it's probably not canon (since they couldn't canonically be meeting each other at those ages, in some of the other crossovers), but we may need some more research/translations to say for sure.
 
Which of course is also super iffy because there was time travel involved, and that's a whole other can of worms.

For what it's worth, I didn't notice any contradictions on the Katanagatari side of things (albeit having only seen the anime)
 
Okay after finishing it, I think pretty much everyone involved would end up being tier 7/6...

But that also means that it would scale to start of series Shichika, who would end up scaling to pretty much everyone, which would also seem fairly weird because Shichika killed Mutsue...

Mutsue and the people comparable to him alone might not scale then, but then that also gets a little weird...

aaaaaa
 
I mean, I always assumed Mutsue was scaled below everyone else in the series. In the anime all you get is that he can cut people apart (so 9-B) and the shogunate retainers were scared to fight him (so they wouldn't go above 9-B until gaining the deviant blades)
 
Mutsue defeated Head after a long battle.

Head was stated to be comparable to Kokken Sabi and Zanki Kiguchi.

Zanki Kiguchi was stated to be a more difficult opponent than Kokken Sabi.

Kokken Sabi and Zanki Kiguchi could both easily fend off Mutsue.

I would like to say that it's because there's 6 Mutsues, and the 6 of them have defeated opponents that they wouldn't have been able to defeat as one person, but Zanki Kiguchi fended off all 6 Mutsues.

Aside from this scaling, though, Mutsue would be around 9-B, maybe a bit higher up, as that's where his solo feats put him.

As an aside, Nanami is still laughably above everyone else in the series, even at 7 years old, so she'd definitely scale to tier 7/6, at least.
 
I'd think that Mutsue and Head were capable of damaging each other, so I'd put them pretty much equal to each other.

Mutsue just says he'd rather fight Zanki than Kokken, so I think Zanki might be able to be considered roughly equal.

But yeah, Zanki and Kokken both shit on Mutsue, and Head is stated to be comparable to Zanki and Kokken. There is some circularity, but not THAT bad.

As an aside, I think there's some implications that Right Arm = Houou Maniwa, but I'm not sure if it's strong enough to be accepted. Right Arm is comparable to Head, so if they are the same (and if we keep Head up there), that point of the series being around tier 7/6 would be consistent at least.

EDIT: Maybe this could be dismissed as Zanki/Kokken/Head being above 1 Mutsue, but being pretty much even to all 6 Mutsues? But that doesn't quite explain Kokken being able to indefinitely stall 6 Mutsues...

EDIT 3: Also, Meisai Tsuruga was made unconscious by Kokken's attack but wasn't harmed by it, despite her only being a small child at the time. So maybe start of series Shichika scaling isn't so ludicrous after all.

EDIT 4: Then again, Mutsue would have gotten older and weaker by the time he was killed by Shichika, so maybe he shouldn't scale fully just then, or should only have it under a possibly.

EDIT 2: btw, the last of the Katanagatari novels arrived! These revisions may be over earlier than I expected.
 
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So now that I've gotten Kokken's feats calc'd, looks like there won't be much of an AP downgrade after all. I'm thinking "7-C, possibly 6-B" will be what the top-tier characters will end up at. And I think if we assume (as implied) that Mutsue is weaker 20 years after the events of Kyotou Yasuri, we might be able to avoid outlier-ish scaling to the entire cast.
 
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Excellent. As far as destroying Japan goes, though, I feel like it may just be talking about wiping out the population, a la Papa-san the Raccoon destroying Japan in the flashback during the Dick Figures movie, which was shown to mean that he butchered its population and laid waste to its cities beyond repair, not necessarily that he literally blew up the island.

Never thought I'd bring up the Dick Figures movie in a discussion about the AP of a light novel. (Though not gonna lie, there's some solid feats of AP, skill, and vehicular mastery in that movie)
 
Yeah, I wasn't sure myself, but I asked around and many even generally skeptical people were fine with 6-B being put as a "possibly".

And Kokken does have the same sword-extending ability as Hakuhei, and he was said to be able to cut the sun, so Kokken probably would have the range for it.
 
I don't think I ever did, I've forgotten about it, at least.

I'm sorta writing up my own comprehensive infodump. I'm on book/episode 11 now, and I'm up to 31 pages of notes on feats.
 
Ooh, got some new info on Pengin's ability.

Apparently his Juukyuu at one point reaches lightspeed. And it says that once it reached lightspeed, it was as if those 2 original projectiles were 200.

I wonder if this can be used to say the original projectiles were 1% SoL. Since Emonzaemon dodged them at first, that would make most of the late-series cast Sub-Rel.
 
OH **** I THINK I UNDERSTAND WHY PENGIN DIED TO EMONZAEMON NOW

It's hard for me to put into words, but basically, Ento the Bead is a weapon from the future. Guns are from the future. History currently favors him, letting him avoid modern weapons, but the future doesn't, so futuristic weapons compounding with a ricochet made his luck not function.

I think his weakness could be changed to include this. After all, he wasn't hit by his own contemporary weapon ricochet'ing, and he wasn't hit by Ento the Bead shooting him directly.
 
Just one thing though - Sabi Hakuei's 8-B feat was shown, or at least teased in the anime : shichika vs hakuei

Also, it's funny how this thread goes from "there's even no proof of 8-B" to "tier 6"
 
Just one thing though - Sabi Hakuei's 8-B feat was shown, or at least teased in the anime : shichika vs hakuei

Also, it's funny how this thread goes from "there's even no proof of 8-B" to "tier 6"
I mean that's the point, it's not shown in the LN, and we don't use feats that only exist in adaptations that weren't done by the original author.
 
Except sometimes, like the one time I saw it happen but can't ******* remember what franchise it was.

Also Jesus you're already at Pengin?
 
Yeah I am surprising myself with how quickly I'm getting through this lmao.
 
Yoooooo, there's a statement that Zanto the Razor shears through the molecular structure of objects.

Looks like we finally have a mechanism for Dura Neg.
 
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