Little Mushroom: Chapters 10 - 12 (EN) or 21 - 24 (CH)

[x_los]

Welcome to Week 4's "Little Mushroom" (小蘑菇) discussion for English chapters 10 - 12 of Book 1 and Chinese chapters 21 - 24 (inclusive). This spreadsheet contains the schedule and concordances of the chapter endings across the Chinese and English versions. There's an associated Discord server (ask superborb for an invite if you'd like one), and we'll be running comment posts here.

This discussion will wrap up and next week's will begin on May 8th.

Chinese text
English text

SPOILER POLICY: I personally don't give a fuck or even like to give unearned credence to the concept, so since I'm writing the post, anything's fair game.

Comments

Chapter 10, EN

[x_los]

The way these successive paragraphs of dialogue use quotation marks isn't necessarily technically wrong, but it’s very awkward: maybe a custom to honour in the breach.

“-yanked the steering wheel around!” I don't know that that you can use an exclamation point in uninflected narration like this? It happens both here and in the succeeding sentence.

Chapter 11, EN

[x_los]

“Reporting in” That's a very weird thing to say in that moment.

I need characters to stop saying “thank you for your hard work” out loud to one another, it’s so weird.

This is maybe the best chapter so far in terms of social dynamics, using this action set-piece to illustrate the position of these people. The imagery and descriptions are more engaging than they've been thus far.

What a strange final line. This chapter just stops.

Re: Chapter 11, EN

[superborb]

The translator has chosen to render a couple similar terms into the same 'thank you for your hard work' too. Though the gist of all of them are the same.

Chapter 12, EN

[x_los]

Wait, can he still get to the main city where they're holding his spore? I thought everything but outer District 6 shut down, basically?

Maybe that line about the inner city having a different security system means that's somewhere the book hasn't taken us yet, where An Zhe hasn't yet had occasion to go.

Why did they retreat to District 6 in preference to the inner city, then? Was it just closer?

Re: Chapter 12, EN

[superborb]

Main city was unaffected, right? The science guy wanted them to evacuate to there originally.

I wonder if we're about to get some class difference, if there's a higher security residential area than where everyone else gets to live.