Keeping the Vox princes going, I finished up the second prince, Flu. I’ll admit, I wasn’t really keen on doing him and kind of put it off, but after doing Stimma, it seemed to make sense to do Flu next. His translation was…a little infuriating. But before I get into that I wanted to remark that Flu’s story doesn’t give the names of his brothers. In Stimma’s story, he introduces Flu and Rufen by name. However in Flu’s story, they are only referred to as ‘younger brother’ (meaning Rufen) and ‘older brother’ (Stimma). I’m not really sure why that is, but when you read, remember that Stimma is the eldest and Rufen is youngest, with Flu right in the middle!Now, for the infuriating part. Flu is QUIET. That’s his whole thing. You’d think that wouldn’t be a big deal, since I’m reading the story and not listening to it, but you’d be wrong. Flu is so quiet that his voice trails off a lot, which means a lot of words are cut out and replaced with ellipses in his dialogue text. Let’s look at this line from Chapter 1:
？？「き。。。が。。。てく。。。ね。」
…what? I could only figure out how to translate this broken speech because he repeats himself clearly after a moment and I get the full sentence. But then there are lines like this from Chapter 4 of the MOON route:
フリュー 「どうし。。。僕。。。って。。。ですか？」
…again, what? I get the first bit is most likely supposed to be どうして, so ‘why’, and then 僕 is ‘I’, and the ですか along with the punctuation makes it a question, but the rest is kind of lost on me, even looking at context. And he doesn’t repeat himself this time. I’m sure it makes more sense to a native speaker who can pick up on the context from that, but unfortunately I am not, and I cannot. I’ve done my best, but by the end of this I really just wanted to reach into the game, grab Flu by the face and say, very loudly and clearly, “SPEAK UP!!!!!”