I had wanted to try a nicer story after translating Makoto… and Nero was a poor choice for that! Still, I found myself very invested in his story and his character. He’s not made it to my top tier, but he’s definitely moved up quite a bit.
While Nero talks about not wanting to grow up (major Peter Pan vibes here) he is 18 at the time of his original story. He’s already at this border point since he’s in his late teens and not that far from entering his 20s, so it’s easy to see why he’s so conflicted about everything. However, I am curious about translating Morta’s story now. Nero briefly mentions Morta in his story as his brother who is an adult but also a child. I’m not sure what the deal with that is, but it’s definitely got me curious. So you can expect to see Morta’s translation at some point soon.
One of the major translation challenges with Nero was how to work with the suffixes. Normally I just omit these and can get away without any trouble. But unfortunately, Nero specifically calls out the protagonist and asks here to stop using a suffix with his name AND to stop using formal speech. Normally I can just gloss over one, but when he specifically calls out both things, it makes it tricky.
The protagonist uses the suffix -くん (kun) when saying Nero’s name, mainly because she recognizes that Nero is younger than her. We don’t have an exact age for the protagonist, but it’s reasonable to say she’s in her 20s at least. Because Nero asks her to stop using くん and to also stop speaking formally to him, I had to alter how she said his name in the brief time that she used the suffix. ‘Prince’ wasn’t appropriate because くん is fairly casual, but ‘Mr.’ doesn’t work because he’s younger, and as you can see in one of the route choice options, it has a better place there (when I translated it once to ‘Mr. Nero’, the Japanese is ネロさん (Nero-san)). So I went with ‘Sir’. Whenever she says ‘Sir Nero’ in the translation, the Japanese is ネロくん (Nero-kun). Is it the best choice? Probably not. But it’s the only one that seemed to fit without getting too much into the particulars. The protagonist recognizes Nero as a prince, so as she doesn’t use the formal suffix, ‘sir’ seemed the best fit. Sometimes suffixes are tricky!