Archived Discussion Anime / SkyGirls

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

Ok, so the great terminological debate over a two year old anime begins :P

• I think that Motion Slit is still the right one, unless something can really prove that source material pronounce it "Suritto" but has English "Suit" to it. In Japanese, スリット is simply Slit, while Suit is スーツ ("su-tsu"). Perhaps Motion Slits are actually an acronym like Motion SLIT (Sustained Lessened Impact Tensor), or something like that?
• The SUIT->SLIT makes "some" sense, but, really...?
  • Check the Wikipedia Sky Girls entry, for starters. Then anecdotally, think about how many alternate variant guesses you've heard for the Godawful mangled Engrish in the series OP. Until someone licenses it, we're stuck with the best phonetic guesses the original fansubbers could make. Occam's Razor suggests that "motion suit" is a lot more likely name for a suit than "motion slit." The latter may have been the first guess, and gotten spread around by virtue of that fact, but that doesn't mean it's right.

  I'll admit that the painfully-silly acronym of WORM is a good argument that they made other unfortunate acronym choices - but I can't find any trace of SLIT being used as an acronym on the Japanese sites that reference Sky Girls, while I can find WORM repeatedly referenced.

  On a depressing note, your guess is as good as mine whether it ever will be licensed so that we can find out what the official scripts said. It's pretty loli-rrific, and after court decisions like the Handley case (for starters), the distributors are likely to be even more leery of something that could get them burned.

  Hm. I'm a lot less sure after watching ep 2 again. Eika and Otoha both clearly call it a pilot "su-tsu" near the beginning of this clip, while Eika calls it a motion "suritto" later. It's possible that it's wishful thinking on my part that they didn't call it a "slit," considering the misogynistic connotations that has.

  • I guess either they called it "suits" for when they're not referring it with its official designation. Also, I somehow remembered the Detective Conan's trick on transforming "1412" in KID, a letter morphing trick. I would like to ignore this proposition on the basis that it's painfully farfetch'd (and ridiculous), but an honest oversight followed by either foreign language is cool/they just didn't care, SUIT, in capital letters, can be misread as SLIT, particularly using block, sans-serif letters (ie, a blocky U with sharp edges can be "decomposed" into LI).

  As for WORMS, I have no idea why they settled on calling it a weapon when it is supposed to be a healing nanomachine. They could have gone with something like "Weaponized Omnipurpose Recovery nanoMachines" (which makes a lot of sense given their background).

  • I'm not absolutely sure from your last comment, but are we both now of the mind that they meant (by accident or design) to call it "Slit" rather than "Suit"? Just wanted to check before changing it back.
  • I say yes, they meant by accident to call it Slit, for whatever ridiculous design. Thanks for keeping up with me *bows*.
    • No, thank you for keeping me from making a stupid mistake and spreading ignorance. Very much.
• Re: apparent ages, I could be wrong... but I think if you showed an average episode to an average person, they'd peg Elise as 8-11, Otoha as 10-13, and Karen and Eika as 14-16. (Unless they've known friends who were born with Turner syndrome, in which case they might have some doubts.)
  • I was wondering if it was just me, so I showed a friend the oldest-looking picture◊ I could find that had everyone in it, and asked him how old the girls looked. Quoth he, "Those are some pretty slutty outfits for grade schoolers." I just hope he doesn't think I'm a lolicon now. ( ^_^')
  • But to the point - unless you object, I'd like to change the part about the pilots' ages to a neutral "Official ages: Elise is 15, Karen and Otoha are 16, and Eika is 17." You think they look the same or older, I think they look considerably younger - let's leave it to the reader to decide for themselves?