Somewhat related to the above: Hakuhi calls Shitara “Shicchan,” although she also calls Takamiya “Tacchan” and Takada (who she knows as female) “Takada-kun,” so I’m not too sure what to make of that. (If it’s meant to be an “inversion” - calling males -chan and females -kun - then maybe “Shicchan” is a holdover from before Shitara started identifying as female, and she doesn’t mind Hakuhi using it still. Probably because, well, it actually matches.)
At any rate, since I made them “Taka” and “Shi-chan” in the translation, the impression given now is that Hakuhi calls Takamiya a pretty normal affectionate nickname and gave Shitara a distinctly feminine one to support her.
Also, I suspect this is more or less how the first phone call from Hakuhi’s swindler goes: He says he’s an old friend who Hakuhi hasn’t seen in a while. She thinks about who that might be and asks if it’s “Takada-kun.” He confirms it (thinking Takada must be a male since she said “-kun”). And she’s like “oh, okay, your voice has changed a lot!”, a leap she has an easier time making since one of her longtime friends is trans.
The names Kuroku and Shiroro are based on “black” and “white,” but as pointed out in-game, the names are backwards compared to their actual colors. They make several references to Japanese children’s games. One is “Greenpeace” which I… don’t know if I understand the rules for, but it involves rock-paper-scissors and the joke is that Kuroku just says the “I win word,” so to speak. Another is “Acchi Muite Hoi” (Look the Other Way), which is rock paper scissors, followed by the winner having to point in a direction which is not the same direction the other person turns their head toward. Kids love rock paper scissors, I guess?
There was a little bit more to the “what’s 1+1” conversation in Japanese relating to how 1 and 2 are written 一 and 二 in kanji - Kuroku notes that 2 is just written like two 1s, so how do you know it’s not 1 followed by another 1 (which in his mind would be 11)? - but yeah, mostly the same.
Sekiyu is likely a pun on “security.” (セキユ → セキュリティー) (EDIT: Nope, Miwashiba says this is just a neat coincidence.) In her intro, she tells Nanashi “ototoi kiyagare,” literally “come back two days ago” - the idea is to never come again, because that’s impossible. But Nanashi’s response is “Too bad I’m not able to time travel.” While that’s arguably amusing foreshadowing to Misane being from the future, it didn’t work out in English, so I changed it to “Don’t touch me with a 10-foot pole.” “What about an 11-foot pole?”
Yukinaga uses “orecchi” to refer to himself, which according to Miwashiba is the foundation of his character from which everything else branched out. Nanashi actually focuses on that over the alien thing, being all “oh yeah, Orecchi-kun!” at one point in the Japanese version.
“Ohnai Akutamori” (Akuta’s pen name) takes two of the kanji from his real name (albeit in reverse order) and appends two random ones afterward. Even though one of the kanji from his real name is “dropped,” the other two kanji can still be, on their own, read “Akuta” and “Kamome.” So it’s even more… unoriginal, I guess, than it might seem in English.
represented
what to make of that.