Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Stop!! Hibari-kun! Batch

Here is Orphan's final word on Stop!! Hibari-kun: the batch torrent, with all 35 episodes. Episodes 12 and 13 received additional checking, while episodes 15, 16, 17, 20, and 23 have minor corrections. A patch file is available here for updating these seven episodes to their corresponding v2s.

The project took almost three years. The first translations arrived in late summer of 2015. The first group of episodes was released in May, 2017, and another in January, 2018. The project languished due to translation checking issues until laalg rejoined Orphan in May. She translation checked 24 episodes in less than a month, allowing us to complete the project quickly. I am very grateful for laalg's return to the fray.

Moho Kareshi translated all 35 episodes. Iri, Onibaba, and tenkenX6 checked various early episodes, while laalg checked episodes 12 to 35. Yogicat timed all the episodes, and I did all the editing and typesetting. konnakude and Nemesis QCed all the episodes, and VigorousJammer did an additional QC on the first ten. M74 encoded all the episodes from an R2J DVD box set. Juggen styled the OP and ED. I want to thank all the members of the team for sticking with this project along its long and winding road.

Stop!! Hibari-kun! proved to be much more difficult than the madcap comedy I was expecting. The dialog was spoken at breakneck speed, sometimes in regional dialects. The show was full of 1980s topical and cultural references; the blog posts have functioned as much as magic decoder rings as commentary on the show itself. And the typesetting... The show is filled with signs, all of them hand-drawn. The encode is mostly free of blended frames, so tracking mostly worked, but there were a lot of signs. Despite my efforts to be more conservative, more than 75 fonts ended up being used.

I gave my perspective on the show's contents in my first blog entry about it. It seemed then like a remarkably even-handed portrayal of a transgender girl, especially for an early 80s series, and it still does. Although some of the later episodes mine easy (or uneasy) laughs out of gay stereotypes, Hibari-kun is treated respectfully throughout. Her family is fleshed out in comic detail, including her apoplectic father Ibari, her bemused older sisters Tsubami and Tsugame, her boss-in-training baby sister Suzume, and her utterly confused love interest, the orphan Kosaku. At the end, nothing is resolved, of course. Hibari loves Kosaku, Kosaku pines for Rie-chan, Rie-chan is hung up on Shina, and Shina wants Hibari. As Hibari sings at the end of every episode, "It's a mixed-up, messed-up, complicated relationship."

In fact, Hibari invariably has the last word, so she might as well have it here too:


You can get the batch torrent at the usual torrent sites or download individual episodes from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net. Thanks for watching.



2 comments:

  1. I personally can't thank you enough for subbing this masterpiece of an anime. I'm saddened by the fact that it was cut short by the weekly shounen jump director's impatience. All though this anime is meant for. Laughs i thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it. If you guys never subbed this than i would have never found out about this anime. Your doing awesome work, God bless!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kodi didn't properly render your subtitles but you put so much work into them. The devs were nice enough to take a look and update how it renders them. :)

    https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=333956

    ReplyDelete