What's in a Name?

Today, in honor of the anniversary of the passing of our late colleague, CP, QC extraordinaire for many groups, we have a mass release of ongoing shows: three episodes of the Yawara! Blu-ray series, and no less than six specials from the Laughing Salesman high-definition series. And great episodes they are too. Yawara! is in the heart of the arc about Mitsuba's first judo tournament, where Fujiko finds her footing as a serious competitor (and finds romance as well). The Laughing Salesman specials delve even deeper into the series' dark and sometimes nightmarish humor.

Yawara! is a FroZen-Evil project; Laughing Salesman is a Evil-Saizen project. The hybrid group names obviously meant something back when the projects started - mid-2011 for Yawara!, late 2013 for Laughing Salesman. But what about today? "FroZen-Evil" stood for Frostii, Saizen, and Live-EviL. Frostii shut down shortly after the project started, but the name never changed. Laughing Salesman got started after the Yawara! DVD project finished and had pretty much the same staff. However, Frostii was long gone, so the joint name was shortened to Evil-Saizen.

The decade since then has seen many changes. CP has died; Juggen, Eternal_Blizzard, sangofe, and many others have mostly left fansubbing. Saizen is a shell of its former self. The projects are now staffed by a smorgasbord of people from the back catalog "kairetsu", including Orphan, Saizen, Inka, Live-Evil, and others. But the original project team names remain, as momento mori.

I find it quite sobering that I've been working on Yawara! for almost twelve years, and Laughing Salesman for almost nine. When I started, the prospect of a really lengthy series didn't seem all that daunting. I had all the time in the world. Now, I no longer feel that way, and the leisurely pace of these series is serious problem. In a world threatened by pandemic and war, with friends far younger than me removed from the scene by illness or other circumstances, the prospect of taking another six or seven years to finish these shows seems out of the question. The teams have made tentative steps towards a faster pace. I hope these steps lead to a more rapid cadence for both shows. If Yawara! could release weekly, like the original series team did, it would be done for CP day in 2023. Laughing Salesman needs a 3-4 week cadence. We'll see.

Meanwhile, enjoy watching Fujiko release her Ouchi Gari on unsuspecting rivals

while Fukuzo lures more victims into his increasingly sinister traps:

Happy holidays!