Kōkyōshihen Eureka Seven: New Order - 2

From now on, I'm posting new chapters along with my reviews on them, so if you don't want spoilers, don't read past the jump.

Download Link: New Order Vol 1 Ch 2

Translation Notes: My goal with this is to make the context as accessible as possible in English. Japanese is a tricky language to translate because it's so different grammatically, so I've made some adjustments. Some of those changes are wording, such as translating "kudan no genkai" as "The Limit of Questions" or "memoria" as "Memory Fragments", for the sake of making the text easier to grasp. Occasionally I used a more appropriate English expression than the literal Japanese, such as the literal "I will go to meet her" to "I'll go after her". I hope this makes it a bit easier to read. If you want more literal translations, the /a/ version will do that (and it has much better scans, I'm cleaning them so I can tell the difference in quality). In any case, I hope you enjoy the second chapter!

[Spoilers past this point!]

Reading this manga is painful. Literally agonizing. It's like watching Renton and Eureka's daughter die in their arms all over again (that made me cry nearly nonstop for a month; my heart still tightens thinking about it). The more I read it, however, the more I curse the decision to use the happy ending in the original anime run. The feelings in this version are so much more raw, so much more honest and powerful, than they were when all that really ridiculous stuff happened in Wish Upon a Star (I will never not be embarrassed by the moon when I show E7 to other people). Take, for example, all the times Eureka and Renton outright confess they're in love. That's always glossed over in the anime in terms of verbal communication, partly because the body language is so great at conveying it. Still, it's so emotional to see them both declare their feelings like this, and it only makes it harder to watch the events unfold. There's just a lot more earnestness in how and why they're going about things the way they are, and it's very difficult not to burst into tears, knowing where this is leading. If I could see this whole sequence animated, I would die happily... but that's what I said about AO too while it was airing, and now I want more.