Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ Episode 41 Discussion

So this is a combination of 3 factors that are present in almost every Tomino work ever:

Tomino and his team's insane level of attention to detail and habit of refusing to spell things out,

Tomino's lightning fast editing pace (even for 50ep shows),

a lot of the English subtitles available for Tomino shows actually suck and completely mistranslate a lot of things - there is a reason why in Japan, Tomino is highly respected not just as an anime director, but as a novelist and lyricist; he writes his dialogues in a very life-like but also incredibly dense way that rarely falls into typical anime writing clichés, but the vast majority of English subtitles often fail to translate those nuances.

And now that I've finished watching literally every single Tomino work since Zanbot 3, Gundam or non-Gundam, ZZ's Eng sub (I'm using EG sub which according to EG was the official translation from Daisuki) might be among the worst offenders alongside Brain Powerd.

So for this scene in question:

There is a foreshadow in ep 39, from 17:49-18:47 when the Neo-Zeon pilot is having a standoff w/ Mondo on Nahel Argama's launch deck. At 17:55, there is great sakuga shot of the NZ pilot firing a beam straight at Mondo's Hyaku-Shiki, but a quick cut to Rasara exclaiming Mondo's name, and the beam inexplicably curved away from Mondo and struck the Moon-Moon ship towed behind Argama. Mondo and NZ pilot both react to this miss: Mondo says "-Did he deliberately miss?", and this is accurate, but when NZ pilot reacts, the eng sub writes "-what the... he's not falling for my bluff!" which makes it sound like, yes, he did miss on purpose to scare Mondo. But what the NZ pilot actually says is "-what the... that was not where i was aiming!" So he too was confused by this inexplicable beam curve.

And then the sub for the following line by the NZ pilot goes "-That's right. I wanted to give you another chance", when he actually says "-That's right. If you wish, I can also sink the other (towed) ship to show you!" Then he fires three missles and they explode around the civilian ship but do not sink, and if you look at the shot carefully, you can see a spherical barrier preventing the explosions from really impacting the ship - which has Haman on it. Given Haman's presence, the NZ pilot definitely deliberately missed this time, but the presence of the barrier is surprising, as he says at 18:28, "-Oh, looks like I didn't aim properly." and then in inner voice at 18:33, "-but I did see that something like a barrier was there." But the Eng sub messed these two sentences up and instead wrote, "-There you go, it's pretty serious. Hope he didn't realize there was a barrier."

Then after the gleeful crossdressing in ep40, ep41 begins with a scene btw Rasara and Sarasa (03:03-03:30) that would explain both ep39 and the later part in ep41:

The very beginning is translated properly, as the following exchange -

Rasara: "-Big Sis, where are you going?"

Sarasa: "-I'm going to see Haman Karn."

Rasara: "-What purpose would that serve?"

But for the next sentence, things go very wrong and a crucial piece of info is completely missing.

Here's the EG eng sub:

Sarasa: "-You ought to be able to see it in her eyes. Can you not understand?"

Rasara: "-No."

So Sarasa's talking about Haman, and this seems to make sense on the surface.

But the actual sentence here is:

Sarasa: "-It looks like your life force is becoming very weak. Do you not understand why?"

Rasara: "-No."

So Sarasa is actually talking about her own sister, and not about Haman at all. The translator for the EG sub seemed to have misheard the japanese pronunciation "me" and simply assumed it was the kanji character 目/eye and so made up a whole sentence to go with it, but the actual sentence was "mei" and the kanji character 命/life, and of course the word "suijaku" or 衰弱/weaken, with the added shiteimasu/しています to denote present tense. So meaning - Rasara's life force has been/is weakening.

And now the following sentence from Sarasa would make more sense at 03:20, but here EG sub is still wrong:

EG sub:

Sarasa: "-We're here to protect Judau and his friends. However, there should be a meeting."

Actual sentence:

Sarasa: "-It's because we used our waveguide to protect Judau and his friends. But we've reached our limit."

The 1st key word here for is "hadou", so either 波動 or 波導, the former being "wave movement/vibration", the latter being "waveguide" (and the name for Ideon's super powerful gun). And the 2nd key word is of course "genkai", so 限界/limit, which the translator in the EG sub seemd to have misheard for many words that may mean meeting that have the "kai" sound.

[TL;DR: the ENG sub currently available for ZZ is woefully bad, and you might not even know what you missed out on]

So watching the scene in question in ep41 back with these new info, I think you can see for yourselves now:

Rasara used her lifeforce to push the MS foot away from Mondo as it was coming down, just like she previously deflected the beam that was coming for his life in the Hyaku Shiki, and coupled with the times the two sisters have protected Judau and co., this final act from Rasara pushed her beyond her limit and killed. The falling rock to the side is just some debris; it's her NewType power, if you want to think of it this way, that killed Rasara.

Personally, I think this is a great scene that helps build toward the Axis miracle at the end of CCA, and ZZ really needs a new Eng sub.