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All right, I’ve asked questions about the original Japanese in PSOH before and people have popped up with the answers. Hoping to have the same good fortune again.

In Volume 10, the chapter “Duplication”, there’s a panel where Leon’s long-time co-worker Jill introduces herself on the phone. In the Tokyopop translation, she gives her name as “Detective Jill Freshney”:

Jill Freshney is also the name of the managing editor on the book:

I assume this is her bio on Aces Editors. She’s a real person, that’s just her real name.

So — does our detective Jill also have this name in the original Japanese text?

If the TP translation had started before the original series ended, I could see it being written in by Matsuri Akino, as a little “aww, there ended up being a real Jill working on my books, I’ll give her a shoutout” homage. But the Japanese volume 10 came out in August 1998, and the NA release of Volume 1 wasn’t until June 2003, so she wouldn’t have known.

Was it added by the TP writers, as their own little gag/homage? Or was it there in the original, and this is an absolutely wild coincidence? (…Or a secret third thing?)

It’s no longer the 15th of the month as I’m finishing this post…but I ran all the numbers on the 15th, so I’m counting it as a regular scheduled update.

I’ve finished one A-to-Z pass of “handing off and/or punting specific webcomics.” In total, that knocked a couple hundred fandoms off my list. Guess I’ll do another, go harder, and knock out a couple hundred more.

There was a point when I thought about starting a habit of “sweep the Unassigned Fandoms list for tiny underloved Christmas movies,” because sweeping for underloved webcomics was working well. Didn’t end up doing it regularly, though — I just got 12 movie fandoms with 1 fic each, and stopped there. So I dropped all of those in an afternoon. (In the years I was babysitting them, the most active of these fandoms came out with…a whole 2nd fic.)

I also dropped some Random Things that I picked up through the irregular process of “checked out a new canon, enjoyed it, went to see if there was any fic on AO3, found an unwrangled fandom with 1 work.” Stuff like Phoebe in Wonderland (2008), Gary and His Demons (Cartoon), or Her Voice is a Backwards Record – Ozy Brennan. They almost certainly won’t suffer if they stay unwrangled for a while.

(There’s still only one fic for Shadow Man – Melissa Scott…and it’s the one I wrote. Guess it’s depressingly safe to leave “the queer intersex revolution/romance where everyone’s on space drugs” unwrangled, huh.)

With bigger Random Things, when they’re active enough I don’t want to leave them unwrangled, I’ve been making the occasional post about “looking to hand off this fandom, will anybody take it?” Breaks up the monotony of the batches of webtoons, I think. And it’s had maybe a 50-50 success rate — not bad. I’ll keep at it.

…I did actually add 2 new fandoms since the last update. A couple fans wrote about the Toon Makers US Sailor Moon pilot for Yuletide 2025, so that has a fandom tag now, and I picked it up to go with the rest of the Sailor Moon fandom tree.

Then it came up in the “wranglers wanted” channel that Pet Shop of Horrors was unassigned. And how was I supposed to resist picking up PSOH? I love PSOH. That manga reread I just recently started will pair perfectly with a review of the existing PSOH tags.

So my current total number of fandoms is 1183. (The number of “fandoms that actually have any new tags to deal with right now” is 28.)

344 down, 733 more to go…