Hi all,
I’ll preface this by saying that there are spoilers ahead. If you haven’t did the music event in v4.6, you have been warned.
I thought something was really off with the lyrics in the song written by Dvorak in the Itto event in v4.6. The lyrics alone don’t seem to make sense, but it somehow includes a lot of animals, and somehow they match up with the list of animals mentioned in the list of treatments by the Puppy Union, left behind by Heizou. And there’s also the fact that Miko mentioned that the lyrics talked about a war, even though on the surface, there is clearly no such mention, at least directly so.
Turns out I wasn’t the only one who noticed it, at least in the Japanese sphere, cause I couldn’t find any discussions about this in English. The link I shared is someone putting all the information together to infer the whole story behind the lyrics. I’ll be basing this post on that link, and give almost all credits to them for putting that information together. I’m just bringing this info to the English-speaking community (feel free to share this on say HoYoLab).
First off, let’s look at the list of animals helped by the Puppy Union.
...Pets admitted for care today...
Weasel Thief No. 11: Dalang, 6 y/o.
...Pets admitted for care today...
Weasel Thief No. 12: Chouji, 8 y/o.
...Pets admitted for care today...
Unagi No. 8: Cocquerel, 35 y/o.
...Pets admitted for care today...
General Crab No. 3: Koharu, 25 y/o.
...Pets admitted for care today...
Bake-Danuki No. 5: Kusumi, 60 y/o.
..Pets admitted for care today...
Unagi No. 9: Dvorak, 40 y/o.
This list should immediately tick something off in everyone’s head; Dvorak’s name is right there. Some of you might remember a Chouji in one of the World Quest chain in Inazuma, the boy who wanted to take some of that tainted marrow material for sale who’s stuck in Yashiori Island, who later decided to go find their mother. It should be clear that the Puppy Union wasn’t rescuing animals, but people. Dvorak probably noticed this; he was saved by the very “Union” after all. And the chances of that being true is quite high; Dvorak himself said that he was in Inazuma during the Civil War.
More importantly, there seems to be a pattern to how people are codenamed. It seems like
- Weasel Theives are meant for “young people”
- Unagi is either “foreigner”, “Fontainian”, or “middle-aged” people
- Bake-danuki is for the “elderly”
General Crab is an odd one, but there is a Koharu right in the Yashiro Commission. Interestingly, in Japanese, the name noted in the list is simply Haru. If the goal is to hide the name sufficiently so that anyone who finds this list can’t trace it to the Yashiro Commission, then it makes sense. In any case, General Crab thus has several possibilities that aren’t necessarily close in meaning: young women, or someone related to the Bakufu.
Now, by near the end of the event, Kokomi made it clear that the Puppy Union was intentionally secretive, even if that’s not their goal. It should be safe to assume that the people that were helped were told not to mention that they were helped publicly, lest it becomes something that gets ahold of the Bakufu’s attention, which would unravel the cooperation between the Yashiro Commission and Sangonomiya.
…
Now for the lyrics.
Raven, took an arrow to the heart
And the bake-danuki, shapeshifted into dark
I, Weasel Thief, hereby bequeath all my Mora:
Two hundred goes to my pa Three hundred to dear mama
Poor little General Crab, Only a shell remains
Unagi goodbye
Now rest in peace, please don't cry
'Cause we'll get reborn as a beetle next time
Onikabuto, raise your horns
Here's to a world beyond the storm
Of rosy skies
Let’s go through by sections. It should be noted that the nuances of the lyrics do differ quite a bit between languages, which I’ll cover below.
Raven, took an arrow to the heart
We haven’t seen a “raven” in the list, but it’s safe to assume that it’s a person. In the Japanese lyrics, instead of “the heart”, the raven took an arrow to their “wing”. It’s thus best to read this as “someone was wounded”.
And the bake-danuki, shapeshifted into dark
The English lyric here is really vague, but we know it has something to do with and old person. In the Japanese lyric, it goes “the bake-danuki who turned into a torch has already disappeared”. This can either mean that the old person was seen out cold, or dead.
I, Weasel Thief, hereby bequeath all my Mora:
Two hundred goes to my pa Three hundred to dear mama
We’ll do these two lines together cause they’re related. A young person “bequeaths” their wealth to their parents. This sounds like a child has passed away before their parents.
Poor little General Crab, Only a shell remains
The English lyric here is quite depressing — possibly hinting at more death. In the Japanese lyric, the “General Crab” lost both their legs.
Unagi goodbye
Now rest in peace, please don't cry
These two lines are presented quite differently in Japanese. In English, it seems like Dvorak saw either another Fontainian or foreigner die in front of them. In the Japanese lyric, Dvorak seems to have seen another Fontainian/foreigner suffering while unconscious, sleeping in a dilapidated house.
Onikabuto, raise your horns
Here's to a world beyond the storm
Of rosy skies
No reincarnation in the English lyrics, which is kind of disappointing (like, why did the title have reincarnation in it then?). Storm here being conflict and war. In Japanese, the “storm” is instead “tainted world”. The “raise your horns” here is likely a call to action. In Japanese, it’s literally translated as “with your horns, we shall make bloom”. In both cases, they probably imply the wish to flip the world upside down, just like how an onikabuto beetle would in a fight. This means that in both the languages, it seems to convey a wish to strive for a world without conflict and war.
The rock genre is usually associated with a spirit of rebelliousness, usually towards a society that isn’t working in someone’s favour, be it that the person wants something good or bad. In Dvorak’s case, at least according to the lyrics, he seems to be seeking peace. Also, Dvorak continued to host the event despite not being able to secure the funding he wished for. This entire event is quite possibly his attempt at presenting his thanks to the people who saved him in the Puppy Union.
On another note, several people have most probably realized Dvorak’s intentions. We already know Kokomi is probably aware of it, and so does Miko. One that’s quite a bit less obvious is Thoma, and it’s quite easily missed unless you revisit his voice lines; he suggested to the Traveller that the story of the heroic dog is a story weaved by Dvorak to convey a message. Given how close he is to the Kamisato siblings, it shouldn’t be surprising if he knew of the Puppy Union.
And there we go, that is what some people think is the hidden message behind the whole event. It seems like HoYoverse is trying to add more background info to the Civil War in Inazuma here, possibly suggesting that we might get more such stories down the line?
Another thing I’d like to note after seeing an English playthrough of the event. The Raiden Shogun’s lines in English are… somewhat shallow, and makes it look like all she knows is to swing a sword around. In Japanese, her answer to Miko’s question is much more nuanced. “Then I (alone) shall face it head on,” is her answer in Japanese, which was then followed by Miko’s “the attendees of today’s event will surely be your ally”. The Japanese text better reflects the Shogun’s personality, who is always ready to bear all burdens alone and to the best of her abilities.
It seems like the author thought stack traces are underrated because people don’t like exceptions and don’t always
throw
. It seems like they don’t understand why people don’t like exceptions, and think that stack traces should be there for every case where the author thinks should be an exception, and ties the desire to avoid exceptions to some strawman use case — a nice looking output — and called it “modern error handling”.Error / exception handling is separate from stack traces. You don’t need to have an exception to have a stack trace, and stack traces aren’t just used for exceptions.
They also seem to not understand why people make do without stack traces in a microservice architecture. That’s simply not true. First off, you can still get stack traces of individual services. And secondly, if you build your services to accept, eg, something like a tracing ID, and print it along your logs, you essentially have a stack traces across services. In a web service, you can track the work done by all your systems for a single request from the client.
Now, onto why exceptions are somewhat disliked. Let’s just get the simple stuff out of the way: they’re generally bad for performance; they’re invisible to the method caller until they run into the problem, meaning you can’t ever ship updates that you’re confident won’t fall over disgracefully; try-catch hell, etc.
For a slightly more philosophical answer, why aren’t your exceptions just cases you need to handle? The try-catch pattern essentially builds up a separate channel of logic where your program needs to operate in but is expressed or recorded in very fragmented ways, forcing devs to have to pop open every function to look at why something is thrown, and hope that somewhere down the stack, no new exceptions are being thrown and not handled. The logic behind exceptions becomes second-class citizens that programmers can easily forget, instead of being front and centre. Can’t divide by 0? Tell me instead of setting me on a separate handling path. Why should I try-catch every single method call, or even property access? Don’t wait for the user to hit the call and just tell me that something is supposed to be impossible, or if I should handle the case where it doesn’t hold any values, right as I compile (dynamic languages can’t really do that).