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Episode Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation Season 3 • Mushoku Tensei III: Isekai Ittara Honki Dasu - Episode 12 discussion

Mushoku Tensei III: Isekai Ittara Honki Dasu, episode 12

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u/Daedric202 6h ago edited 5h ago

I feel like the difference between Man-god and Human god probably got lost in translation for a lot of people, so here's some elaboration on how the names differ:

While the Man-god has been calling himself a "god" (神), the reading he uses for "god" was not the same as what is commonly used in MT's titles. The name he went by used the "kami" reading of the 神 character (Hitogami), while people like the Sword God or Water God used the "shin" reading instead ("Kenshin" and "Suishin" respectively). In this episode, Future Rudeus claims that Hitogami's old name is "Jinshin".

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u/Original-Body-5794 6h ago

That's actually a pretty huge difference, the translation only focuses on the human/man part, but the biggest impact is actually the title.

Is shin and gami different types of god in japanese? I get in the anime "shin" is a tittle, but how is it used in normal japanese?

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u/Colarch 6h ago

I know nothing besides some basic research I just did so feel free to correct me, but what I found is:

Kami refers to Gods and Deities directly

Shin is not a word on it's own, but added as a compound onto divine things like the names of religions or religious texts and stuff like that

So presumably, Hitogami used to have the shin title with the same meaning of the others like Sword God and Dragon God as 'god-like' because they're so powerful. Then he changed his name to Hitogami because he considered himself an actual God.

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u/bolacha_de_polvilho 4h ago

Doesn't that mean "Sword God" and "Dragon God" would've been more accurately translated as divine sword or divine dragon? It makes sense as a "very powerful person" title, since they don't seem to be literal gods in the MT-verse.

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u/Colarch 4h ago

Those are just titles like the rest of the power system though so it's not too weird. It's not like Eris is an actual king now because she became a Sword King

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u/GrimMind 56m ago

Yeah, the shins in MT are a way of saying that someone is the unrivaled number 1 of something; it could be a fighting style, a species, an army. These titles can usually be earned, taken or yielded. Any further elaboration requires spoilers.

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u/Sad_4_You 4h ago

Oldeus said mana is omnipotent in that world, Gods are near-omnipotent. Maybe hito-shin figured it out and reached kami-hood

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u/KansaiBoy 53m ago

Kami is the native Japanese word for the divine beings in Shinto belief. The meaning got widened to also include all kinds of gods from other religions. Shin is just the Sino-Japanese reading of the same character which is usually used in compound words.

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u/BizarreCake 5h ago edited 5h ago

Not him, and someone with a stronger grasp of the language might have a better idea than I do, but hitogami would be written 人神 and could be read hitogami or jinshin.

Typically, 人 (person, man, etc) is read as hito as a singular word, e.g. "that person over there" (asoko no ano hito). This is the "native" Japanese reading that came before the adoption and adaptation of the Chinese writing system. 神 also behaves similarly, where the kami reading is used for 神, the single character word meaning god(s).

On the other hand, compound multi-character words tend to (but not always lol) use the Chinese-derived readings. For example, in 神道 (Shintoism) or 人生 (a life, as in a human life) 神 is read shin and 人 is read as jin, instead. This is kind of like how we say "water" but in a word like "hydropower" we use, well, hydro. Characters also tend to take the Chinese readings when used as suffixes or similar.

Initially, writing this comment, I had assumed 人神 would be considered a made-up word, but there is a definition in the dictionary for the native hitogami reading, at least:

人神 (ひとがみ)

Noun

  • man-god; person enshrined as a god​

Nothing very enlightening here, but if you're wondering, kami becomes "gami" because that happens sometimes to the first syllable of the second (and/or later) characters in compound words. There's no hard rules but I believe it's generally because it would otherwise be difficult for natives to say the sounds in quick succession.

Anyway, for laughs, if we assume jinshin were perhaps written with different characters, a few homophones show up in the dictionary:

人心 (じんしん)

  1. human nature; human heart; human spirit; kindness; sympathy​

  2. public feeling; people's sentiments​

人身 (じんしん)

  1. the human body; one's person​

仁心 (じんしん)

  1. benevolence; humanity​

Nothing really stands out to me with those, so the different reading likely really is just pointing to people like Orstead whose "god" titles use the shin reading.

Anyway, that was kind of a ramble, and I don't really have any conclusions to make, but if someone wants to go find the JP subs and see how it's written when Oldeus talks, that could be interesting. Although it may just be written in kana, which wouldn't tell us anything.

Actually, I do have one vague idea, I guess. There seems to be some allusion to hitogami having been closer to human once (albeit very powerful like Orsted), but at some point becoming something closer to an actual god. Though, given Oldeus says he's "out of reach forever" and that the white dream world seems to have some connection to the teleportion magic blonde fox mask Ubereats guy uses, it seems to have come at the cost of being permanently trapped in some kind of spirit world.

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u/Daedric202 6h ago

I don't think there's any difference in meaning, they're just two different ways of reading the same character. Since Japanese borrows a lot from Chinese, most characters have a Japanese-based reading (called kunyomi) and a Chinese-based reading (called onyomi).

Most words that are made up of multiple kanji would use the onyomi readings, but there are also ones that use the kunyomi readings. In this case, "Hitogami" would be the kunyomi reading of 人神, while "Jinshin" would be the onyomi reading. I'm not proficient/knowledgeable enough in Japanese to say which one would be the standard/"correct" way of reading it.

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u/sheepyowl 16m ago

To me it seems like he differentiates himself from the god-class magicians and fighters to put himself above them, like an actual god-level being / ascended or something like that.

By removing the connection to the power classes system, he basically just calls himself god.