Thank you so much if you've read this far!
I promised to release this earlier but wasn't able to work on it so much due to being busy with another TL commission for a friend.
This chapter was a lot of fun! We finally see WA and Springfield in the same page again and they're a lovely duo as always. Tobimura draws Suomi really really well in my opinion. She is cute as hell in this. Speaking of Suomi, I did a ton of research on Finland while translating this for the sake of accuracy. I decided to translate 私の故郷フィンランド as "my motherland/fatherland Finland" instead of "my home country of Finland" which meant I had to find out whether Finland was considered a motherland or fatherland. (Turns out they have the word "isänmaa" in their vocabulary which literally means father's land.)
Though it's explained a bit in the original Japanese, I also had to learn what the hell löyly was to adapt it properly to an English sentence. I read up on the history of the Molotov and its usage in the Winter War to try and make sure I have the context right. In the credits page, I added in a little bit of cultural info into Suomi's dialogue I learned while researching, which is that Finnish people apparently love hanging out in summer cottages.
The credits page itself was crazy good fun to make. To be honest, since this was a Suomi chapter I had the kneejerk reaction of making a Ceia joke, but after I saw the Molotov bottle in page 2 my head was brimming with ideas. I really love how it ended up in execution. Also yes I made Suomi drunk in that page, partly so that I don't get crucified if I wrote her out of character but mostly because writing *hic* is hilarious. In the "swimsuit skin" collage in the background, I made sure to only use characters that have appeared in previous chapters. In fact, I was able to put everyone who had a swimsuit skin in there. I made sure to cover their eyes to amplify the suggestiveness but can you spot all of them?
The final page with the GIF was a throwback to the "raining gems" page from Chapter 5 I was really proud of and also a follow-up to the joke in the previous page. If anyone was curious what my process was in making such an image I actually don't have a lot of video editing or VFX experience at all, so it went something like this:
Download the ZB-26 image (Asset 1) → Screenshot my phone's GFL and use image editing software to make the token icon → Boot up Wallpaper Engine's editor (yes really) → Edit "falling leaves" particle preset so that it uses the gem and token images I made instead → Record the preview of that effect using OBS → Convert video to GIF → Turn black pixels into transparent using ezgif.com (that site is stupid good for quick GIF edits) → Save the transparent GIF (Asset 2) → Make a transparent crop of the logo and "Thanks for reading" text (Asset 3) → Use a video editor to mash all 3 assets together