Dex-chan lover
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2025
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Given your expanded definition of the specific word/term used in the original Japanese, I think your guess is actually correct.Not sure if this helps (or if it's what the author was going for), but:
What she says (綺麗になれ - kirei ni nare) is very literally an order to become clean (kirei), so the translation is certainly not wrong.
But "kirei" has a broader meaning than just "clean". If you watch anime in Japanese, you might've seen some scene where a boy sees a beautiful girl and murmurs "kirei", meaning beautiful. In My Dress-Up Darling it's the same kirei/beautiful that Gojo says is special to him.
A dictionary says: (adj-na) (1) pretty; lovely; beautiful; fair; (adj-na) (2) (uk) clean; clear; pure; tidy; neat.
So, maybe the world is interpreting it as "become beautiful", where "beautiful" is based on the image she had in her head while casting the spell.
Or maybe I'm just trying too hard to make sense of it...
I know only enough to know that it's far deeper than I realize, but there's an entire histo-cultural facet of Japan that deals in aesthetics and how integral they are to Japanese concepts of beauty. A lot of them tend to deal with the transient nature and impermanence of things (aided by things like Shintoism, Buddhism, and more), but there's a definite focus on the physical appearance of a person, place, or thing, and how that impacts its perceived 'beauty".
I think there's still the big question of the actual mechanics of her magic (is it time manipulation? matter reconstitution? some form of multi-dimensional metamorphosis that actually rewrites reality to whatever her whim may be?) - but the translation being "clean" and coming from "kirei" does, I think, match up with what you're hinting at here as covering all of the bases, whether she's cleaning fabric or reconstructing a derelict structure.
I more want to know if this has some form of "equivalent exchange", like if it's pulling from her life force, or depleting matter & energy from elsewhere in the world / another universe, or what - but I'm uncertain if the author cares to go that deep with the implications of her having "commoner magic" that's actually potentially reality-breaking.