Deciphering Youjo Senki – part 1: text

I love the attention to detail that went into this 12 episode series, where they invented a full alphabet with capitals and minuscules, in calligraphic, print and cursive form and complete with numbers. Most animation is content with some squiggly lines to represent text, but here all the text that briefly flashes on screen seems to actually mean something relevant.

So I had some fun deciphering the onscreen text (sometimes limited by legibility due to resolution). Most of the text is in English or a mix of English and German, and a small bit of French. The mix of English and German is used indiscriminately for both the Empire and the Republic.

Sometimes the text is mirrored and/or upside down, and often with typos, but I saw only one instance of complete gibberish. There are some instances of what appear to be in-jokes.

I almost left out the French:

Another extra, Bientot’s readout:

identification code 04 04 18 666 

  observed data 
  operation frequency: 1523654
  output pattern: awwacc
  waveform amplitude: 56.00

.…and a bunch of numbers

Then there was the writing on this silly piece of merchandise:

Addendum: the Movie

Some more texts, from the 2019 movie:

THEY DO NOT BELIEVE IN TEARS
Praise the historical feat

There are some characters here that don’t seem part of the alphabet we’ve seen so far

Tiegenhof is obviously Königsberg/Kaliningrad

The document that Loria drools on has nothing to do with the meeting he’s in, but seems to be composed of snippets copied from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldhistory2/chapter/the-allied-powers/ sections “The Rise of Stalin” and “Purges and Executions”. The text is not only upside down but also mirrored in the scene.

This random document next to the Mauser seems to refer to events in episode 3 of the series.

Loria’s second document makes a lot more sense.

What’s “new” in the movie: a couple of capital J in the “Fraktur” type font, and a lowercase j – which so far was only seen in the manga. Unfortunately the j is small and blurry, as was the manga one.