What’s in a Title: Slayers

Dash! 逃げろ！魔法が使えない？

Dash

I just wanted to add this to introduce the word into the loan word ダッシュ.

逃げろ（にげろ）

This word is the imperative form of the verb to run or escape. The imperative form is basically a rough command by someone. Think of it like a drill sergeant commanding you to do something. 食べろ！飲もう！寝ろ！

As you can see the imperative form is quite rude. But if you are in a dire “life or death” situation, you can use it to make your speech shorter during emergencies.

Anyways, this just means “Escape!” or “Run!”.

魔法（まほう）

It is made up with the kanji 魔 which can mean “witch, demon, evil spirit” and 法 which can mean “method, law, system, etc.”. So from combining these two Kanji we can see how the word “magic” is made. Take witch and method.  “Witches” are known for using a certain “Method” to do their spells. 

In other words, this word means “magic”.

が

が is another particle that indicates the sentence’s subject. It usually comes up when you want to describe something with an adjective or in this case describing a verb with the subject “magic”.

使えない（つかえない）

This is the casual potential negative form of the verb 使う, to use. The potential form is basically a form where you can say you can or can’t do a certain verb. In this case, it means “can’t use”. A question mark is added afterwards as it comes to the shock/surprise to the character it involves.

Put that together with ”魔法が使えない？” means “I can’t use my magic?”

Put that together with the rest of the words the title means ”DASH! Escape! I Can’t Use My Magic?”.

Compared to the official translation, they both say the same thing. However, I think that my translation is a bit too straightforward.

This title comes from the 90s anime “Slayers”. It follows a story with a girl who can use powerful magic and steals treasure from bandits. She later on teams up with a natural airhead of a swordsman. Perhaps many more will join her party (I haven’t watched it all yet. Finished the 5th episode just yesterday.)

It kind of gives me a RPG vibe. Was watching it dubbed for the first episode but after seeing that the Japanese version comes with titles like this I changed to sub. Plus, the OP and ED songs come with the lyrics in Japanese with furigana so I couldn’t pass this up. If you are interested you can find it on Funimation as far as I know.