Karon

February 28, 2021

Karon is the friendly Robin Foot who flies you to the Moon Palace. His lines imply that there’s multiple stops on the ferry, but as it is, only the Palace is a destination.  Karon also shares some often overlooked trivia about the Moon Palace:

KARON: Seems this was called a “planetarium” long, long ago, but…it’s not really that spacious. 

What’s meant here is that because the Palace is a planetarium, it appears to be a vast universe, but once the lights go out, it’s just a small room, like an actual planetarium.  In the SNES release, Karon says that, “there’s a whole lot of nothing in the Palace”, and based on the location of the Moon Palace, many get the wrong impression that the “nothing” inside refers to literal space or the mysterious contents of the Sea of Wonders.

Localization Notes

• Despite being a reference to the famous ferryman, Karon is still Karon and not Charon in Japanese, as is sometimes claimed.
• The line above has “planetarium” in quotes as it’s bracketed and written in hiragana in the Japanese script. Planetarium is usually written in katakana, as it’s a foreign load word. The hiragana spelling implies that the speaker doesn’t understand the meaning of the word. This is similar to the situation with Phanna’s “sacrifice” in Pandora.
  
  Despite the “but” at the end of the first sentence, the second sentence is actually a completely different thought. Read out of context in English, it seems to mean that if something is a planetarium, then one expects it to be spacious.
  
  A probable take is, “It seems that this place was called a ‘planetarium’, but… [I don’t really know what that means].  In truth, it’s not really all that vast, you know…”
  
  Here, Karon’s joining two thoughts together, not necessarily stating that one implies the other.  らしいけど ends the first sentence. Then he likely sees the others marveling at the apparent vastness of the dark space and adds, “It’s not really all that vast, you know.”  The first sentence trailing off with “but…” is a characteristically vague statement, typical of the language (there’s many lines like this in the script).