I like translator's notes, if I ever write a fantasy novel I'm going to frame it as having been originally written in the fantasy language & then "found" and translated into english, just so I can include them
@lioness Didn't Tolkien do that? I don't think the most well known works had any translators notes of note, but there were some in some of the histories
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@lioness I think at least some editions of the hobbit say "translated from the original Westron" on them
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@Felthry that's true, and there were various historical footnotes and such! I like footnotes in general tbh :-)
@lioness There was one series we read a long time ago where the narrator was a really sarcastic demon who put a *lot* of comments in footnotes, it was called.... the bartimaeus trilogy?? i think???
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@Felthry yep! I have that one too, it's fun although wow did the tone change massively between the first & second books.
pratchett & douglas adams are the other two authors that stand out to me as well… oh and a webcomic or two where I remember the footnotes as being better than the actual series
@lioness it's been like
over a decade since we read those books, i don't know why we remembered them, but we don't remember much of anything about them
and yeah pratchett used a lot of footnotes! but he's a pretty well known author already
as for the webcomics i'm assuming you're thinking xkcd for one of them, right?
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@Felthry actually no, the first was a scifi adventure/comedy webcomic; the author used footnotes to explain stuff like "do you know the difference between a plasma cannon and a plasma rocket?", or do scale calculations — like the comic will just be a ship going boom & the notes will be working out how large an antimatter reactor a ship that size would need & how much energy would be released if someone broke it. (Schlock Mercenary; I haven't followed it in ages tho.)