Parsing a specific sentence from a book

Question

I have this following sentence: 　

横線――ＨＰバーの名で呼ばれる青いそれは、俺の生命の残量を可視化したものだ。

There are a few questions I came up with about this sentence:

1. The first part of the sentence is: 横線―――ＨＰバーの名で呼ばれる青いそれ, my question is how can this sentence be parsed? How does the long ――― change the meaning/parsing of the sentence?
2. At the end of the sentence, it is written: 可視化したもの. Why is 可視化した used in past form, while according to the context I'd expect a present-form? Is this perhaps a grammar subject I just don't know yet?

For the context (and the context only), the translation of the book can be found in this link.
However, the translation is not literal which doesn't really help me understand and solve my questions by myself.

Any help is appreciated! Thank you!

Answer 1

1.

[[ＨＰバーの名]で呼ばれる] [青いそれ]

I can't really say for sure about "――" without more context. My guess is that 横線 is being pulled out to make it clear that it's the term being explained (maybe it's part of a list?). The technical terms in my translation might be off, but this should give you the feel:

The Horizontal Line -- that blue thing which goes by the name of ....

You might have been thrown off by 青いそれ, literally "blue that". In English, demonstrative pronouns cannot be modified by adjectives, but that is not the case in Japanese.

2.

Basically it says that this is "the result of" visualizing your remaining life. Since it is the result of that process, it's already complete, therefore した.

A subtle point is that もの is not the subject of the relative clause. I.e. the literal translation of 俺の生命の残量を可視化したもの is not "The thing that visualizes my remaining life" (although that might be the most idiomatic English expression), rather "(The thing which is) the result of having visualized my remaining life". Note that Japanese is very flexible about the role of the modified noun in the relative clause. Less so in English, which is why the literal translation I give above does not involve a relative clause at all.

The technical way to explain した would be say that this is not a past tense, but a perfective aspect. The use of different verb forms for tense-aspect in Japanese is quite subtle, and the use differs between matrix sentences and subordinate/relative clauses. Let me know if you want to know more about this, it might be worth a separate question.

Answer 2

To add to @dainichi's answer, 横線 is probably better translated as "horizontal line", not "side line".

Also, the ーー could probably be replaced easily by すなわち or 言い換えて. "That horizontal line, that is/in other words, that blue thing called the 'HP Bar', ..."

Answer 3

The horizontal line -the blue one called HP bar- visualizes my remaining life.

Answer 4

Please read this web page cache. According to it, the horizontal line is what is shown on glasses or something and tells the knight how long he can live. It is blue and called "HP Bar".

The ーー is a dash. Japanese usually use a double size dash. It is often written with two dashes. When a phrase or sentence is between two double size dash, the phrase or sentence expresses about the word in front of the first dash. The author of the book that you read use a single "double size" dash with the same meaning.