#ANYWAY the nicknames were bothering me why not just continue to go by Yusuf or Nico why these Americanized versions

[avelera]

Headcanon: Why exactly do the The Old Guard go by such American versions of their original names?

So I’ve been thinking about a Watsonian explanation for why Joe, Nicky, Andy, and Booker go by English-nicknames and not just English but such American versions of their names. I mean, seriously, calling the French guy whose name is Le Livre Booker? That’s some American dumbassery right there, an English person would have come up with about a 1,000 different insults to toss at a French guy other than just mischievously translating his name. 

(The Doylist explanation for all this is, obviously, the writer and director are Americans. ANYWAY.)

But I finally figured it out! They must have picked up those versions of their names during the American Civil War, where we see them prominently pictured in the photo on Copley’s desk.

See, while “The Old Guard” wonderfully, blessedly ignores the U.S. entirely for most of the story (other than it being where Nile is from and the military she served with), the OG Old Guard members clearly have some experience there, the first thing they say to Copley is that a company man for the CIA would usually be American, not a Brit, showing some understanding of the inner workings of the American intelligence apparatus. 

"Sure, Avelera,” you might say. “Clearly they’re familiar with the US, they’re mercenaries, but they seem familiar with everywhere on Earth. That doesn’t explain the Americanization of their names.” Aha! But this brings me to another theory, which requires a slight digression: 

The immortality of the Old Guard is very interesting, it’s pretty much only fast healing, which arrests them at the age they died. There’s no super strength, no accelerated metabolism (they’re effected by knock-out gas just as much and for just as long as anyone else), they still need to eat and sleep, and most importantly there’s no improved memory. This is really key because it means that for all their bragging about how Nile and Booker are babies, the older Old Guard like Andy, Joe, and Nicky still experience time the way normal people do, complete with forgetting things because they’ve lived through so goddamn much. 

This is pretty huge because it means, unlike some supernatural immortals in fiction, if they spend a century somewhere they’re going to feel it. And in my opinion, this is the Watsonian rationale for why they don’t really have very distinct accents for their original languages and they’re comfortable with changing up their names, you would too if every decade actually felt like a decade and you had over 100 of them.

But back to the Civil War. If Booker died in 1812 fighting for Napoleon, and his son died in his 40s that means (ding ding ding!) that shot of the Old Guard in the Civil War in the 1860s would have been soon after the last of Booker’s family died, perhaps immediately after depending on how old his sons were when he died or if they were fathered after he became immortal. Perhaps the Old Guard didn’t just go to America to fight in this war for kicks or for a good cause (if they were on the Union side). Rather, they might have been trying to give Booker a change of scenery after the trauma he’d been through, maybe to the point of staying away from Europe for an extended period of time. 

And you know what those nicknames of theirs sound like? The kind of nicknames that the dumbass American soldiers they met while they were there would give them. Yusuf becomes “Joe”, Nicolò becomes “Nicky”, Andromache pretends to be a particularly clean-shaven, stunningly attractive man and becomes “Andy” and Sebastian LeLivre becomes “Booker”. Now add a few more decades onto that of kicking around in the U.S., then have English become the most common second language in the world in the 20th c., and suddenly those names become comfortable and hey, maybe in 100 years you’ll pick up a new version of your name to match the times, just to keep things fresh.