#I haven't seen one in the flesh and I've had classes with an Assyrian

[sophianightdreamer]

Classical mistaking diminutives for names, fumbling up gendered endings along with names (there's a girl named Yuriy somewhere, I remember) and almost total lack of patronymics, but that's universal (Natasha is not a proper name, it's short for Natalya). Otherwise, some cases of general phonetic fumbling and general lack of ideas what to name people - number of people with surnames from famous writers approaches a critical threshold of some kind (Tolstoys are a whole different category - it's a still extant formerly noble bloodline, those people are aristocracy still), and names in general swing from "Tom, Dick and Harry" level of genericness to absolutely batshit insane (Sapsan Electrichka! It's just two different trains!).

Also, Russians tend to have silver hair for some reason. Like, when it's not generic foreigner blue-eyed blonde it's always downright silver or white - I think I even remember more silver/white haired anime Russians than blonde ones. I have no idea why silver specifically. It's not bad, but it's baffling.

And snow. Lots and lots of snow. Everybody's bundled up. It's always winter in Russia, and pay no mind that Scandinavia, Canada and Korea do usually have seasons when they appear. Why it's always winter? Nobody knows. Also, Russia consists of about two cities and an endless coniferous (seems to usually be pine) forest. IRL southern Siberia is rather warm, most of the forests are temperate and otherwise a good chunk of Russia is the Great Steppe.

And, since I'm born and raised in Kazakhstan, there's like two and a half Kazakhs in anime, and one of them is named Allelujah - but okay, it's Gundam, the home of Beltorchika, half of people here have insane names. I think I heard about somebody with Kazakhstan as a birthplace in TerraforMars, but I don't know enough about TerraforMars to confirm. There's also Otoyomegatari about Central Asia in general, and while the visuals are great - I think the artist got hold of some sort of illustrated encyclopedia and had it on hand, every time I read the names I step into the Twilight Zone, because they are just so random and frequently wrong. Amir is a male name, to begin with. And it's like that for almost every ethnicity involved.

This may be a question that a lot of people cannot answer because they've never seen it happen, but what's something funny or interesting that anime somehow always seems to get wrong about your country? Like even if one character is just randomly your nationality but obviously only in name, and some odd trope that has nothing to do with your country in real life, that's somehow always present?

It's not often I've seen anime/manga depicting finnish character(s), but one thing that consistently gets me is how casually Japanese creators will give female characters names that are culturally strictly male. I got sidetracked into writing a whole essay about this (twice) before I came back to my senses and spared you from it, but I will say that finnish naming conventions are very strict about gendered names, and there are like 5 truly gender-neutral traditional finnish names, which are all so old-fashioned and rare that I've never actually met a person with one of them.

Like this is one of those beautiful examples of cultural contrast - I know next to nothing about Japanese naming conventions, but I can see how it could just genuinely not occur to someone to go look up whether it's normal to name a girl Simo or Jouko.