#Japanese names can be... a thing

[turtleations]

Interview with Setsumaru Masahoko (Nippon Broadcast Organization)

Published in the hide BIBLE (by Akemi Oshima) 2008

Q1: When did you meet hide for the first time?

A: I think the first time was when hide-san came as a guest to a radio program I was in change of to promote his solo single. But I only really talked to him when I took a business trip to L.A. from 31 March until 4 April 1998 to record “hide’s All Night Nippon R” radio program.

Q2: Please tell us what kind of impression you had at the time.

A: He seemed like a shy person. At that time, hide-san happened to be checking the jacket for his single “Pink Spider” and I remember that the way he handled that jacket was very polite, making me think, “hide-san must be a sensitive person.”

Q3: Please tell us of an episode with hide that left an impression on you.

A: It happened when we were at a Japanese restaurant, celebrating the three days of recording being over. We had a passionate conversation about music, and I can’t forget him saying, “I really want to get a Grammy.” Also, he wanted to do this event in Summer, wanted to promote his “Psyborg Rock” sound, and I felt like he really was a creator from the heart, overflowing with ideas.

Q4: What kind of person was hide to you?

A: The “big brother” of my heart.

Q5: If you ever saw him live, please tell us of your impression.

A: Dramatic, powerful, beautiful. The things hide-san produced where always sensationally beautiful.

Q6: Out of hide’s songs, which is your favorite and why?

A: I can’t choose a “favorite”, but “Pink Spider” is profoundly memorable. Because I heard hide-san himself talk about it a lot, and every time I hear it, it brings up irreplacable images of the promotional video and the members of Spread Beaver for me.

[technically-human]

Boy Crystal and Niko..? And the sprites if you wanna.

Crystal (yes his name is still Crystal, although before getting his memories back, he assumed it to be Chris) and Jiro had a little cameo here. I'm glad they finally got their own piece!

Litty became Kingham and Kingham became Litty, but you wouldn't be able to tell anything has changed.

Ko-Fi

[laurellala]

A Shakespearean comedy of errors

bonus:

[feroluce]

On Sampo's name (ALL of his names!)

I feel like everyone who's a fan knows the meaning of Sampo's full name by now- the sampo was a legendary item that could magically make endless supplies of gold, flour, and salt, all priceless items at the time! So it works perfectly for a scammer businessman like Sampo. ☆

"Koski" is the Finnish word for "water rapids" which might seem kinda random but actually makes sense for him, since Aha and the Masked Fools are also referred to with water terms:

This kind of analogy isn't specific to only Aha and the Masked Fools, but it does still tie them together. So water rapids fits perfectly! Sampo wants to stir the pot! He likes to shake things around and spice things up! He's taking that stagnant pool and turning it into water rapids! It would actually explain his ridiculous hair color, too; a dark blue wave tipped with white foam haha

EDIT: an amazing contribution from @ricochetlovebombs, who heard it from hoyolab user Rattaboy. If you interpret his first and last name together, instead of separately like I did, you would get something like "money river."

In other words, Sampo's name literally means CASH FLOW SKXJMDMDMD

What I really wanted to talk about is his drag alias name, though, Brughel Poisson, because to me that's where it gets really interesting.

So like in the English version, Sampo goes by Brughel Poisson when he's in disguise. Searching for just "Brughel" itself doesn't seem to get you much at first: a Flemish and Dutch Renaissance painter named Pieter Brueghel the Elder, who was famous for his landscapes and peasant scenery, especially Hunters in the Snow and The Blue Cloak.

He's referred to as "the Elder" because he had a son also named Pieter Brueghel (the Younger), and he began a long line of painters, all named Brueghel. Some of them did original work, and many of them created reproductions of the Elder's art to sell. The Elder was also famous as a printmaker. All of this is hilarious when you remember that Sampo is an infamous counterfeiter and has sold a relic called the Parallel Universe Printer JSKZJSMD

There is also something called Brueghel's Syndrome, named after one of Brueghel's paintings called De Gaper, which pictured a man yawning widely. It's a condition that causes the mouth to open and gape uncontrollably, twisting a person's countenance into a distorted mask of their usual face.

Tumblr doesn't have a way of censoring pics like twitter, so for the sake of the medically squeamish, I'm just showing De Gaper here. But if you look up Brueghel's Syndrome, you can find pictures of actual patients, some of whom really do make faces resembling Aha's comedy and tragedy masks!

In the Chinese and Japanese versions, his alias last name is a lot more silly- In those, "Sampo" is phonetically written as "san-bo" and "san-po." And in disguise, his last names are phonetically written as... "Bo-san" and "Po-san." The Chinese version uses different tones, but still. This smug asshole seriously just decided to write his own name backwards and called it a day NDMKXMDMD

In the English version, Poisson itself is kind of a reused Hoyo asset- it's also the name of Navia's fishing village in Genshin Impact. Which is a really silly name for a village, because it literally just means "fish" in French smzjxkdkdk but!

Again, more water imagery. And in English, if something is suspicious, we say that it's "fishy," which is perhaps the most fitting association yet for someone as shady as Sampo ☆

And for a good while I thought that was the only connection. But then. My beloved @hydrachea, who is an actual native French speaker, dropped this on me right after April Fool's Day:

Poisson is literally the word you use to pull an April Fool's prank.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[peridot-tears]

During the main quests, this appears p often. It literally means "Jin's Journey":

But the kanji for "Jin" -- 仁 -- also means "benevolence," emphasizing a respect for humanity. So 仁之道, while it means "Jin's Journey," can also be read as "the path/way of benevolence."

He isn't following the bushido, or 武士道，the way of the warrior/samurai, but rather 仁之道, the way of benevolence, a path that diverts sharply from the "honor" that samurai follow.

[isa-ah]

he’s a tired kitsune who spends his time trying to mediate between people and spirits and wandering around cities cleaning up messes he’s framed in by his rival

[kimbapisnotsushi]

hi! please share your headcanons about jay. thanks!

ooooooooh sure thing let's get it!!

(also please keep in mind that soke was literally my first time dipping back into dc after a LONG while, so i have a bit of catch-up to do in terms of characters and stories, and thus some of my knowledge might be outdated!!! also i love jay but i do consider myself still very new to understanding him and thus most of these will be silly fun :333)

damian makes fun of him for that all-black ninja-esque stealth suit he wore to sneak into star labs because there was literally NO POINT in jay trying to disguise himself like that when he didn't bother covering up his BRIGHT FUCKING PINK hair

yes i'm still mad about yes i would like to know his thought process

is it natural btw??? i've seen different takes around where people think it's dyed bc of his other version in aos:jk, but i feel like that's pretty unlikely considering it was shaved all the way down when he got taken prisoner and experimented on and it grew back exactly like that

for the record i'm not a hater i'm just saying 1) it made him a walking beacon and 2) it being natural is so fucking funny to me since he clearly didn't inherit it from his mom, which begs the question:

who the fuck is jay's dad

while jay does care for all of the revolutionaries as their ally and everyone at the truth as their boss, and as an overall friend, i think that wink and the aerie are especially close to him and they consider each other family. they were pretty much the closest thing to adult supervision jay had for a while, and he relied on them a lot when he was settling down in metropolis and figuring out how to live alone

this meant that he called them for stupid things like "if something explodes in your microwave do you call the fire department", and not-stupid things like "help me open a bank account because metropolis bank has laws that won't let me do it by myself as a minor"

they were also the first people he came out to

jay loves them even if they CAN be really annoying

jay: "are you—are you guys ACTUALLY planning on shovel-talking superman" wink: "technically, he's superman's son" the aerie: "and if he's late to the coffee shop, i'm taking points off"

i think jay would get along with tim actually

the dude is an underground hacktivist refugee, investigative journalist, and a former president's son. he's probably used to always looking over his shoulder, ready to be jumped at a moment's notice. he's got a plan for everything but the plans only exist inside his head because he can't risk hard copies being found or digital ones being hacked. he's memorized them all. they're either alphabetized or mentally color-coded. we're talking levels of elaborate just-in-case getaways and meticulously planned investigations that would get a normal reporter killed if they asked the wrong question. it's dedication to a terrifying degree

yeah tim would definitely rock with him

jay has this neat little trick where if he's in a situation in which someone's poisoned his food and he has to eat it/can't let them know he knows, he just partially phases his organs so that the food falls through his body a little bit at a time and never enters his digestive system

jon is HORRIFIED when he finds out. damian is really fucking impressed

does gamorra have its own language???? i feel like jay would be fluent in it if so. of course he would be. he'd do anything to keep part of home as close to his chest as possible

oh that's another thing i'll probs mess up on btw i am legit so confused on gamorra considering it's apparently in asia and i would assume has its own distinct culture? but jay's surname is japanese and that random kid on the boat has a japanese name so are they like. japanese-adjacent??? or is gamorra made up of multiple asian identities blended into one (read tags for clarification)

i should probably read absolute power shouldn't i

okay sorry that got WAY off topic but yeah jay is definitely someone who loved his home despite not being able to go back and did everything he could to maintain his ties

ALSO can we talk about jay being a student at metropolis college at seventeen???? did he skip a year of school when he got to the u.s.??? did he lie on forms or something??

like i don't think he's taking extra credit classes as a high school student because he was also advertising the media department when we saw him, and i don't think he'd be doing that if he was in high school

jon makes sense because he had a fake identity which COULD put him in college. but jay???

honestly lying on paper is such a jay nakamura thing to do if he doesn't want people tracking him down by cross-referencing his birthday with government records

jay nakamura's number-one tip of running an anonymous underground activist stream: hide all identifiable information from the government

(this does not work when you are widely recognized as superman's boyfriend)

also now that dick is backing the truth can we PLEASE get tim in on it. i think it'd be so fucking funny. i think he and jay would have a grand old time breaking into firewalls and digging through internet archives and exposing corrupt people

tim is like "FINALLY i have something fun to do at all those fucking galas bruce makes me go to" because jay needs some rich guy's vacation itinerary so he knows the prime time to break into his house and gather evidence for something

i just have so much appreciation for jay nakamura you guys i love him so much

[jovieinramshackle]

Sorry guys I actually like "Ernesto Foulworth and Gino" please don't come at me/j

[kaurwreck]

do you have a favorite literary ref in bsd or is that a cruel question to ask

This is so hard! I like lots and lots of them, for different reasons. If I had to choose only one, and if I were to be sincere, Gin might be my favorite literary reference. I really love how much her namesake short story reframes Akutagawa's character, especially when comparing his Beast iteration against the version of him in bsd's main timeline. O-Gin also just really neatly and cleanly encapsulates what I love about Akutagawa's Kirishitan mono, including his affection for the Holy Fool trope.

To be more silly, I really love when Atsushi tell Tanzō Tonan that he has to feed his chameleon to escape the conversation with Tonan upon realizing Tonan wasn't being forthright (just ahead of the Decay of Angels framing the Agency). There are two references here that I adore (1) the reference to Chamelon Diary, in which Nakajima Atsushi semi-autobiographically recounts receiving a chameleon from a student and also his epiphany on how to live absent objective existential meaning; and (2) the reference to Tonan-sensei, a short story by Nakajima Atsushi about his beloved uncle, whom I also adore.

Rather than attempt to write an essay on Tonan-sensei and his influence on Nakajima Atsushi, I'll simply include a roughly translated version of the short story's Wikipedia synopsis:

The story depicts the protagonist, who secretly harbors self-loathing resentment towards his uncle because he shares similar mental characteristics with himself, but through his interactions with his uncle as he faces death, he gradually sorts out his critical view of the coexistence of love and hate and comes to realize the deep love he has for his uncle that lies dormant within him.

I will also include below a snippet about Tonan (referred to also as "Tan") from Nakajima Atsushi: His Life and Work, a dissertation submitted to the University of Hawaii by Nobuko Miyama Ochner in May 1984 (the date is relevant, because Ochner-sensei was able to speak to some of Atsushi's then-living family and friends to piece together his biography):

[Nakajima Atsushi's grandfather's] second eldest son, Tan, was also a scholar of Chinese. A bright boy, he was able to read the Chinese classics at the age of six and compose poetry and prose in Chinese at thirteen, according to the Japanese system of reckoning age. He was a proud, uncompromising, and impatient man, who never married, and who seemed to be always pursuing the impossible. In a short piece entitled "Tonan Sensei" (Tonan was Tan's pen name), Atsushi describes his uncle as having the virgin's beautifully clear, pure eyes— "the eyes of a man who is always dreaming an impossible dream." Tan, who revered General Nogi Maresuke (1849-1912), was an "amalgam of fervent patriotism and the temperament of a traditional Confucian scholar." He was greatly concerned about the future of Japan and China, as well as of Asia in general, confronted with the onslaught of the Western colonial powers.

...

In his articles he laments the ignorance of Chinese culture and tradition on the part of the Japanese diplomats in China, and criticizes their excessive reliance upon Western sources of news information. He felt that the peoples of Japan and China must unite in their efforts to repel the outsiders from East Asia; he went to China at least two times to try to enlist Chinese support for his vision. One of the prominent men he met was the scholar Lo Chen-yii (1866-1940), who later wrote an introduction to the posthumously published collection of Tan's poetry and prose, Tonan sonko. Atsushi is said to resemble this uncle most.

[everbluekisses]

i would also like to gather all my old kuya arts that i deleted from my blog just to be silly

[harapeveco]

I wish I knew any Japanese fanfic sites I just know the knk and int fics are crazy over there

[nerosdayinanime]

"Im worried what people would think of you then, that you're just a personal whore or something- i don't want to ruin your reputation.."

"Are you kidding? 'My dick was so good i got promoted-' Thats the biggest flex i can think of!"

"Well, you're certaintly enthusiastic about this."

[n7punk]

for all the None people who follow me and care about Trace Memory/Another Code (spoiler free I promise): if you're interested in the remaster, I recommend you only get it if you're getting it for the sequel that was never released in America. they changed a lot in Trace Memory (Another Code 1) and this isn't a "new is bad" thing (usually I prefer remasters), this is a "they cut puzzles, 'streamlined' the game, and reworked/removed the best scene in the entire game" kind of thing. the game undoubtedly looks better, but it's also missing some of the hand-drawn art that really added to its story. there are some improvements (the new voice acting is cool to have, especially having it be optional, and the way they implemented the autoplay feature for that is clever. there are some improved scenes they could rework with the benefit of 3D graphics and voice acting), but I don't think it should be your first Trace Memory experience.

if you can't get your hands on the DS line and an emulator isn't working for the puzzles (something I can see - some of them did actually need to be cut just for being janky or more difficult than they needed to be) and this is the only way you can ever experience the first game, I recommend it over not playing the game, I'm just saying it's not the original. from what I can tell they normed the style of the first game with the second, so it's brighter and all the dialogue and non-flashback cutscenes are rendered in game, which loses some of the impact of the stylistic comic panels. I never thought I'd prefer flat art to rendered cut scenes but in a game like this the hand-drawn, kinda gritty art did a LOT and the brightly-rendered 3D models just don't lend themselves to the mystery of all these people's deaths. I am excited to play the second game since, changes or not, this is the only way to experience it in America (like I said, I still recommend Another Code: Recollection if it's the only way you can experience Trace Memory), but I would say the remaster is mostly worth buying for the sequel if you like the original game.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[chibishortdeath]

Yippie! So silly (kinda sad) idea I had I while ago that I need to draw about again aaaa— Anyway, there were a lot details that had me thinking about stuff in certain games. Harmony of Despair has the “Helmont/Shiimon/Simon Wraith” enemies that have this ominous description of “some say this is what happened to Simon Belmont in the end”, and it’s just never mentioned again. Like damn ok that’s uh some interesting information wow uh— Also that coupled with the hanging skeletons being a reference to Simon in CV4 and also being in the hanged man position, the family heirlooms in the ghostly Dracula’s castle in Harmony of Dissonance, and the quest for Anna in Order of Ecclesia about helping her cat protect her from dark spirits that’s ended with a really sudden line about her having nightmares about a man with a whip fighting something scary, my guy is haunting the narrative and doesn’t sound like he’s doing so great 💀.

So the Ghost Simon concept was born and uh here he is I guess lol. Part of it also came from the idea that we’ve already seen a ghost companion in the series in Wind (if you know you know), but what if there was one you had to help that was a little more uh what’s the word… tormented? Vengeful? Upset in general? Yeah. He’s kinda just a mix of a bunch of different ghost lore, not one in particular. Fun fact: Dulahans sometimes use their own spines as a whip :3. And in a lot of folklore Strigoi often prey on their own family members, especially the younger girls in the family. But yeah, he’s just kind of a nuisance, not really like ‘evil’ or anything. Breaks things sometimes, generally pesters people, only occasionally a minor threat. Maybe leaves bloody footprints sometimes, turns paintings crooked, writes omens on walls, ya know, average ghost activities. I like to think that the boss rush with him in HoD is what he’s been doing for a while. Maybe Juste unknowingly takes him home with some of the furniture, probably the grandfather clock lol. Idk it’s just a fun what if idea for fun tho mostly d(^^ ).