#Knowing the etymology is also part of why I picked that name

[sophieswundergarten]

Have I expressed how much I love the fact that the wonderful librarian is named "Sophie"??

Because the name is from the Greek meaning wisdom. Come on, how perfect is that? It fully delights me how much attention to detail is given to the names in this series, and I am over the moon that the really nice lady who works at the science museum library and dispenses knowledge is named after wisdom

[sarafangirlart]

Andromeda’s race/ethnicity and why it’s not inaccurate to interpret her as black/African

Now you’ve seen how I draw my babygirl as Afro Palestinian Egyptian so you know where I personally stand on the subject. However, my interpretation isn’t the only one, ancient authors, from mythographers to historians to poets to playwrights, have proposed various different locations for Andromeda’s homeland, often times contradicting each other, what I’m trying to do here is correct some misinformation as well as argue that even if Andromeda isn’t black/ethiopian, she still wouldn’t be considered white or ethnically European.

I would like to reiterate like I did with my Hephaestus/Aphrodite post that I’m not a mythology or history expert, I just read a lot. So do your own research and come up with your own conclusions.

Let’s go.

The etymology of “Aethiopia”

Aethiopia means "of burned face" which yes is pretty racist be modern standards but basically means that its inhabitants are dark skinned, so even if you go by sources that it isn’t in Africa, the inhabitants still wouldn’t be white or Greek.

Location of the Kingdom

You’d hear the statement that the Aethiopia in mythology is not the same as Ethiopia the modern country, which is true. You’d also hear that it’s a completely fictitious location, that’s only partially true, while Aethiopia existed mainly as a mythological location (mentioned as early as the Iliad) that didn’t stop ancient historians, mythographers and poets from placing it in real locations or calling pre-existing nations Aethiopia. It’s hard to pick which one is more “accurate” bc they all contradict each other, not only that, but these writers didn’t actually visit these locations and ancient ppl weren’t as well versed in geography as we are today so they’d be weirdly vague or confusing about these locations, I mean just look at an ancient map and you’d see what I mean.

So personally, I think you can go with any version you personally prefer, the options are quite limitless, she could be from the Arab peninsula, the Levant, North Africa, Persia, hell maybe even India if you are like Ovid.

Andromeda’s genealogy

(I just realized that these are the Waterson kids color palette while writing this lmaooooooooo)

Yes Andromeda is descended from Zeus (no family tree can escape that man lol) and she’s also the great granddaughter of Poseidon, which adds a whole new layer to the fact he tried to kill her.

Now for a bit of history: The Trojan war (which didn’t happen irl obviously) was dated as taking place in the 12th or 13th century BCE by some ancient writers, that war happens a few generations after Perseus’s story, which means that Egypt was in the New Kingdom era, also called the Egyptian Empire, when Nubians (who would be considered black by today’s standards) were a very important part of society, even becoming Pharaohs. Ancient Egypt was a lot more diverse than modern ppl give it credit for, there were multiple ethnic groups living there. Not to mention that you can’t get more Egyptian than being descended from the god of the Nile River lol

Libya is (obviously) the personification of the region of Libya, not the modern country Libya, but the general area in North Africa west of Egypt. The name Libya comes from the Libu, a berber tribe. So once again, even if Andromeda wasn’t black, even if you interpreted that her kingdom is placed in Asia, she’d still be of African decent.

Cassiopeia is a tricky one, her origins are obscure, she’s called a nymph by Nonnus, while Stephanus of Byzantium (a very late source) states she’s from Ioppa and that the city takes its name from her. However, Ioppa/Jaffa was identified as Andromeda’s home much earlier in Periplus attributed to Scylax, which was composed in the late fourth century bc.

Conclusion

You can make Andromeda black it’s ok. Ancient writers couldn’t agree on her country’s location but we can still speculate. Anyways ummm… I think that’s it? Maybe I’ll add to this if I find or remember more interesting information.

Have a great day.

[lividria]

(Bad) Fangame Idea: Metroid Menace 1

A post or two ago, I brought up that some time last year I came up with a trilogy of Metroid fangame ideas trying to figure out where the series could go after Metroid Dread and instead created something truly deranged. This post will be outlining the first installment in this insanity only my mind could conjure up. It's also the most fleshed out of the trilogy, but somehow also the most reasonable. And also the only one I wrote down in detail, though I do still have all of my old notes for the other two. Strap yourself in, this is gonna be a wild ride.

(Side note, I remember specifically writing down that in this continuity Other M is non-canon just so I could recycle some of the ideas I liked from it without them being linked to that abomination, so if you pick up on that at any point, probably specifically if I write up Menace 2, yea.)

Prepare for Samus robots, way too many bosses, unnecessary explanations for things nobody cares about, lack of explanations for things you would actually care about, rehashing of ideas the series already did to an absurd degree, two (technically three) Ridley knock-offs, a Samus boss fight, and the general vibe of what I imagine Metroid pages look like on Fantendo... If you were high.

Doppler, Our Protagonist

Okay, so, one of my ideas here was that the Metroid Menace trilogy follows a different character instead of Samus. At this point, we know the Federation is shady and Samus has seen some of that already, but she hasn't seen the bigger picture. Whatever that is. Remember how, in Federation Force, they were trying to make something as strong as Samus' Power Suit but for their soldiers?

They took notes from that incident... And pivoted to making robot replicas, instead, for some reason. Doppler, derived from Doppelganger and the Doppler Effect (I had no better ideas and yes I know the Doppler Effect has no reason to be part of the etymology but at the time it sounded cooler than Doppel), is the most recent model, and for some reason I always imagined them as having Dark Samus' color scheme. Is Doppler the titular Menace? I dunno.

The head GF official overseeing the entire project, Aurlets Onora Unison (That name has a reason to be like that, I promise, it only comes up in Menace 3 though so... I'm just gonna call him Aurlets for now.), has Doppler shipped up to a space station modeled after a standard Samus mission to test & train it. They just built an entire Metroidvania up there. Now that I think about it, I might've accidentally ripped off Metroid Confrontation. Does anyone even... Know? About Metroid Confrontation? Whatever, Doppler is there now, and Aurlets acts as their ADAM, explaining the plot of the simulation.

The Plot Of The Simulation

Space Pirates stole an Aurora Unit. They have it in this space station base now. There are Metroids and X parasites, there, too. Don't ask how they coexist. Of course, they're not actually Metroids, but Mechtroids, robotic recreations that are/should be only capable of sapping electricity, and Z, GF experiments based on a sample of X they got from Samus or something that only eat & mimic certain things with a specific DNA piece placed by the GF and remain docile until attacked or shown a pre-registered threat, such as Doppler. The Feds tried to play this safe, obviously.

There's multiple sectors, each with specific tasks for Doppler to clear before being allowed to unlock the next area, all connected in a generic, undecorated hallway in the center of the space station. I have the tasks all written down, but nobody cares, they were all pretty basic like Find This Thing or Kill This Thing or Kill These Things, that type of thing, and this post is going to be pretty long anyways. The areas were also all just basic themes and loosely based off Super Metroid: Underground, Overgrowth, Heatstroke, Frostbite, and Base. I don't know why that was the naming scheme, or why Maridia froze over.

Timeline of Interesting Things That Happen / Cool Boss Ideas I Had

Alright, starting with Underground. You may have caught onto this from my previous posts, but I... Don't know how to do bulleted lists in Tumblr posts. I tried my best- Wait, no, I figured it out.

Doppler can't absorb Z, so after killing Arachnus-Z you just... Walk through to the next room and the Morph Ball is on a Chozo statue. Which I find pretty funny.

The Missiles are missing from the room they're supposed to be in. You can break into the ventilation and escape to an "out-of-bounds" sector of the space station, where a rogue, earlier model of Doppler, Doppler-2 (We follow Doppler-5), is with the stolen Missiles. You somehow defeat them with just the Beam, but they run off instead of being destroyed.

The Elephant Bird is here, of all things, but instead of collapsing into a Core-Z or something it's it's "original form", some unseen creature that's puppeteering the Chozo Statue it's in that escapes whenever you break it. I think I wanted to do something more interesting than the Torizo?

Each area has Mechtroids scattered around to destroy, with each one going up to the next tier like in Metroid 2, but this one starts with the Larval Mechtroids to pad it across all 5 areas.

And now, Overgrowth:

There's a Wave Trooper from Metroid Prime as a miniboss to obtain the Wave Beam, instead of a regular enemy, which I still find kinda neat. Probably really screws things up to have the Wave Beam so early, though, I would probably fix that.

Yakuza-Z is for some reason ground-bound? Only getting off the ground by climbing up it's webs to shoot projectiles at you? It's entire thing was that it's a jumping chaos spider, why did I...

Not only do you see signs that someone's been through this area before, I sure do wonder who, but sometimes when you enter a room you can see a Little Birdie fleeing before you can get close to it. Oh no.

I don't really have anything interesting to say in-between these. Heatstroke.

For some reason I really liked the idea of elemental Spore Spawns as a recurring miniboss across this entire series, and it starts here with the Flamespore. I think it happens like 5 times.

An entire boss is killed ahead of time, specifically the Mecha-Crocomire. You can just... Go get the Grapple Beam without any difficulty.

The Ice Trooper drops the... Ice Missiles. What?

If you saw my Meet the Space Dragon posts, you'll remember Metroid 1 had an unused Fake Ridley as a miniboss. They're here as the official GF test to see if Doppler can take on a Space Dragon, though it's obviously hilariously weaker than the real deal.

It initially looks like, to get the Plasma Beam, you just face off against a Plasma Trooper, but then a Mystery Creature instead ambushes them, devours them, and makes off with the Plasma Beam. You chase it out of bounds, kick its ass, it spits the upgrade out and skitters off. Oh no.

Aaand Frostbite.

It looks like you'll finally get the Ice Beam by fighting another Ice Trooper (But you already have the Ice Missiles, why would you need both), but then the Trooper's frozen by the Freezespore. Yup.

Another dead boss is just out and about, this time Serris. It's not actually supposed to be guarding an upgrade, you just find it.

It looks like the Super Missiles are being guarded by a Power Trooper, but then Doppler-2 blows them up with a Power Bomb and steals the upgrade. You get an actual showdown with them, resulting in the ice under them shattering, throwing them underwater, and then re-freezing above them, trapping them underwater without a Gravity Suit. At this point, Aurlets fesses up that that was a failed prototype that went rogue and kept escaping the "playground", so he had an Omega Mechtroid deal with it, but it was somehow reactivated, albeit without it's abilities. Looks like it had a grudge on its successor. But it's gone now. Probably.

You can actually find a part of the sector that isn't frozen, for some reason. I don't know why I wrote this down, it might've been to imply there was a place Doppler-2 could've escaped to?

The Screw Attack is guarded by the Terminus, a giant boss version of the Genesis, named as such because it was the last animal retrieved from SR388. I don't think Doppler was supposed to encounter it, that sounds like a valuable specimen, I don't know why it's here. It was probably just an AM2R reference.

By The Way, There Are Superbosses If You Backtrack

Side note before Base. Exactly what it says on the tin, though there's other non-superbosses to backtrack for.

An Omega Mechtroid in each area.

A Zeta Mechtroid in Underground, meant to be fought around the Heatstroke state of progression, because it gives you the Baby Mechtroid, which helps attack enemies, heals Doppler with stolen energy, and even eats Z somehow. I think my idea was the Federation made this one specifically able to do that and not the rest of the Mechtroids, but why would they even give Doppler this in the first place? And why make it optional?

Wait, what the fuck, you had to actually go through each area to get keys to Base USING THE SHINESPARK? I have fun making ideas that are intentionally miserable to go through, but that's horrible. I'm pretty sure I made it a separate upgrade from the Speed Booster, too, for some reason.

Underground's superboss is the Queen Mechtroid, lodged in the background wall for some reason, probably to differentiate it from the Metroid 2 boss fight a bit. It drops an upgrade for the Baby Mechtroid that lets it drain energy from regular enemies... Oh, god, does that imply GF figured out how to replicate the actual Metroids doing that?

Overgrowth's superboss is an Elephant Bird rematch, for some reason, and it has a Core-Z second phase this time around. It drops the... Beam Coil? Which is a damage increase? I know that was meant to explain it's violent behaviors, but... Why a coil?

Heatstroke's superboss is Klaw, the Mystery Creature from earlier all grown up. Once again, he's not in the actual intended area for Doppler. Twice again, if you remember my Meet the Space Dragons post, you'll have seen the Ridley-2 design and my headcanon that each Space Dragon has a unique ability. This guy breathes electricity, and drops the Shock Beam, which paralyzes enemies. Which is kinda useless when you should have the Ice Beam by now.

Frostbite's superboss is the... Jelzap-Z? Okay, I guess. It drops the Regeneration Suit, which regenerates your health & missiles while in the water. Because that's totally not overpowered.

The Wave Buster, Ice Spreader and Flamethrower from Prime are all hidden upgrades, and I have no clue how they'd work here because this is a traditional 2D Metroid game with beam-stacking.

I mentioned in the Google Doc for this idea you can find more out of bound areas with juicy lore, but didn't elaborate on the juicy lore. How could you do this to me, me?

Base, Basically The Most Chaotic Climax I Could've Written

Ok, you open up Base. It's Tourian, obviously. Instead of going around the area, completing a list of tasks, it's just get from Point A to Point B and kill everything in your way. Along the way, some of the Space Pirates you fight don't turn into Z, which were previously how the GF were cloning so many enemies for the area, so that has concerning implications.

Remember the stolen Aurora Unit from earlier? It's set up to be Mother Brain here, and you can even see the giant body for it a few rooms before the fight. But as it goes to raise it up for the second ohase, it gets blown up from some Super Missiles off-screen. Place your bets now, who is it? You're wrong, it's not Doppler-2, IT'S SAMUS.

Cue an intense remix of the SA-X boss theme (Which I wrote down as a way to make it unclear if this is Samus if this idea were brought to fruition but... I'm just gonna tell you it's Samus, this is a Tumblr post) as you fight her in a state of panicked confusion, probably, as a pre-recorded message from Aurlets congratulating you on completing the mission plays in the background which was just meant to be a story beat at the time but is hilarious looking back on it. He also mentions that Doppler should now enter a capsule in the next room to officially end their mission and join the Galactic Federation. Samus has a weakened version of the fucking Super Metroid Hyper Beam for some reason, according to my notes, and when the fight starts the Z from the (obviously fake) Aurora Unit is absorbed by the Baby Mechtroid and somehow gives Doppler the "Aurora Suit", which is basically this game's equivalent of the Omega Suit from Fusion or the Metroid Suit from Dread. Don't ask, I was on another level when writing this, apparently.

The fight ends, and both Doppler and Samus jump away from each other, exhausted and confused, only for a SPACE PIRATE SHIP TO BURST THROUGH THE WALL WITH ANOTHER SPACE DRAGON ON IT. This one is Talon, and breathes ice as an Ice Ridley reference (Again, if you saw Meet the Space Dragons you'll remember that), and it lashes out at both Samuses, as he's also confused. This seems pretty dire, right? You didn't get healed after the Samus fight, but instead the Baby Mechtroid somehow saps life energy from Talon and heals both Doppler and Samus, who now fights Talon alongside you for the final boss fight.

Yeah, what's going on is that the space station is being sieged by Space Pirates just as you went to fight the fake Space Pirates, which is why Klaw was running around earlier, he's Talon's son. Talon is the one leading the raid, the newly appointed commander of the Space Pirates after Ridley's death, and Samus just happened to respond to Aurlets' distress call about this and got very confused when she saw Doppler, but now she has bigger fish to fry.

You beat Talon's boss fight, but he is still ready to throw more punches, so instead Samus blows up a wall of the space station with a Super Missile, revealing the vacuum of space, which Talon is immediately launched towards. He holds onto the walls, still not wanting to give up, so Samus jumps into his mouth in her Morph Ball and Power Bombs his ass... Or, well, his mouth. He freaks the fuck out and is launched off into the distance towards the planet the station's orbiting, and since Doppler & Samus both have Gravity Suits they're completely fine. Samus' Fusion/Dread ship flies up, and you're given... Multiple ending choices, huh.

You go back to that capsule from earlier and become an officially licensed Galactic Federation robot soldier to send on bounties instead of Samus, as Doppler should be physically unable to distrust them and thus is preferable over Samus if another Fusion situation ever pops up.

You go with Samus, who for some reason mentors Doppler and the two go on missions together for a while.

You steal Talon's ship from earlier and go on your own, which doesn't make sense since Doppler was specifically designed to not have free will, but whatever. This is the canon ending, because of course it is.

OR you can try and kill Samus, resulting in a Metroid Suit Samus superboss fight where you defeat her and join the Space Pirates as an elite soldier because I wanted a really fucking dumb ending just to entertain myself, I think. You're not healed after Talon, by the way.

And then there's a post-credits scene where it's shown Talon can fly in space, just like Ridley, and willingly retreats to the planet the space station is orbiting, which you can visually identify as Twin Tabula, a planet namedropped in Prime 1. I think you could visually identify it, anyways, because wasn't it namedropped on a hologram of the system Tallon IV's in? Also, I think it was that one in specific because Doppler could be viewed as a twin of Samus, or something.

Conclusion

What the actual fuck?

If anyone shows interest in this, I'll be more than willing to write up Metroid Menace 2 and 3, which are... Somehow even rougher around the edges, and even more patently absurd, it'll be a lot of fun. I will spoil that, if you couldn't already tell, our Space Dragon duo will be the recurring antagonists, and Doppler-2's arc isn't over either, which would've been much harder to catch, actually.

I told @bean-counter29 I'd @ them with this after they mentioned having a similar idea, so there you go. A much stranger finale than playable SA-X versus Samus, I'd say.

[cyberdragoninfinity]

Sora mayhap? 🍭

SORAAAAA 🥺

Why I like them/why I don’t: im a turbo sucker for "character effectively raised to be a weapon learning how to make friends and exist as like. a Person" so sora makes me bonkers yonkers. his character arc is so good in a show full of Kind of Fumbled Character Arcs. he's not just an impish Little Fucker™ but then he turns into a certified REAL ONE!! A RARE AND BEAUTIFUL GIFT. he loves his friends with his whole heart and his deck rules and it will never not be funny that every time he's in shot he has somehow acquired another piece of candy and/or dessert. I KNOW HE IS STICKY!!!

What I like about their appearance: i love that the aforementioned candy is like basically part of his design at this point. they need to make a sora figure that comes with the lollypop. also his color palette!! the polymerization colors!!! WAAUUGHH

Do I prefer their dub names or original names?: pretty neutral to both his last names.. I do love that they both have etymologies tied to the color purple!!

OTP: im an aro sora truther so i dont really have oneeee.... we were cooking some insane toxic middle school yaoi in dimensionswap AU with sora and yuya and im still fond of it though

NOTP: i see sora/shay a lot and i gotta say, not a huge fan. age/maturity gap that doesnt feel great and in general i just dont rly think shay would be interested in dating someone largely complicit in All That Shit That Happened to His Home even if they repented. shrugs

OT3: mentioned this when i talked about yuya but yuya/sora/zuzu is very sweet.....

Favourite card they use: GAAAH HARD TO PICK AGAIN. I LOVE FRIGHTFURS. i think i gotta give it to either Frightfur Tiger or Frightfur Sabretooth.... my two dear friends i always have so much fun with in tinks. i love Tiger's weird cackle they gave it in-show.

Favourite moment they were in: everyone and their mom is gonna say the sora-shay duel and i get it, it's a great duel, but im sooo so fond of a lot of Sora's smaller moments that show just how much he cares about yuya and zuzu especially. going out of his way to show Yuya zuzu's helmet and prove she's safe during the friendship cup. when he and zuzu beat the shit out of those cops. when sora duels zarc and he's FUCKING CRYING. OVER YUYA. AAHH. LITTLE BABYMAN

Least favourite moment: i think we actually did talk about this but it's so weird that just like. made sora go back to Fusion after the zarc battle and hes just hanging out there?!??! put him back in Paradise City right now HIS FRIENDS ARE THERE!!!

Something I associate with them: this genre of post

[kazeharuhime]

Made a thing and decided maybe it's decent enough to post. Links to refs, the blank, and rambles under the cut.

Flora: Flos adonis. "Painful recollections" in flower language according to Catharine Harbeson Waterman's Flora's Lexicon (1840).

Fauna: Flying fish. I use these as symbols for Wotrens in general, but Tsuname in particular has a scene where he glides over the ocean and enjoys a moment of freedom, so I think he best exemplifies the whimsy that is the flying fish.

Object: Marble. In hindsight though I should have picked suncatcher, that would have been a lot more symbolic, especially considering I have an old picture of him trying to catch the last rays of the sun. Well, marble will do in a pinch I guess. My thinking was a silly pun involving losing his marbles, also it being a lone marble to imply "where did the others go?" Also chose a clear one as part of the symbolism too. I went through a number of objects for him before settling on marble. Originally I was going to do "window" but couldn't find a ref I liked for it. Then I thought of "tide pool" but that's more a place than an object. Then I thought maybe one of those epoxy resin arts, but there's something really artistic and delicate about those that felt a little bit off to represent Tsuname. But yeah. He's transparent but also shallow some ways. So that's why it has to be a marble or something not that deep. Shallow in the sense that you don't have to reach very far to see what's going on inside. That's why I was thinking glass at first. Window because you can easily peer inside and see what's going on. Tide pool for a similar reason. It's not that deep, you can scoop up some crustacean crawling around in there and look at it. Also sea-theming is very important for him.

You know what I just remembered... 'bracelet' is an object that has more significance in-story. I guess it less represents him though and more his devotion to Sh'zkai...

Song: The Name of Anger by Rurutia. I also could have picked Meltdown by Lollia, but decided they both exemplify Tsuname in different ways, so I didn't need to swap it out. For the one I chose though, it's chock full of symbolism that I think really fits Tsuname well. I think of it typically in the broader context of the invasion he experienced, so in some ways, Meltdown feels a bit more personal than The Name of Anger does for Tsuname. Meltdown I associate more with his ongoing mental battle, whereas The Name of Anger deals far more with the past and how it contextualizes the present. The opening line translates to something like "The ladder of light collapses." This 'ladder of light' I think of representative of hope, but also with like a tractor beam. The light is 'collapsing' which means the beam is disappearing, and with it, any hope of getting back those that were taken by it. "Innocent live sink to the mud." . . . "Overflowing from the ark are the tears of lost children." That last one I associate with the Gaediens who were taken. "My hands transform into swords; my ventless anger continues to spiral" Feels like a fast-forward to present day Tsuname, who has become a weapon against his will and his hands are now swords, and his pent up anger from the horrors he endured spills out everywhere. Lastly I love the picture painted by this line: "The jet-black sea winds whirlpools." There's not many good translations of the song online but you can find the original lyrics here: (x) I am for sure taking some creative liberties in my associations but XD that's the rub.

Feeling: Kuebiko. I abridged the definition quite a bit on the picture to get the text to play nice.

And yes, I did ref the Ocarina of Time scarecrow because it was simpler to draw than trying to figure out how to abstract a proper photo of a scarecrow. XD;

There's a lot of interesting gems in the etymology of kuebiko as well that fit Tsuname:

Kuebiko comes from kueru (崩える), an archaic verb meaning "to break down; to become shabby and disordered", plus hiko (彦), an old epithet for "boy, young man", in turn from hi ko (日子), literally "sun child".[1][2][3] The meaning could be translated as something like "shabby young man".

Yamada no sohodo is formed like an old-fashioned formal name, from surname or literal noun Yamada (山田, lit. 'mountain + paddy'), genitive or possessive particle no (の), and sohodo (案山子),[4] in turn from soho ("sopping wet") + -do, a contraction from -bito, the compounding form of hito (人).[5] The meaning of this name could be construed as "soaked person of the mountain paddies", a euphemism for "scarecrow".

As for the kami aspect of the etymology, at first I thought he had nothing to do with folk wisdom, knowledge and agriculture, but if you think on it, maybe a little. For one thing, when he returns to the island he has a lot of knowledge of how things work out in space that no one else has, so in one sense he is sort of this oddity. Folk wisdom could be turned on its head because his devotion to what he grew up believing is a big part of his character, but he lacked the proper nuance about the belief, so this "folk wisdom" doesn't exactly pan out when he doesn't understand how it applies to the real world (or doesn't). Agriculture was the one that I thought... no, not at all, but thinking on like... the connotations of agriculture, like "living on the land" -> "devotion to the land" -> "devotion to one's home and native land" could be something.

But anyways, the TDoOS definition definitely pulls more from the latter half of that opening sentence from the wiki:

"Kuebiko (久延毘古) is ... represented in Japanese mythology as a scarecrow who cannot walk but has comprehensive awareness."

Going back to the literal meaning, "shabby boy/sun child" really fits Tsuname well. Broken down, made shabby and disordered by his past. I often associate Tsuname with the sun in a lot of ways too. His original sunny disposition, overshadowed now by the horizon, making "sunset" another potent symbol for Tsuname's present psyche.

The second name for Kuebiko in Yamada no sohodo I also thought was kind of interesting, since being a fish boy he often does drag himself out of the ocean sopping wet, but also the connotation of sopping wet with "pathetic" feels of portent. XD

Hmm. Knowing what I know now it feels kinda weird to associate him with this word, but, I guess TDoOS is useful for describing feelings!

Anyways here's the link to the blank: (x)

Thank you if you've read this far. XD

[darkx-the-dragon-kn1ght]

Chapter 17- Part 8

So, first thing’s first- Paralysis!

And from here, well- it’s a low-level Taillow, I don’t even think I need to lower its health? Just a Poké Ball should be fine?

And that’s that, welcome to Ace the Taillow! And now for the other half of these Rhodochrine encounters…

Stantler! Let’s see how this one goes.

Still gonna paralyze it, that’s just objectively good capturing strategy.

And from here, I think Acid will be sufficient enough to lower its HP at a safe rate.

And now, just to be safe, let’s use that Great Ball we just picked up, yeah?

If you didn’t know, I named her after the love interest deer girl from Bambi. Seemed appropriate enough.

So those are about all the encounters we can get right now, so let’s address that Egg.

Taking a closer look at the Egg like this…mainly yellow with significant brown portions…immediately, my mind goes to Drowzee. But I guess it’s possible for it to be Girafarig, though I feel like Girafarig would have some pink on it too due to its triangle scales. So um- Drowzee is my main guess, with Girafarig as a secondary guess?

But we won’t know until it hatches, so let’s just do some rearranging of the party-

There! With Magma Armor, this Egg should hatch in no time!

(Many steps later…)

The second guess it is! Look at this…not-so little guy!

Pardon me, the little guy is a little girl, in fact-

Anyways, if you’re curious about the name, it’s a reference to Girafarig’s inspiration (both generally and in terms of etymology)- the kirin, which is not only a mythological creature, but also the Japanese word for ‘giraffe’!

So yeah, a Psychic-type that also has immunities and extra resistances thanks to its specific dual-typing! I like it!

Anyways, with that, it’s time to do some team-building. And with the information I have about the Fields of interest as well as the general characteristics of Poison-types…I think I know who I’m bringing to this fight.

Riptide and Glare are pretty self-explanatory- Riptide because I refuse to take the starter out of the party, and Glare for probably Poison immunity. Crater and Kirin are for the type advantages (and in Kirin’s case, a certain move she hatched with that could be useful for…reasons), Breeze for whenever I want to blow the Corrosive Mist away, and Blaze to take advantage of the Corrosive Mist to power up her Fire-type moves in case Crater or Kirin aren’t cutting it.

Obviously, some level-grinding is in order, but that’s what the Grand Hall battle corner is for, yeah?

(Then I had to go to sleep…although, the pull for the battle corner that day sucked, so I didn’t mind waiting another day to see if better Trainers would show up.)

Wow, my luck with Grand Hall sure has been sucky, huh? Yesterday there was just one (1) Trainer with Pokémon in the early 20s and who only gave less than 60 Pokémon Dollars, and today? One (1) Trainer with Pokémon in the early 20s who only gave ~100 Pokémon Dollars. Would it kill this game to at least give me more than one Trainer to battle against?? 

I know what you might be thinking- “Oh X, just use the extra Exp. Candies (S) that you have to level your Pokémon!” And I could do that, yes- but I’m not just grinding for exp. points, I’m grinding for money too! Because I want to be able to afford items! What the heck is this, then??

Well, despite how unpleasant it was- seriously, why do I keep running into this guy with a Mawile?- I was able to get the team to a good level.

Lv. 29 seemed like a good stopping point, I doubt Corey will have any Pokémon above Lv. 30 at least. Plus, still no idea when we’re gonna get to the actual third Gym, which has a level cap of Lv. 35, so the lower I can keep my party’s levels while still being able to do this specific boss fight, the better. Besides- if Riptide levels up one more time during the battle, it’d make for a very cinematic evolution moment.

You might have also noticed how everyone now has an item. Breeze and Blaze have Elemental Seeds because they’re most likely to come out on Corrosive Mist, so that’ll give them a power-up (in spite of poisoning them too). Riptide and Kirin have Pecha Berries (I only had two to begin with) to deal with any poisoning of their own, and Crater has an Oran Berry for HP reasons- I would have liked to give her a Sitrus Berry instead, but I didn’t have one. Oh, and Glare’s item didn’t change, still Protective Pads.

Now, I think we’ve prepared rather thoroughly- in the end, it all comes down to what actually happens during the battle. So no more delays, let’s do it.

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[liber-what-ia]

Just sharing a quick list of jolly good sites probably every single soul and their aunt knows, but whatever – sharing is caring and you might still find something new.

I think these are particularly useful if you are English-as-a-second-language and I’m dropping some Italian-specific pages (prego, non c’è di che):

OneLook Thesaurus (Reverse Dictionary): so useful for varying your writing and finding that one word you can’t remember.

Tip of My Tongue: for scatterbrains like me who will remember how the word looks or sounds but not the word itself. Spoiler: 90% of times you find out that was absolutely not how the word looked or sounded but it’s a fun journey.

Thesaurus: a classic, I guess. You get the occurrence rate for every synonym, antonyms, usage and some related words. The homepage is awful but it gets better once you search something.

Urban Dictionary: of course everybody already knows it, but it has to be mentioned (use with caution, of course, and double/triple check everything elsewhere).

RhymeZone: I find this to be the most reliable one among the ones of this kind I’ve tried out. You get results by syllables and almost-rhymes that actually make sense.

Related words: so, this is kind of like playing a Minesweeper round, and it’s all but reliable, but I’ve found it useful when trying to describe a place and needing to know what might be found in that specific place.

Fantasy name generator: it says fantasy but it also has fandom-specific generators, maps, places and so on. There’s also a description generator but I’d skip on that if I were you, even though it can kick creativity back into motion. Probably useful if you’re writing a game and need item descriptions.

Visual Dictionary: this is my holy Graal every time I need to describe a machine or how it works, or when I’m in doubt about how a specific item is addressed in English. It’s maybe basic if you’re a native speaker, but it does wonders if you’re not, especially for what concerns packaging (e.g. is it a carton, a brick or a box?). It also offers fairly detailed descriptions of animal anatomy, and, in general, all that has parts or components with technical names. I used to use some schematics for teaching my tutoring students more advanced English, since the pics help a great deal and words can be easily erased (Paint, my beloved) for exercises and tests, so you might want to try it out.

Dizy (ITA only): this is a game changer since it gives you a definition, antonyms and synonyms AND adjectives to describe substantives listed by occurrence, examples, proverbs and films/books containing the word. It has also a lot of trivia about the words and their composition (roots, syllables, accents etc.) that can be extremely useful if you’re learning Italian. If in doubt, double-check meanings and etymology on Enciclopedia Treccani.

Since I’m a translator, as well as a wannabe writer, I often resort to glossaries if I’m reverse-translating something technical. Just for fun, I’m sharing a bunch of extremely specific glossaries I’ve found in my faves, so you can have a laugh:

- Ichthyology (ita). Specifically, fish in the Mediterranean Sea and I don’t even remember WHY I needed that. - Scuba diving glossary (ita but has also eng). I’m seeing a pattern here and it’s not remembering why I needed something. Please shield your eyes, the layout is hideous. - Finance (ita&eng). ‘Cause seriously, you guys use words you probably made up on the spot. - Jail slang (ita). I mean, why not? Not really reliable and sus as hell, but it had what I needed. - Neapolitan language (ita). Let’s just say I ended up giving up on using any expression listed here since I have no idea how to make them sound in a non-cringe way for native speakers. The book is also dated but I needed to write about Naples in the 30s so it worked for me. - Hessisch for beginners (de). A fun little dictionary I pick quirky words from just to have a laugh with my German family. - Panamanian slang (eng). Not at all related to one of my fics. - Aviation glossary (ita). I needed it for one (1) line and that’s all I’m gonna say about it. - Fixed phrases glossary (ita). You have no idea HOW useful this is, even for a native speaker. - Mando’a dictionary (eng) + Mandor - Guide to Mandalorian Language (sadly they removed this grammar book online but hit me up if you want the PDF). - League of Legends + MOBA glossary (ita&eng). Let me tell you that translation job was NOT FUN.

Here it was, I hope this might help someone and make their struggles with writing a bit easier.

[thatgordongirl]

So I was looking at the board Alison made of the Ghosts. I’ve always tried to read Pat’s article fully but of course there’s parts blocked out so we are going off what I can see. Idk if anyone else has done this but I’m going to weigh in. 

Of course it is notable who his mother is, Maureen, since she has a connection between Pat and his grandfather. However, his father is either unmentioned or behind the sticky note. It seems important that the two people mentioned are Maureen and Gerald (his grandfather) while Carol and Daley aren’t brought up at all. We know since Pat was 39 in 1984 that he was most likely born in 1945, and we can see that Gerald was a Scoutmaster from 1948 to 1963, putting Pat between the ages of 3 to 18. Pat is said to have been an assistant to his grandfather. 

Now, Pat’s organisation and routine compulsion is so intertwined with his personality that he doesn’t understand why people break routine at all. For someone who was so happy and joyful, you’d think he’d have been more open to spontaneity in his life. Perhaps all that time spent with Gerald in his younger years developed into compulsions. Pat’s excusing of Carol’s cheating implies that he has had to learn to let transgressions slide, which of course comes back to Maureen. 

Pat has two conflicting aspects of himself. There’s the positive, blissfully ignorant dad who loves his job and is devoted to his wife, and the heartbroken, under the surface angry husband who’s compulsions and comfortable lies help regulate the emotions he can’t cope with on his own. The way his thinking developed means that he can exist in the limbo of knowing something terrible has happened but having the mindset of it never occurring. He can’t talk about death, he can’t accept his wife cheating on him, he hasn’t been instilled with coping mechanisms. 

Spending his early years in routine and isolation would be similar to the army, showing the parallels with Captain. But Pat had Maureen, who may have been flawed but could have had a positive mindset. Perhaps they had their own problems in the family but Maureen tried to keep them quiet as not to upset Pat, and he interpreted it as pushing down issues and pretending to be unaware of them makes everything better. It would have been done out of worry for Pat’s heart without considering the way it would affect his head. 

Just a quick little etymology note- Patrick and Maureen both have Irish roots, so either Pat has a relative he’s named after or Maureen specifically picked it to represent her. Gerald has Germanic roots. Also, I wonder if the reason Pat thought drinking under the influence of ‘a few pints’ meant that he was raised that way, ergo, Maureen or Gerald drank. Maybe his father did. 

[power-chords]

I am going to re-watch episodes 1-4 of this season, probably, to see what else I can pick up on. But once again, I am paying close attention to costuming decisions. There is information being conveyed here.

Note who is dressed in black and white, and when. These are being used as indicators of Hale’s dominion, influence, or attempts at control (Hale is always dressed in black or white). Costuming that is in color, as with Clementine, or with Christina, indicates something external to her, or in conflict with her. When we see Christina wearing color, we might suspect that a part of Dolores – wherever she may be – is struggling to surface. Notice how Maya is dressed when accompanying her, when trying to steer her decisions one way or the other.

I do not think Maya is “good people.” I think Maya is a minder, a mother – there are both phonetic and semantic connotations to the name – as the name Christina has etymologic parallels to child. There is also Peter Myers (as in Peter Abernathy, as in pater; Myers, as in a masculine counterpart to Maya, as in mayor). We know Westworld is big on parent/child themes and the question of “programming” invoked therein, both sacrificial love and intrinsic tension, succession and separation. What it means not just to deviate, but to individuate, even speciate.

What is the significance of Christina's date in 4x01, and of Teddy, both dressed in gray? I’m still trying to parse that out. If black and white represent Hale’s conflation of harmony and binarism, Black and White, Humans and Hosts, then perhaps gray is indicative of a test of some kind, tempting Christina with the illusion of an alternate choice, breaking free of the either/or. Perhaps Teddy is a covert operative (and if so, on whose behalf?), a wrench in the gears, trying to sneak in under the cover of Christina’s own simulation enclosure-slash-fidelity test.

In last Sunday’s episode, Maeve makes a comment to Hale to the effect of, “And here I thought Wyatt was Dolores’s bad side.” That’s a hugely loaded line, intended to remind the audience that Hale 2.0 is (or, perhaps, was) the synthesis of two discrete personalities: Dolores Abernathy and Charlotte Hale. She even tells Dolores in S3: “Why give us these feelings” if all they’ll be is a liability?

All of which is why I have a hunch that Christina is a part of Hale 2.0 – the Dolores part – that has been jettisoned, partitioned off and imprisoned, so as not to interfere with Hale’s execution of her master plan.

So then why keep Christina around, stuck in a loop? Who knows. Maybe Hale’s just vindictive. Maybe Dolores, being the park’s OG host, contains valuable data that Hale doesn’t want to risk disposing of – an insurance policy of sorts, or a backup template. Wouldn’t it be funny if she winds up being the proverbial fly in the ointment, coming back – resurrecting – to bite Hale in the ass?

More costuming details: you see a lot of cut-out panels in Christina’s clothing, implying a missing or segmented piece. Her earrings are broken in two. There are also abundant straps, belts, or textile details that suggest leashing, binding. You see some of it echoed in Host MIB’s outfits, as well.

[ceescedasticity]

Before I try to dig into the Bree/Arnor question, what the hell is going on with Enedwaith?

So, first half of the Second Age, it was heavily forested except for fens around the river convergence and possibly along the coast. The northern/upriver part was considered part of Eregion. The rest of it was inhabited by a number of small communities of Men. So far, so good.

The Númenóreans arrive. They're well-behaved for a while, but eventually start devastating the forests in Enedwaith and Minhiriath for lumber. (The timing isn't at all clear on this.) The locals object, reasonably, and start fighting back. The Númenóreans build a bunch of forts along the Gwathló/Greyflood, from Lond Daer on the coast up to Tharbad, and work on crushing resistance. The people of Enedwaith flee to Dunland. The timing on this isn't clear, either.

After the Númenóreans start devastating the forests and oppressing the locals — not clear how long after — Sauron destroyed Eregion and overran all of Eriador up to the Blue Mountains. At least some of the natives of Minhiriath and probably also Enedwaith welcomed him as anti-Númenórean and acted as scouts and spies (which suggests they hadn't all been forced out yet); as thanks, Sauron burned down what was left of the forest. For a while there was a defensive line along the Gwathló, and there was at least one major battle there. Eventually Sauron was defeated and driven back by Númenor.

And then… nothing, for a long time. There may still have been people living there? There may still have been some Númenórean outposts on the coasts? A lot of unanswered questions, but this all still pretty much makes sense.

Now it starts getting weird. When Arnor and Gondor are established, neither of them officially claim Enedwaith. —This is probably when the name "Enedwaith" is coined, given the 'middle' part of the etymology. —Actually the 'waith' means 'people' even if it can be read as 'region'. —When means that it might have been called that earlier if the 'middle' meant 'Middle Men' rather than 'between Arnor and Gondor'…

Well, anyway, Arnor and Gondor put a lot of effort into Tharbad, draining the land around Tharbad, making the Gwathló navigable up to Tharbad, and the North-South road generally.

And that's it. Enedwaith is otherwise left alone.

This suggests to me that there probably were non-Númenórean Men living in Enedwaith, who weren't particularly friendly but who also weren't inclined to pick a fight. They would have been related to the Bree-men and the Dunlendings, and… we know nothing else about them.

Question: Who were they? What were they like? What made the Dúnedain respect them enough not to even try to claim their territory?

As Arnor declines it becomes nominally part of Gondor no later than this time, but Gondor still doesn't do anything besides road+Tharbad maintenance. Dates not clear here, but maybe around 1409 when Cardolan fell?

The Great Plague in 1636 hits the region hard, which supports the idea there were people living there and they were less isolationist than the Dunlendings. After that it's supposed to be mostly depopulated except for Drúedain in the marshes on the coasts and Tharbad.

Gondor stops being even nominally in charge around 2050 or so, and abandons the maintenance of the road and Tharbad. Some remnant of Tharbad lasts a lot longer — the bridge comes down eventually but it's not clear when — but it's finally deserted in 2911 after bad flooding, which presumably wrecked all the delicate engineering which kept Tharbad from being a swamp.

Question: When the Dunlendings started expanding around T.A. 2050 or so, why didn't they go west into the rest of Enedwaith? Either instead of southeast into Calenardhon (future Rohan), or in addition to that. They used to live in all of Enedwaith. Apparently it was inhabitable recently. Even if there were still people living there, they would have been related (though rather distantly by then). We need to add either something about the rest of Enedwaith that makes the Dunlendings not want to go there (economically unviable for them particularly somehow? haunted?) or else have otherwise unmentioned people living there with a reason not to welcome the Dunlendings.

What is going on in Enedwaith?

ERIADOR

Why is the Lonely Land so lonely? There's been some discussion of this on the discord server and I thought I'd try to sum up my thoughts.

But first, ERIADOR:

Base map cropped from Christopher Tolkien's, overlay by me. Long Tolkien Gateway-based discussion follows!

The green area in the west is Second Age Lindon (except pre-downfall-of-Númenor there was at least some more land west of the mountains, thanks loads Eru). Any time in the Third Age elves are occupying much less of this, but we don't know how much less, and there's no indication it was ever formally claimed by anyone else.

Off-red area north of Lindon was Second Age dwarf territory — it's possible dwarves also controlled the actual mountains in what is marked Lindon, but it's not stated. The red dot is the approximate location of First Age Belegost. It should probably be more in the mountains proper. Third Age I would guess their territory extended farther south? There was a dwarven kingdom-in-exile somewhere around there T.A. 2802-2941, but presumably dwarves living there both before and after.

You can see the Shire in light blue — boundaries are kind of a guess. It was established T.A. 1601. And then 'suffered greatly' in 1636 from the Great Plague. Rough start!

Angmar is in gray in the northeast. It lasted T.A. 1300-1975. Angmar's borders other than the south one are not entirely clear. They Grey Mountains are mentioned as the eastern border, but that takes us across the Misty Mountains? Anyway Angmar's capital Carn Dûm is noted, at the end of the Mountains of Angmar. There were supposed to be evil Men living there. Its forces also included orcs.

It's generally unclear what the northern border of Arnor was — or the effective northern border. It never seems to be defined, but they clearly weren't doing much when you get up into the Forodwaith. Too cold. Which is kind of weird when you consider that Forochel is at approximately the same latitude as Dorthonion and the ocean is right there NO I SAID I WASN'T GOING TO CONSIDER CLIMATE/LATITUDE/CHANGING OF WORLD. Ahem. There were people minding their own business up there, especially towards the coast away from Angmar.

Apart from its fuzzy northern border, old Arnor was bordered in the west by (south to north) the Blue Mountains/Gulf of Lune/probably River Lhûn. Then its, uh, southwest border was the coast, and its southeast border was Rivers Gwathlo/Mitheithel/Bruinen (a.k.a. Greyflood/Hoarwell/Loudwater) up to the Misty Mountains. It's not clear whether Arnor included what later became Angmar.

Arnor split up in T.A. 861 into Arthedain (northwest), Cardolan (south), and Rhudaur (northeast). There was some dispute between the three over the part of Arthedain around Weathertop, where Arthedain had the watchtower of Amon Sûl and accompanying palantír and the other two kind of wanted it.

Arthedain had the cities Annúminas (the old capital of Arnor) and (its own capital) Fornost. It included what were supposed to be the most populous regions of Arnor. The Shire is in Arthedain, though it was apparently mostly unused by Men by the time the Shire was founded (even though the Baranduin was previously a locus of population — clearly things were already not so great). Northern Arthedain didn't get hit as hard by the Great Plague. It was at war with Angmar off and on from T.A. 1356 at the latest until its fall in T.A. 1974.

Cardolan had two towns on its borders — Bree and Tharbad — but if it had a capital or notable locations of its own they aren't recorded apparently. Its defenses were broken and its last prince killed in T.A. 1409. After this most of the remaining Dúnedain of Cardolan holed up in what became the Barrow-downs and Old Forest. (The Barrow-downs weren't haunted yet but they were a gravesite, and, like, in the Old Forest? How'd that work out for them? Yeeesh.) There were still non-Dúnedain living elsewhere in Cardolan, but most of them died in the Great Plague in 1636. It was after this that the Barrow-downs got haunted, so presumably the remaining Dúnedain were gone, too.

Rhudaur really seems to have gotten the short end of the stick in terms of both size and kind of territory. Yes, they get to be neighbors with Elrond, but does that really make up for it? The territory breakup would be somewhat more equitable if Rhudaur originally included what became Angmar, but that's not clear, and it's not like that's particularly nice territory. Anyway, Rhudaur allied with Angmar sometime before T.A. 1356. It sounds like they did so officially sometime after T.A. 1349, when the king of Arthedain decided to claim overlordship of the other two on the grounds that they didn't have Isildur descendants anymore, but there must have been some sort of relationship before that. According to Arthedain there were only evil men left in Rhudaur after 1409, and there was no one at all in Rhudaur after 1975; there was 'a shadow on the land'. —Okay apparently the etymology of Rhudaur is arguably 'troll forest' or 'evil forest', which, really? I'm going to say it started as the alternate possibility 'east forest', and the other is a later folk etymology.

The uncolored area between the rivers and the mountains used to be Eregion, and doesn't seem to have been claimed by Arnor at all. Imladris is up at its north end, which is probably why Arnor set the border there, but I don't think there's much evidence Imladris was governing the region in any way. Khazad-dum was still active until T.A. 1981, but there's no evidence they did any governing, either. Not clear if anyone lived there.

Dunland… is Dunland. Its western border is unclear because it's supposed to be a road which isn't fully drawn on the map, and also the road curves towards the Isen in a way which would seem to preclude Dunland's southern border being the Isen? Also, how is Dunland isolated enough to avoid the worst of the Great Plague when one of its borders is the main North-South road? Does Dunland have an effective border of some miles east of the road? Anyway the Dunlendings' ancestors were chased there in the Second Age by Númenóreans and they've been there ever since.

Then we have the nice empty space marked Enedwaith! (Technically includes Dunland.) Enedwaith was not part of Gondor or Arnor; they 'had a joint interest, but apparently the only part they actually cared about was maintaining the North-South Road (indicated by the long skinny thingy) and Tharbad. Most of Enedwaith's pre-Númenórean occupants got chased into Dunland by the Númenóreans, but then the Númenóreans didn't really settle there either even in the Third Age. There were some Drúedain in the marshes towards the coast. Both Enedwaith and Minhiriath in Cardolan suffered devastating deforestation in the Second Age, but in the Third Age were apparently perfectly good grassland. —Technically speaking Enedwaith is not considered Eriador apparently? But I'm not sure what it is.

Okay, what else… The town of Tharbad is on the map. It was founded in the Second Age as an Númenórean fort/river haven, and there was a battle there, but after that was ignored for a while until Arnor and Gondor needed a road and a place to cross the Gwathlo. The whole area around the river convergence was really marshy — it was called the Swanfleet — but it was extensively drained to enable building a proper fortified town, a bridge, and causeways for the road on either side. Tharbad hung on after the Great Plague. It did not hang on after Fell Winter-related floods in 2912, presumably because all the drainage systems, dikes, etc. were destroyed in the floods and the area returned to its natural state as a giant marsh. There was still sort of a ford in the ruins of the bridge, but it wasn't a very good ford.

Aaaaand Bree-land, which probably I should have marked but it's just a really small area around Bree. The Bree-men have been living there since the Second Age — their ancestors fled Númenóreans — and just… carried on, all through the rise and fall of the North-kingdom. (For non-Númenóreans carrying on through the rise may be the more impressive part.) Bree was an active trading town and in the late Third Age saw travelers from all sorts of places! Bree-land was occupied by Men and later hobbits. Noted to be most westerly settlement of Men. Hmmm. Not sure I believe that.

Okay. I may have to come back, but I think that covers it.

Stay tuned for (at some point) "why is the Lonely Land so lonely?"

[bean-na-farraige-agus-foraoise]

Druids ain’t shit and here’s why.

Straight from the Pond- here’s a lesson from your friendly neighborhood historian.

It’s a long post so the history lesson is under the cut. 

Druidic “history” (or pseudohistory rather) actually begins with early renaissance politics. 

Basically Italy is dominating politics and religion by being able to call back to an ancient history that led directly into the formation of the centralized Catholic church. Surprising nobody who's familiar with European history- the German states want in on that action but they don't really have that direct line linking them to antiquity beyond their conquering by Rome- so, like any good 15th century academics, they create that link by just making shit up. 

So they look back at ancient roman writings, and see mention of druids, and also realize that they actually don't know fuck all about them, there's no records of them beyond a few classical authors- and for the record, classical authors are NOTORIOUSLY unreliable, there are entire graduate level seminars dedicated to teaching people how to read through ancient Roman propaganda, almost every druid I have ever met has taken classical authors at face value, anyway I digress, they just start making up a history of the druids, German lands used to be populated by Celts, and they create these mystical druids who serve as the direct precursor to The Church in these areas, like they forge documents and everything so when Italy goes "oh yeah since when?" they have something to hold up as a "gotcha" - they fashion statues and hide them in crypts as further evidence. It’s wild. 

So, France sees that the German states are becoming more politically popular within the HRE (Holy Roman Empire) because of these druid stories, and so they go "Hey Celts used to live in France too... we should have druids"- and they create druid stories. Scotland at the time is very close with France politically and they go "Hey us too, we're still Celts,” and then it spreads to Wales, and then England. Ireland is mostly staying out of druid nonsense- like in this period of the OG pseudohistories Ireland is like "this is disgusting we don't want druids" so like all the writings in Ireland in this period on druids are like "yeah the Church HATES druids"

Things quiet down for a little bit, because the stories are established, the cards have been played, whatever, but then Neo-Classicism and the Enlightenment- and now suddenly it's cool to have ancient history again - but like... Britain has "we got conquered by Rome" or "hey a few centuries ago people were saying we had druids?”; so naturally the more nationalistic go with druids....which is how we get, Iolo Morganweg.  Iolo's real name is Edward Williams but he insisted on going by his "bardic name"- bc druids.  Williams was a Welsh antiquarian- who is in some scholastic circles considered the father of “modern” druidry.  Williams literally named his son Taliesin after the bardic poet behind the Poems of Taliesin which is frequently in association with the Mabinogi in Brythonic texts. To pull from the wiki on this asshole: 

[he made] claims that ancient Druidic tradition had survived the Roman conquest, the conversion of the populace to Christianity, the persecution of bards under King Edward I, and other adversities. His forgeries develop an elaborate mystical philosophy, which he claimed as a direct continuation of ancient Druidic practice. Williams's reportedly heavy use of laudanum may have been a contributing factor

Yeah.... just... yeah. So not only did he forge like hella documents, which today in the 21st century, over 100 years after he was revealed as a fraud, are still more popular than the originals- but he also is the reason that ogham is like that. Williams created a ‘bardic alphabet’ based on combining Scandinavian runes and extant ogham - we are still wading through his bullshit trying to fix ogham. 

And this brings us to the Celtic Twilight...... 

To quote @liminalblessings​, “And a bunch of noodle fuckers decide "hey, we didn't bastardize the Irish enough for the last however long.... We should do more of that."” But for those of you not familiar with the term, it's a nationalistic pan-Celtic movement that wanted to like, make the Celts in vogue again? but like their idea of the Celts as "noble savage” - because the modern era was scary. At this point, Pan-Celtic Nationalism is starting to rise as pushback against British colonialism in Celtic nations. Unfortunately it's heavily reliant on the Druid myth as like.... A foundational shared cultural history between the surviving Celtic nations. The point largely is, though, "look at us. We should all be sticking together because we're the same / cousins / brothers". Which leads to a L O T of Celtic culture from various countries kind of getting.... molded into one singular idea- which is USUALLY what we think of today when we think of Celts. Basically everything gets branded as Irish because the Irish were “pure” and a “separate racial identity” as opposed to the Scots and Welsh. It took that idea of a pan-Celtic singularity, and then went ham with it mostly on Irish pre-Christian stuff, and as it occurred not too long after Williams’ fuckery, it really cemented those forgeries and psuedohistories in the cultural memory. And Williams wasn’t exposed as a fraud until after the Celtic Twilight had died down.

Now... Yeats, we all know Yeats- some people recommend his writings for learning about the fairies. DO NOT LISTEN TO THOSE PEOPLE. Yeats makes up an entire tree calendar, and also files all Scottish fairy lore under the “Irish” tab because he’s part of the Celtic Twilight and didn’t you know that everything Celtic is actually Irish? Fuck this guy. #yeetyeats

Enter... Robert Graves- destroyer of histories and all around fuckwit. Graves maked up an ENTIRE religious notion around a mother goddess and shit. And like, the irony of that is the people he supposedly went to originally were like lol dude you're a fucking idiot none of this is real. But he published it anyways and of course it got taken seriously. And then there's a lot of reverse etymology at this point which is just.... really bad linguistics. And because of Graves’ white goddess + said bad linguistics by others, you get Danu.(Danu is a whole thing, please shoot me an ask if you want a post about all of that nonsense). 

So.... Gerald Gardener.... to quote @liminalblessings​ again- “didn’t have a direct role in druidism, except he kind of did.”  See, Gardner had a good friend who was hella interested in the Celtic twilight. Said friend was hella inspiried by Gardner's "recreation" of old British trad witch traditions... But he didn't jive with the old British trad witch traditions. HE jived with Irish Druidry. So while Gardner's doing HIS thing, his friend's doing the modern Druid thing- heavily drawing from Gardner's own work but "making it more historically Druid" Except, as you may have picked up- there is no such thing as “historically druid” that can be reconstructed. Basically he can only pull from Williams, but because he had issues with with the old 15th century on stuff, up to the Twilight era (despite those being his sources) so he tries to distance himself from the earlier movements and leans hella heavy into Gardner's work as a result. Which is, if you've ever wondered, why Wicca and Druidry have such incredibly similar ritual structures and beliefs.

SO, this guy starts the Druid Order, decides that he’s gonna like pull his teachings from Williams- but he's also gonna say that Williams has nothing to do with his druidry because y'know, Williams has relatively recently been revealed as a fraud. This guy goes through the grueling process of ripping off his best bud gardner founding Druidry, right. So The Druid Order has this rebranding in 1951, that lauds the “history of the druids” as written by Williams but simultaneously rejects Williams saying “yeah we have nothing whatsoever to do with that guy.” Mix into this narrative, Gardener’s “burning times” bullshit, and now not only do we have mythical pseudohistorical druids, but a rewrite of Williams’ “the druids survived conversion” which then turned into - “The druids were heavily persecuted by the church and survived a horrible burning times but despite this there’s a tradition of continuous druidic belief.” Here begins the bullshit known as “vestiges of pagan thought”- which took actual historians not even a decade to disprove, and yet still circulates in pagan circles, because nobody picks up a fucking book.  Theoretical Folkloric archaeology became very popular at this time, which postulates (incorrectly) that all folk traditions and folklore absolutely stems from Pagan times and is 100% the Christianization of pagan practices and thoughts- which is not at all true. (Not-so-friendly reminder that Eostre? DOESN’T FUCKING EXIST. STOP FALLING FOR A JOKE MADE BY A MONK)

Td;lr so far- the druids went from 

the Catholic clergy before the Catholics existed 

to 

a religious group that survived conversion

to

druids survived an intense and violent persecution 

And now? In this our 21st century? 

Well.... druidic organizations today tend to still push these ahistorical narratives, that buy into the pagan persecution complex.... and several of these organizations also have known racists and terfs on their recommended reading lists. And while some organizations have made attempts to become more historically accurate- but the end result is usually.... bad. It tends to result in them using a source from like 1960 that’s been disproven 1000 times since by other historians to go “look a historian agrees with us!” rather than like... keep up with current research trends and academic standards. Druids also tend to be hostile to the syncretism of the Irish church which is just..... so fucking dumb. Don’t worship gaelic deities if you can’t accept that our lore are Christian texts about pagan beliefs. 

So yeah..... druids ain’t shit and I can prove it historically. I am also more than willing to send anyone links to full length books on the history of druids if you want to learn more. 

[elemental-daddy-neos]

What are everyone’s teams in your Pokemon au? Do you have a plot set out or is it a more causal au?

Oooooh this is a fun one

You'd better fucking BELIEVE we have a plot set up, I have poured so much effort into the Pokemon au

Okay, so: when it comes to teams, I decided that everyone should have at least one legendary Pokemon in their party as a way to be faithful to the ace monster concept, but it wasn’t until much later into the au that I realized I’d failed to do that with Sora’s team, which led to a very fun plot point involving his secret 7th Pokemon he keeps in his box

Teams under the cut because it’s gonna be a long one, boys

Yuya has: Groudon, Sandshrew, Popplio, Hippopotas, Aipom, and Ekans

In his box, he’s got Phanphy, Charmander, Politoad, Ducklett, Liepard, Skorupi, and Lycanroc (Midnight form)

I wanted him to have as many Pokemon as he could that reminded me of the monsters in his deck, and since Yuya is a coordinator in this au instead of a regular trainer, it just felt right that he’d have a lot of different partners he could swap out for various contests

Also I’m mad that there isn’t a legendary dragon that looks like Odd Eyes, so I had to give Yuya Groudon instead, making him the only Yu boy in this au to not have a legendary dragon type Pokemon

Yuto has: Eternatus, Bisharp, Aegislash, Aggron, Lucario, and Shadow Rider Calyrex

Okay listen, I know I was supposed to only give everyone One legendary Pokemon, but with Calyrex I feel justified because it looks So Much like it could be one of Yuto’s Phantom Knights, I mean

Just look at it

Yuto gets to have two legendaries to make up for Arc-V killing him off so early into the show

Aside from this guy, the rest of Yuto’s team just felt like it should be comprised of steel types ow the edge so that’s what I gave him. His Pokemon are as edgy as he tries to appear to be and that is enough to amuse me.

There also weren’t exactly many good Pokemon equivalents of his archetype, so I made do with what I had.

Yugo has: Latios, Scizor, Claydol, Porygon 2, Ponyta (Shiny), and Sudowoodo

Yugo was honestly so hard to come up with a team for because all his Speedroid cards are just like... toys and stuff for the most part, so I agonized over what I should pick for him for a Long time. In the end, I feel like I got close enough to his general aesthetic with the Pokemon I picked.

(His Ponyta is there because of Speedroid Horse Stilts, and while it is a shiny, the dumbass has no idea about it, and thinks he just happened to get a special blue horse that was born a little differently- he never claimed to be smart.)

He also deadass thought Sudowoodo was a grass type for the longest time. Rin had to be the one to tell him it wasn’t. 

“Yugo. Sudowoodo? It sounds like pseudo? As in fake wood?”

“Ohhhhh is that what its name means? Wow Rin you’re so smart.”

No Yugo you’re just exceptionally stupid.

Yuri has: Naganadel, Seviper, Victreebel, Toxicroak, Vileplume, and Roserade

For the most toxic of battlers, I felt it only necessary to give Yuri an all poison type team. I included an even mix of plants in there to tie into his Predaplant deck, Seviper for the snake eye vibes, and Toxicroak... just feels right, you know. I couldn’t find any other poison plant themed Pokemon that seemed like they’d fit his vibe, so he gets a poison frog instead.

Yuzu has: Meloetta, Sylveon, Meowstic (Female), Gardevoir, Florges, and Jigglypuff

I tried to stick with Pokemon that had very feminine vibes for Yuzu, since her deck is comprised of pretty singing ladies, so Meloetta and Jigglypuff in particular feel very fitting in that regard.

Serena has: Cresselia, Delcatty, Glameow, Lopunny, Persian, and Pyroar (Female)

The moon vibes with Cresselia felt perfect for Serena, and as for the rest of her team, all cats and a bunny to pay homage to her Lunalight deck ^^

Rin has: Celesteela, Mismagius, Hatterene, Glaceon, Froslass, and Chimecho

Her team vibes with the witch part of her Wind Witch deck, at least for Mismagius and Hatterene. Glaceon, Froslass, and Chimecho are there due to the etymology of her name, where possible meanings of it include “cold” and “bell”, which I thought was pretty cool, no pun intended.

Ruri has: Galarian Articuno, Pidgeot, Noctowl, Chatot, Altaria, and Unfezant (Male)

Some softer birds for the soft bird girl, for the most part. I liked the thought of her team being all birds like her Lyriluscs, and just... yeah. They’re all very friendly birds that Ruri’s bonded pretty closely with. Also I made sure she had Galarian Articuno for no reason other than it is purple like her, and I think that’s all the reason I need.

Gong has: Kartana, Machoke, Samurott, Golisopod, Hariyama, and Conkeldurr

Gong was really easy to assign a team to- just had to find as many samurai themed Pokemon as possible, and fill in the rest with really strong fighting types, like Machoke, Hariyama, and Conkeldurr.

Shingo has: Type: Null, Dusclops, Misdreavus, Spiritomb, Decidueye, and Cramorant

With Shingo, I tried to go for Pokemon that had the same vibes as some of his Abyss Actors, and I think Dusclops is the best example of this. Tbh I am very proud of giving him a Type: Null because Type: Null is an amalgamation of other Pokemon, something that was created in a lab to be a fighting machine. There’s nothing natural about Type: Null, and it’s kind of terrifying to Yuya specifically, who’s always viewed Pokemon as creatures to befriend. This experiment created purely to kill... unnerves him, and serves as a very good foil to his beliefs when it comes to Pokemon.

And they were narrative foils

Oh my god they were narrative foils

On a sillier note, I chose Cramorant purely because of this quote from its bulbapedia page: “Cramorant are also rather unintelligent as they can't remember which Pokémon they fight in mid battle, but never forget Trainers that they trust. However, they try to attack their Trainers if they steal food from them.”

I just thought the idea of Shingo having this dumb bird that occasionally pecks at him over food would be funny tbh, gotta dunk on the rival at least a little bit.

Sora has: Banette, Vanillish, Swirlix, Stufful, Litleo, and Buneary

In his box, he has a Guzzlord

I feel like Sora’s team is very straightforward, as it’s a mix of sweets themed Pokemon, and Pokemon that represent monsters in his deck- Stufful for Flufflal Bear, Litleo for Fluffal Leo, and Buneary for Fluffal Rabbit. Guzzlord... is relevant later on in the plot after shit goes down, that’s all I’ll say for now.

Masumi has: Diancie, Sableye, Corsola, Aurorus, Tyranitar, and Lycanroc (Dusk form)

Gem Knight girl deserved to have a bunch of good rock type Pokemon, and Diancie is like. The best possible legendary I could have given someone like her lol, the crystal aesthetic is just perfect for her. Not much to say here honestly, I just really vibed with these specific rock types and thought they’d make a good team for her.

Yaiba has: Zeraora, Kecleon, Pangoro, Scyther, Purugly, and Stantler

So I actually threw this list together just now because I realized Masumi was the only member of her trio to have a full team, and that just wasn’t right. I tried to base this team off the XX-Sabers as well I could, but it was a little hard with how many humanoid cards Yaiba has. With his legendary, I actually chose it based off this monster right here! 

I think they’ve got similar enough vibes aesthetically for Zeraora to fit him. Scyther is based on Emmersblade, Kecleon on Ragigura, Stantler on Garsem, Purugly on Gardestrike, and Pangoro... Honestly, it just makes me think of Yaiba himself when I look at him. I think they’d get along well.

Hokuto has: Deoxys, Espeon, Grumpig, Starmie, Lunatone, and Malamar

Psychic type Pokemon just sort of felt right for him to have, considering that his deck is based on constellations and has an overall space theme to it. Not sure why that translates over to psychic in my brain, but you know what, it looks right, I love this team for him, and I’m not gonna question it.

I especially think Deoxys makes a good legendary for him considering it is literally a space alien, and Hokuto’s whole thing is space, so yeah, he gets to have the space alien.

Shun has: Galarian Moltres, Skarmory, Fearow, Dodrio, Staraptor, and Talonflame

Pretty straightforward team I feel- it’s all birds of prey for the Raid Raptor boy, and I just thought the Galarian version of Moltres was neat. Makes me think of his Blaze Falcon since they’re both black and red.

Dennis has: Hoopa, Mr. Mime, Delphox, Zoroark, Alakazam, and Hawlucha

Hoopa seemed like a very good legendary for Dennis to have, given his deck archetype and all, he just kind of looks like a little circus dude. Its unbound form makes me think about the swap Dennis has when it gets revealed that he’s actually been a double agent the whole time, and the play gloves finally come off.

The rest of his team... I feel like they speak for themselves. I tried to give him Pokemon that matched up with his deck archetype, so there’s Delphox to rep the fire themed monsters, Mr. Mime because it just fits Dennis’ general personality- and I love the thought of those two being friends and just copying each other’s theatric poses. Chaotic dynamic duo.

(Also: Zoroark's ability letting it disguise itself as another Pokemon is just another parallel to Dennis pretending to be one of the good guys at first, and I love it)

Shinji has: Buzzwole, Beedrill, Vespiquen, Ribombee, Kricketune, and Leavanny

I tried to give the bee man all the bees I could, but there are only so many bee Pokemon out there 😔 I knew the rest of his team had to be insect types to make up for it, so I picked Kricketune because he is just... a friend... a musical buddy who definitely gets along well with the kids. Leavanny is just a bug mom who also helps patch up the kids’ clothing when they get tears in them, which I just love the idea of. Sweet bug mom whose dex entry talks about how they sew for other Pokemon looks after her trainer’s kids when she’s not battling.

Buzzwole: witness the fitness

Throwback to the Smash Bros mains lmao 

Crow has: Murkrow, Braviary, Starly, Swellow, Pikipek, and Corviknight

Bunch of birds for my Blackwing user... This team was partially picked out by June, and it was mostly meant for the Other Pokemon au, but I don’t really see a reason to change his team here. Crow is the one person without a legendary on his team, which makes me sad, but there really isn’t a legendary bird out there that fits his vibes, so as much as I wanna give him a legendary, he will have to make do without one. Sorry Crow.

Hoo... that’s finally all the teams down. Now I can talk about the plot! So, as I briefly mentioned in a previous post (I think), this particular au is inspired by Pokemon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum! It’s the era where contests really became a big thing, which is perfect for a lot of these characters because it’s easy to translate dueltaining over to coordinating in this world. Much like in canon, Yuya aspires to be as great a coordinator as his dad was, and strives to entertain people the way Yusho could. He’s not much for battling, and far prefers getting to show off his Pokemon’s talents in contests than anything. 

Academia is going to play the role of Team Galactic in this au, which is incredibly fitting with their mission in canon: to remake the universe in their leader’s image. In this case, with Leo Akaba taking on the role of Cyrus, his intent is, presumably, to either destroy the universe that took his daughter from him, or create a new one where she can live once again, no matter the cost.

Sora being a key member in Team Galactic is a very big part of the plot in this au: his mission was to capture one of the lake legendaries, Uxie, since Leo needed all three of them for his plan to remake the universe, but things don’t exactly go well for him, and he ends up losing his battle against Uxie, resulting in all of his memories being locked away, and essentially making him a blank slate.

Side note: the Galactic grunt haircut reminds me a lot of Sora, I mean just look at it

Practically same bangs as him, just add an upturned ponytail and you’ve got my son.

This post is getting very long... but I will add one last plot related thing to it before I go: Uxie can erase memories, Mesprit can erase emotions, and Azelf can erase willpower. All three of these lake legendaries play a very important role in the plot, due to being the keys to Leo Akaba’s plans to remake the universe. Sora was touched by Uxie, effectively doing away with all memory he has of being in Team Galactic. Yuya ends up touched by Mesprit in an attempt to save them, and subsequently loses his emotions as a result. Riley?

Riley had been affected by all three of them before the plot began, which is why she is the way she’d been in Arc-V: Emotionless, unable to remember anything about her past except for those brief, fleeting flashes of memory when put into certain situations she’d experienced before, and without any will of her own. She’s so dependent on her older brother because she quite literally has no clue what to do with herself without being told to, and needs orders to function.

Hoo, if you’ve made it all the way to the end of the post, congratulations! I think this is the longest one I’ve made... ever lmao. I hope you guys found it enjoyable! If anyone wants to know more about certain aspects of this au, feel free to ask! I look forward to talking about it more c:

[fineillsignup]

tips for choosing a Chinese name for your OC when you don’t know Chinese

This is a meta for gifset trade with @purple-fury! Maybe you would like to trade something with me? You can PM me if so!

Choosing a Chinese name, if you don’t know a Chinese language, is difficult, but here’s a secret for you: choosing a Chinese name, when you do know a Chinese language, is also difficult. So, my tip #1 is: Relax. Did you know that Actual Chinese People choose shitty names all the dang time? It’s true!!! Just as you, doubtless, have come across people in your daily life in your native language that you think “God, your parents must have been on SOME SHIT when they named you”, the same is true about Chinese people, now and throughout history. If you choose a shitty name, it’s not the end of the world! Your character’s parents now canonically suck at choosing a name. There, we fixed it!

However. Just because you should not drive yourself to the brink of the grave fretting over choosing a Chinese name for a character, neither does that mean you shouldn’t care at all. Especially, tip #2, Never just pick some syllables that vaguely sound Chinese and call it a day. That shit is awful and tbh it’s as inaccurate and racist as saying “ching chong” to mimic the Chinese language. Examples: Cho Chang from Harry Potter, Tenten from Naruto, and most notorious of all, Fu Manchu and his daughter Fah lo Suee (how the F/UCK did he come up with that one).

So where do you begin then? Well, first you need to pick your character’s surname. This is actually not too difficult, because Chinese actually doesn’t have that many surnames in common use. One hundred surnames cover over eighty percent of China’s population, and in local areas especially, certain surnames within that one hundred are absurdly common, like one out of every ten people you meet is surnamed Wang, for example. Also, if you’re making an OC for an established media franchise, you may already have the surname based on who you want your character related to. Finally, if you’re writing an ethnically Chinese character who was born and raised outside of China, you might only want their surname to be Chinese, and give them a given name from the language/culture of their native country; that’s very very common.

If you don’t have a surname in mind, check out the Wikipedia page for the list of common Chinese surnames, roughly the top one hundred. If you’re not going to pick one of the top one hundred surnames, you should have a good reason why. Now you need to choose a romanization system. You’ll note that the Wikipedia list contains variant spellings. If your character is a Chinese-American (or other non-Chinese country) whose ancestors emigrated before the 1950s (or whose ancestors did not come from mainland China), their name will not be spelled according to pinyin. It might be spelled according to Wade-Giles romanization, or according to the name’s pronunciation in other Chinese languages, or according to what the name sounds like in the language of the country they immigrated to. (The latter is where you get spellings like Lee, Young, Woo, and Law.)  A huge proportion of emigration especially came from southern China, where people spoke Cantonese, Min, Hakka, and other non-Mandarin languages.

So, for example, if you want to make a Chinese-Canadian character whose paternal source of their surname immigrated to Canada in the 20s, don’t give them the surname Xie, spelled that way, because #1 that spelling didn’t exist when their first generation ancestor left China and #2 their first generation ancestor was unlikely to have come from a part of China where Mandarin was spoken anyway (although still could have! that’s up to you). Instead, name them Tse, Tze, Sia, Chia, or Hsieh.

If you’re working with a character who lives in, or who left or is descended from people who left mainland China in the 1960s or later; or if you’re working with a historical or mythological setting, then you are going to want to use the pinyin romanization. The reason I say that you should use pinyin for historical or mythological settings is because pinyin is now the official or de facto romanization system for international standards in academia, the United Nations, etc. So if you’re writing a story with characters from ancient China, or medieval China, use pinyin, even though not only pinyin, but the Mandarin pronunciations themselves didn’t exist back then. Just... just accept this. This is one of those quirks of having a non-alphabetic language.

(Here’s an “exceptions” paragraph: there are various well known Chinese names that are typically, even now, transliterated in a non-standard way: Confucius, Mencius, the Yangtze River, Sun Yat-sen, etc. Go ahead and use these if you want. And if you really consciously want to make a Cantonese or Hakka or whatever setting, more power to you, but in that case you better be far beyond needing this tutorial and I don’t know why you’re here. Get. Scoot!)

One last point about names that use the ü with the umlaut over it. The umlaut ü is actually pretty critical for the meaning because wherever the ü appears, the consonant preceding it also can be used with u: lu/lü, nu/nü, etc. However, de facto, lots of individual people, media franchises, etc, simply drop the umlaut and write u instead when writing a name in English, such as “Lu Bu” in the Dynasty Warriors franchise in English (it should be written Lü Bu). And to be fair, since tones are also typically dropped in Latin script and are just as critical to the meaning and pronunciation of the original, dropping the umlaut probably doesn’t make much difference. This is kind of a choice you have to make for yourself. Maybe you even want to play with it! Maybe everybody thinks your character’s surname is pronounced “loo as in loo roll” but SURPRISE MOFO it’s actually lü! You could Do Something with that. Also, in contexts where people want to distinguish between u and ü when typing but don’t have easy access to a keyboard method of making the ü, the typical shorthand is the letter v. 

Alright! So you have your surname and you know how you want it spelled using the Latin alphabet. Great! What next?

Alright, so, now we get to the hard part: choosing the given name. No, don’t cry, I know baby I know. We can do this. I believe in you.

Here are some premises we’re going to be operating on, and I’m not entirely sure why I made this a numbered list:

Chinese people, generally, love their kids. (Obviously, like in every culture, there are some awful exceptions, and I’ll give one specific example of this later on.)

As part of loving their kids, they want to give them a Good name.

So what makes a name a Good name??? Well, in Chinese culture, the cultural values (which have changed over time) have tended to prioritize things like: education; clan and family; health and beauty; religious devotions of various religions (Buddhism, Taoism, folk religions, Christianity, other); philosophical beliefs (Buddhism, Confucianism, etc) (see also education); refinement and culture (see also education); moral rectitude; and of course many other things as the individual personally finds important. You’ll notice that education is a big one. If you can’t decide on where to start, something related to education, intelligence, wisdom, knowledge, etc, is a bet that can’t go wrong.

Unlike in English speaking cultures (and I’m going to limit myself to English because we’re writing English and good God look at how long this post is already), there is no canon of “names” in Chinese like there has traditionally been in English. No John, Mary, Susan, Jacob, Maxine, William, and other words that are names and only names and which, historically at least, almost everyone was named. Instead, in Chinese culture, you can basically choose any character you want. You can choose one character, or two characters. (More than two characters? No one can live at that speed. Seriously, do not give your character a given name with more than two characters. If you need this tutorial, you don’t know enough to try it.) Congratulations, it is now a name!!

But what this means is that Chinese names aggressively Mean Something in a way that most English names don’t. You know nature names like Rose and Pearl, and Puritan names like Wrestling, Makepeace, Prudence, Silence, Zeal, and Unity? I mean, yeah, you can technically look up that the name Mary comes from a etymological root meaning bitter, but Mary doesn’t mean bitter in the way that Silence means, well, silence. Chinese names are much much more like the latter, because even though there are some characters that are more common as names than as words, the meaning of the name is still far more upfront than English names.

So the meaning of the name is generally a much more direct expression of those Good Values mentioned before. But it gets more complicated!

Being too direct has, across many eras of Chinese history, been considered crude; the very opposite of the education you’re valuing in the first place. Therefore, rather than the Puritan slap you in the face approach where you just name your kid VIRTUE!, Chinese have typically favoured instead more indirect, related words about these virtues and values, or poetic allusions to same. What might seem like a very blunt, concrete name, such as Guan Yu’s “yu” (which means feather), is actually a poetic, referential name to all the things that feathers evoke: flight, freedom, intellectual broadmindness, protection...

So when you’re choosing a name, you start from the value you want to express, then see where looking up related words in a dictionary gets you until you find something that sounds “like a name”; you can also try researching Chinese art symbolism to get more concrete names. Then, here’s my favourite trick, try combining your fake name with several of the most common surnames: 王，李，陈. And Google that shit. If you find Actual Human Beings with that name: congratulations, at least if you did f/uck up, somebody else out there f/ucked up first and stuck a Human Being with it, so you’re still doing better than they are. High five!

You’re going to stick with the same romanization system (or lack thereof) as you’ve used for the surname. In the interests of time, I’m going to focus on pinyin only.

First let’s take a look at some real and actual Chinese names and talk about what they mean, why they might have been chosen, and also some fictional OC names that I’ve come up with that riff off of these actual Chinese names. And then we’ll go over some resources and also some pitfalls. Hopefully you can learn by example! Fun!!!

Let’s start with two great historical strategists: Zhuge Liang and Zhou Yu, and the names I picked for some (fictional) sons of theirs. Then I will be talking about Sun Shangxiang and Guan Yinping, two historical-legendary women of the same era, and what I named their fictional daughters. And finally I’ll be talking about historical Chinese pirate Gan Ning and what I named his fictional wife and fictional daughter. Uh, this could be considered spoilers for my novel Clouds and Rain and associated one-shots in that universe, so you probably want to go and read that work... and its prequels... and leave lots of comments and kudos first and then come back. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

(I’m just kidding you don’t need to know a thing about my work to find this useful.)

ZHUGE Liang is written 諸葛亮 in traditional Chinese characters and 诸葛亮 in simplified Chinese characters. It is a two-character surname. Two character surnames used to be more common than they are now. When I read Chinese history, I notice that two character surname clans seem to have a bad habit of flying real high and then getting the Icarus treatment if Icarus when his wings melted also got beheaded and had the Nine Familial Exterminations performed on his clan. Yikes. Sooner or later that'll cost ya.

But anyway. Zhuge means “lots of kudzu”, which if you have been to the American south you know is that only way that kudzu comes. Liang means “light, shining” in the sense of daylight, moonlight, etc; and from this literal meaning also such figurative meanings as reveal or clear. (I’m going to talk about words have a primary and secondary meaning in this way because I think it’s important for understanding. It’s just like how in English, ‘run’ has many meanings, but almost of all them are derived from a primary meaning of ‘to move fast via one’s human legs’, if I can be weird for a moment. “Run” as in “home run” comes from that, “run” as in “run in your stocking” comes from that, “run” as in “that’ll run you at least $200″ comes from that. You have to get it straight which is the primary meaning, which is the one that people think of first and they way they get to the secondary meaning.)

“Light” has a similar “enlightenment” concept in Chinese as in English, so the person who chose Zhuge Liang’s name—most likely his father or grandfather—clearly valued learning.

I named my fictional son for Zhuge Liang Zhuge Jing 京. The value or direction I was coming from is that Zhuge Liang has come to the decision that he has to nurture the next generation for the benefit of the land, that he has to remain in the world in a way that he very much did not want to do when he himself was a young man. In this alternate universe, Liu Bei has formed a new Han dynasty and recaptured Luoyang, so when Zhuge Liang’s son is then born he chooses this name Jing which means literally “capital”. This concrete name is meant as an allusion to a devotion to public service and to remaining “central”. After I chose this name, I discovered that Zhuge Liang actually has a recorded grandson named Zhuge Jing with this same character.

above, me, realizing I picked a good name

ZHOU Yu is written 周瑜 in both simplified and traditional Chinese characters.

The surname Zhou was and remains a very common Chinese surname whose original meaning was like... a really nice field. Like just the greatest f/ucking field you’ve ever seen. “Dang, that is a sweet field” said an ancient Chinese farmer, “I’m gonna make a new Chinese character to record just how great it is.” And then it came to mean things along the line of complete and thorough.

Yu means the excellence of a gemstone--its brilliance, lustre, etc, as opposed to its flaws. It is not a common word but does appear in some expressions such as 瑕不掩瑜 "a flaw does not conceal the rest of the gemstone's beauty; a defect does not mean the whole thing is bad".

Zhou Yu has gone down in history for being not only smart but also artistic and handsome. A real triple threat. And this name speaks to a family that valued art and beauty. It really does suit him.

Zhou Yu had two recorded sons but in my alternate history I gave him four. I borrowed the first one’s name from history: Xun 循, follow. Based on this name, I chose other names that I thought gave a similar sense of his values: Shou 守, guard; Wen 聞, listen. The youngest one I had born when he already knew he was dying, and things had not been going well generally; therefore I had him give him the name Shen 慎, which means “careful, cautious”.

SUN Shangxiang 孫尚香 is one of several names that history and legend give for a sister of w//arlord-king Sun Quan who was married to a rival w//arlord named Liu Bei in a marriage which, historically, uh, didn’t... didn’t go all that well. In my alternate history it goes well! You can’t stop me, I’ve already done it!

The surname Sun means “grandson” and the given name components are Shang mean “values, esteems” and Xiang “scent” which we can combine into meaning something like “precious perfume”. A lot of the recorded names for women in this era (a huge number didn’t have any names recorded, a problem in itself) seem to me to be more concrete, to contain more objects, to be more focused on affection, less focused on hopes and dreams. This makes sense for the era: you love your daughters (I HOPE) but then they get married and leave you. You don’t have long term plans for them because their long term belongs to another clan.

I gave her daughter by Liu Bei the name Liu Yitao 劉義桃. Yi 義 meaning righteousness, rectitude and 桃 meaning... peach. Okay, okay, I know "righteous peach" sounds damn funny in English, but the legendary oath in the peach garden, the "oath of brotherhood" is called in Chinese 結義 "tying righteousness" and the peach garden is, uh, a peach garden. I also give her the cutesy nickname Taotao 桃桃 which you could compare to “Peaches” or “Peachy”. Reduplication of a character in a two-character name is a classic nickname strategy in Chinese.

GUAN Yinping 關銀屏/关银屏 is a “made up” (scare quotes because old legends have their own kind of validity, fight me) name for a historical daughter of Guan Yu. Guan means “to close (a door)”. Yin means “silver” and ping means “a screen, to hide” and according to the legend, her father’s oath brother Zhang Fei named her after a silver treasure. So here again we see a name for a woman that completely lacks the kind of aspirations we see in male names. Who would have an aspiration for a daughter?

My fictional characters, that’s who. I named her daughter Lu Ruofeng 陸若鳳/陆若凤, Ruo (like the) Feng (phoenix), based on a quote from a Confucian text about what one should try to be during both times of chaos and times of good government. I portray her father as a devoted Confucian scholar, so that was another factor for why I looked to Confucian texts for a source of a name.

Modern parents also now have big dreams for their daughters :’) and so modern girls receive names that are far more similar to how boys are named. 

GAN Ning 甘寧/甘宁 is a great example of a person whose name does not suit him. Gan 甘 depicts a tongue and means “sweet”, and Ning 寧 which shows a bowl and table and heart beneath a roof means “peaceful”. Which, it would be hard to come up with a name for this guy, a ruthless pirate turned extremely effective general:

that is less suitable than essentially being named “Sweet Peace”.

And when he was an adult, his style name—a name that Chinese men used to be given when they turned 20 (ie became adults) by East Asian reckoning—indeed reflects that. Choosing your own style name was widely considered to be crass. I absolutely think that Gan Ning chose his own style name; he was that kind of a guy. And the name he chose! Xingba 興霸/兴霸! I’ve never seen another style name like it. It means, basically, “thriving dominator”! Brand new official adult Gan Ning treats his style name like he’s picking his Xbox gamer tag and he picks BadassBoss69_420, that’s what this style name is like to me. Except, you know, he had almost certainly killed many hundreds of people by the time he was nineteen, so, uh, it wouldn’t be a wise idea to make fun of his name to his face.

In my fictional version of his life, he married a woman whose father was the exception to the “parents love their children” rule and who named his daughter Pandi 盼第 “expecting a younger brother”, which is a classic “daughters ain’t shit, I want a son” name. Real and actual Chinese women have been given this shitty name and ones like it.

Because Gan Ning had an ironically placid name, I also gave his daughter the placid single character name Wan 婉, which means “gentle, restrained”, as a foil to her wild personality.

So there are a bunch of examples of some historical characters and some OCs and how I chose their names. “But wait, all that was really cool, but how can I do that? You can read Chinese, I can’t!”

I originally had a bunch of links here to dictionaries and resources but Tumblr :) wouldn’t let the post show up in tag search with all the links :) :) :) so you need to check the reblogs of this post to see my own reblog; that reblog has all the links. I’M SORRY ABOUT THIS. Here are a list of the sites without the links if you want to Google them yourself.

MDBG  - an open source dictionary - start here

Wiktionary -  don’t knock it til you try it

iCIBA (they recently changed their user interface and it’s much less English-speaker friendly now but it’s still a great dictionary)

Pleco (an iOS app, maybe also Android???) contains same open source dictionary as MDBG and also its own proprietary dictionary

Chinese Etymology at hanziyuan dot net

You search some English keywords from the value you want, and then you see what kind of characters you get. You should take the character and then reverse search, making sure that it doesn’t have negative words/meanings, and similar. Look into the etymology and see if it has any thematic elements that appeal to what you’re doing with the character--eg a fire radical for a character with fire powers.

And then, like I mention before, when you have got a couple characters and you think “I think this could be a good name”, you go to Google, you take a very common surname, you append your chosen name—don’t forget to use quotation marks—and you see what happens. Did you get some results? Even better, did you get lots of results? Then you’re probably safe! No results does not necessarily mean your name won’t work, but you should probably run it by an Actual Chinese Native Speaker at that point to check. Also, remember, as I said at the beginning, sometimes people have weird names. If you consciously decide “you know what, I think this character’s parents would choose a weird name”, then own that.

THINGS YOU SHOULD PROBABLY IGNORE!

Starting in relatively recent history (not really a big thing until Song dynasty) and continuing, moreso outside of mainland China, to the modern day, there is something called a generation name component to a name. This means that of a name’s two characters, one of the characters is shared with every other paternal line relative of that person’s generation; historically, usually only boys get a generation name and girls don’t. (Chinese history, banging on pots and pans: DAUGHTERS AIN’T SHIT AND DON’T FORGET IT!) “Generation” here means everyone who is equidistant descendant from some past ancestor, not necessarily that they are exactly the same age. For example, all of ancestor’s X’s sons share the character 一 in their names, his grandsons all have the character 二，great-grandsons 三, great-great-grandsons 四 (I just used numbers because I’m lazy). By the time you get to great-great-grandson, you might have some that are forty years old and some that are babies (because of how old their fathers were when they were conceived), but they are still the same generation.

In some clans, this tradition goes so far as to have something called a name poem, where the generations cycle, character by character, through a poem that was specifically written for this purpose and which is generally about how their clan is super rad.

If you want to riff off of this idea and have siblings or paternal cousins share a character in their names, ok, but it genuinely isn’t necessary. Anyone with a single character name obviously doesn’t have one of these generation names, and by no means does every person with a two character name (especially female) have a generation name. If you’re doing an OC for an ancient Chinese setting (certainly anything before the year about 500), you shouldn’t use these generation names because it wasn’t a thing. Also, in a modern setting, even if such a generation name or name poem exists, it’s not like there is any legal requirement to use it (though there may be family pressure to do so).

As a further complication, some parents do the shared character thing among their children without it actually being a generation name per se because it isn’t shared by any cousins. Or, they have all their children (or all their children of the same gender) share a radical, which is a meaning component in a Chinese character.

If someone does have one of these shared character names, then their nickname will never come from that shared character; either they will be called by the full name or by some name riffing off of the character that is not shared. For example, I knew a pair of sisters called Yuru and Yufei with the same first character; the first sister went by her English name in daily life (even when speaking Chinese) while the second sister was called Feifei.

tl;dr If you don’t already know Chinese, consider generation names an extra complication for masochists only. Definitely not required for modern characters.

Fortune telling is another thing that I think you should either ignore or wildly make up. Do you know what ordinary Chinese people who want to choose a lucky name for their child do? They hire someone to work it out. This is not some DIY shit even if you are deeply immured in the culture. There are considerations of the number of strokes, the radicals, the birth date, the birth hour. You’re the god of your fictional universe, so go ahead and unilaterally declare that your desired names are lucky or unlucky as suits the story if you want to.

MILK NAMES

In modern times, babies get named right away, if for no other reason that the government requires it everywhere in the world for record keeping purposes.

However, in traditional times, Chinese people did not give babies a permanent name right away, instead waiting until a certain period of time had passed (3 months/100 days is a classic).

What do you call the baby in the meantime? A milk name 乳名, which your (close, older than you) family may or may not keep on using for you until such time as you die, just so that you remember that you used to be a funny looking little raisin that peed on people.

This kind of name is almost always very humble, sometimes to the point of being outright insulting. This is because to use any name on your baby that implies you might actually like the little thing is tempting Bad News. Possible exception: sometimes a baby would receive a milk name that dedicated it to some deity. In this case, I guess you’re hoping that deity will be flattered enough to take on the job of shooing away all the other spirits and things that might be otherwise attracted to this Delicious Fresh Baby.

Because milk names were only used by one’s (older) family and very close family friends of one’s parents/grandparents, most people’s milk names are not recorded or known, with some notable exceptions. Liu Shan, the son of Liu Bei, who as a baby was rescued by Zhao Yun during the Shu forces retreat from Changban. Perhaps because his big debut in history/legend was as a baby, he is well-known for his milk name A-Dou 阿斗, which means, essentially, Dipper.

If you’re writing a story, you really only need to worry about a milk name for your character if it’s a historical (or pseudohistorical) setting, and even then only if the character either makes an appearance as a small infant or you consciously decide to have them interact with characters who knew them well as a small child and choose to continue using the milk name. Not all parents, etc who could use the milk name with a youth or an adult actually did so.

Here are some milk names I’ve come up with in my fiction: Little Mouse/Xiaoshu 小鼠 for a girl, Tadpole/Kedou 蝌蚪 for a boy, and Shouty/A-Yao 阿吆 for a boy. In the first two cases the babies were both smol and quiet (as babies go). The last one neither small nor quiet, ahahaha. 蔷蔷 Qiangqiang, which is a pretty enough name meaning “wild rose” (duplication to make it lighter), except the baby is a boy, so this is the typical idea that making a boy feminine makes him worth less, which, yikes, but also, historically accurate. Also Xiaohei 小黑 “Blackie” for a work that I will probably never publish because I don’t ever see myself finishing it. I might recycle it to use on another story.

 Here are some more milk names I came up with off the cuff for a friend that wanted an insulting milk name. They ended up not using any of these, so feel free to use, no credit necessary. Rongzi 冗子 “Unwanted Child”; Xiaochou 小丑 “Little Ugly”; A-Xu 阿虛 “Empty”; Pangzhu 胖豬 “Fat Pig”;  Shasha 傻傻 “Dummy”.

PITFALLS!

Chinese has a lot of homophones. Like, so many, you cannot even believe. That means the potential for puns, double meanings, etc, is off the charts. And this can be bad, real real bad, when it comes to names. It is way too easy to pick a name and think to yourself “wow, this name is great” and then realize later that the name sounds exactly the same as “cat shit” or something even worse.

Some Chinese families live the name choosing life on hard mode because their surname is itself a homonym that can make almost any name sound bad. I’m speaking of course of the poor Wus and Bus of the world. You see Wu may have innocuous and pleasant surnames associated with it, but it also means “without, un-”. (Bu is similar, sounds like “no, not”.) Suddenly, any pleasant name you give your kid, your kid is NOT that thing.

This means picking a name that is pleasant in itself yet also somehow also pleasant when combined with Wu. So you might pick a character with a sound like Ting, Xian, Hui, or Liang - unstopping, unlimited, no regrets, immeasurable. A positive negative name, a kind of paradox. Like I said, this is naming on hard mode.

If you are naming an ancient character, I am going to say in my opinion you should ignore all considerations of sound, because reconstruction of ancient Chinese pronunciations is on some other, other level of pedantic and you just don’t need to do that to yourself.

For modern characters, however, an attractive name, in general, should be a mix of tones and a mix of sounds. As a non-Chinese speaker, basically this means especially if you go for a two character given name, having all three characters start with the same sound, or end with the same sound, can sound kind of tongue twistery and thus silly/stupid. That doesn’t mean that such names never exist, and can in some cases even sound good (or at least memorable), but how likely is it that you’ve found the exception? Not very. (Two out of three having repetition isn’t bad. It’s three out of three you have to be careful of. Something like Wang Fang or Zhou Pengpeng is probably fine; it’s something over the top like Guan Guangguo or Li Lili you want to avoid.)

Just like the West (sigh), in the modern Sinosphere it is widely acceptable for girls to have masculine names but totally unacceptable for boys to have feminine names. If you see the radical 女 which means woman, don’t choose that character for a boy, at least if you’re trying to be realistic. Now Chinese ideas of masculinity doesn’t have the same boundaries as Western ideas, but if you want to play around in those boundaries, you gotta do that research on your own; you’ve left what I can teach you in this already entirely too long tutorial.

Don’t name a character after someone else in story, or after a famous person. In some/many Western cultures, and actually in some Eastern cultures too (Japan is basically fine with this, for example), naming a baby the same name as someone else (a relative, a saint, a famous person, etc), is a respected and popular way to honour that person.

But not in Chinese culture, not now, not a thousand years ago, not two thousand years ago. (Disclaimer: I bet there is some weird rare exception that, eventually, somebody will “gotcha” me with. I am prepared to be amazed and delighted when this occurs.)

Part of this is because of a fundamentally different idea in Chinese culture vs many other cultures about what is valuing vs disrespecting with regard to personal names. The highest respect paid in Chinese history to a category of personal names is to the emperor, and what would happen there is that it would be under name taboo, a very serious and onerous custom where you not only have to not say the emperor’s name, but you can’t say anything that sounds the same as the emperor’s name.

Did I mention that this is in the language of CRAZY GO NUTS numbers of homonyms? The day-to-day troubles caused by observing name taboo were so potentially intense that there are even instances where, before ascending to the imperial throne, the emperor-to-be would change his name to something that was easier to observe taboo about!

So you see this is an attitude that says: if you want to honour and show respect to somebody, you don’t speak their name.

As the highest person in the land, only the emperor gets this extreme level of avoidance, but it trickles down all through society. You can’t use the personal names of people superior to you. Naming a baby after someone inherently throws the hierarchy out of whack. Now you have a young baby with the same name as a grown adult, or even a dead person, who is due honour from their rank in life. People who would not be permitted to use the inspiration’s name may now use that name because they are superior to the baby who received the name! This would mean that hierarchy was not being preserved, and oh my heaven, is there anything worse than hierarchy not being preserved? All of Chinese History: Noooooo!

Now. As an author—and I hope to God no one is using my Chinese name guide as a resource to name an actual human baby because I can’t take that kind of pressure—you can use the names of characters to inspire the names of other characters, in the following way.

Remember that I said that the key, the starting point, to naming someone in Chinese is to start from a value. Okay. So what you do, if as the author you want to draw a thematic connection between two fictional characters, is take the Inspiration character’s name, think about what the value is that caused that name to be chosen, and then go from that value to choose the New Character’s name.

If you’ll recall what I said about Gan Ning and his baby Wan, this is exactly the approach I took. Gan Ning had a placid single character name that belied his violent and outrageous personality; I chose a placid single character name for his similarly wild daughter to make them thematically similar. As an author, I named his baby after him. But within the context of the story, she was not named after him. Does the distinction make sense?

Values also run in families for obvious reasons. It’s very common to look at a family tree and see lots of names that follow a kind of theme and give you a sense that, eg, this family is rather low class and uneducated; this family is very erudite but a bit too fussy about it; this family is really big on Confucianism. So yes, as an author, looking to other characters for inspiration is not a bad idea.

Remember, a lot of times, as an author, you can and even should kick realism to the curb sometimes. If you want to make some Ominous Foreshadowing that Character A’s name is something to do with fire but! They name their child something to do with water and therefore they are destined to clash with their own offspring, gasp, you can do that kind of thing because you are the god of your universe. Relish your power.

Do you have any more questions? Feel free to send a PM or an ask. I hope this was helpful! Go forth and name your Chinese OCs with slightly more confidence!

Edit 22 April 2019: I added some more sections (fortune telling, Milk Names, and taboo on naming after people). I also need to overhaul the entirety of the previous to emphasize that even thought I thoughtlessly used “Chinese” as if it was synonymous with “Han”, there are non-Han Chinese and they can have very different naming customs. Mea culpa.

[littleeyesofpallas]

(I used the black and white because without any official color work, I don't actually trust the digital colorist's guesses to reflect much of Kubo's intent. Save for Mera's red hair... given the use of toner and her fire powers, I can't imagine her hair would've been anything but bright red, like Renji's.)

Hiuchigashima[燧ヶ島] MERA[メラ]:

"signal fire/hand-drill* island," "ME-RA"

*like a hand-drill for starting fires. Also a homonym with hiuchi[火打ち石]: "flint" and I've seen this part of her name somewhat erroneously translated as "tinder." Basically the common thread in all these readings being fire starters.

**taken from the onomatopoeic or mimetic sound/phrase meramera[メラメラ]: the sound of flaring up, or the sound of bursting into flames.

Tonokawa[砥ノ川] Tokie[時江]:

"Whetstone/Grindstone's River," "Time Bay"

Hashihara[箸原] HASUka[ハス花]:

"Chopsticks Field," "HA-SU* Flower"

*with HASU[ハス] here being a homonym with hasu[蓮]: Lotus/Sacred Lotus/Indian Lotus.

Nomino[鑿野] Nonomi[のの美]:

"Chisel Field," "NO-NO Beauty"

*technically it's the same either way but no[の] as hiragana is the grammatical possessive, where as in a name you'd normally expect it to be the kanji no[乃] but they mean the same thing. And incidentally the name Nonomi would normally be written [乃々実].

Tsuchimiya[槌宮] Tsumiko[罪子]:

"Hammer/Mallet Princess," "Guilty/Criminal Child."

I dunno why I thought to tackle these 5 as they really don't do much, but it feels like a neatly compact example of Kubo's naming sensibilities, because unlike characters that got to actually speak and interact with others and have any kind of a story of their own, their names are almost all we know about them; that and a few simple tonal notes in how they talk or carry themselves in the one scene most of them show up in.

Obviously the girls are each named after a tool used in sword smithing and serve that role in assisting Oh-etsu. And since they're each a zanpakutou, like the rest of Nimaiyas harem, it feels like it's implied that they are each literally said tool, instead of the more conventional katana. It's kind of weird considering how zanpakutou have worked up until this point in the story, but like much of the final arc we just kind of move on and never elaborate or explore this idea... (It almost feels like an entire Soul Eater thing is implied here, but we'll just never know...)

Its also weird that the girls get full names, with distinctly humanlike etymology and what appear to be full on surnames considering they're all zanpakutou and so you'd expect them to have a singular name, almost more like a title, and more in line with the zanpakutou names we already know.

You can probably tell Kubo decided to lean into this weird alliterative thing with the names. Ironically Mera is named after the meramera thing I mentioned, but her actual full name is the only one without the repetitive phonetics. Otherwise the girls all evoke the repeated sounds, Meramera, TokiToki, HasuHasu, NomiNomi/NonoNono, and TsumiTsumi. I feel like there are some sort of homonyms, or sounds like meramera, or other wordplay at work here that I just don't know enough outside of textbook Japanese to pick up on...

A random note: I find it funny that Mera's design feels like it was a last minute twist on Kubo's usual wildtype that he just knew he'd never get the chance to throw in there otherwise... Bazz-B's mohawk and fire powers, Renji's hair color, Grimmjow's eyeliner... kind of some Hiyori/Shino adjacent spunky girl energy? She feels like she'd fit that whole character type, even though we barely got to hear from her. It would've been nice to see a spicy tomboy actually involved in the story.

And maybe it's just a coincidence but it almost feels like there's a wuxing thing going on with the girls with the classical 5 daoist elements reflected in their names and tools: Fire-starters, Water-quenching and river/bay, wood "Chopsticks"/Tongs and flower, metal Chisel, and earth Hammer.

[historic-old-guard-lover]

Historically Booker’s native language would be Occitan and not French . He would also probably deeply resent standard / Parisian French since the government did their damnest to erase regional languages and still do it today .

Agreed! There was another post about this, but since I got an ask (I love you, anon) I’ll elaborate. Buckle up for a primer on the evolution of the French language with a brief aside for troubadours, traveling musician-poets you wish were still a career option. No, being a rock star is not quite the same.

In the early medieval period (as early as ~900CE), the country we now call France had a language divide between the northern and southern regions. In the north, they spoke langues d'oïl which is what eventually became modern standard French. In the south, they spoke Occitan or lenga d'òc and a modern form of this language is known as Provençal. Looking at the regional sub-dialects, the more northern Occitan begins to sound like a langue d’oil and the more southern dialects begin to sound like Spanish.

As I touched upon in a previous post, this is because they all share similar roots as a romance language. Even though modern standard French is a langue d’oil, occitan managed to sneak a few things into the language. If you’ve learned French as a second language, you’ll know that when you respond yes (oui) to a negative question (you don’t like cheese? / tu n’aimes pas le fromage?) that you use a different yes (si). This is a skeleton of Occitan! 

The why of the invention of “standard French” is, as most “standard” things are, a detour into nationalism. In 1635, Cardinal Richelieu (under Louis XIII) founded the Académie Française (French Academy) which was tasked with standardizing the French language so that it could be exported to the rest of Europe and used to gain further prestige of the role of French philosophers during the Enlightenment. During the French Revolution, it was disregarded, but Napoleon Bonaparte restored it as part of the Institut de France (Institute of France) in 1803. To this day, the Académie is tasked with publishing the French dictionary and inventing new words for things such as “e-mails” so that the French needn’t stoop to using English loan-words.

Another part of this was the Toubon Law (August 1994) which required French (the standard French from the Académie) to be used in all official documents and advertising. It required all advertising to use French and even set a certain percentage of music on the radio that must be French. This law was literally the government going “let’s make the French french again.” If a school doesn’t instruct in French (modern, standard French of course), then they can’t receive government funds. The only exception is Breton-language schools (Breton is as north as it gets and is a langue d’oil so it still helps crush Occitan).

Since the previous paragraph probably made you mad as heck, let me give you some irony to laugh at: some French people refer to this as the loi Allgood (“law” Allgood). To explain this joke, it helps to know that Toubon is the last name of the Minister of Culture at the time the law was passed. If you break down his last name, it sounds like “tout bon” in French which translates to “all good.” People took this law saying make everything French, goddammit and replied, sure thing Minister All-Good. I love it.

Now, for the troubadours! I learned standard modern French in high school, but at university I came across Occitan because of those romantic poets. I’ll put this aside below the break so you can continue on with your day if for some reason you’re not interested in medieval French rock star-poets...

Let me begin by quoting the Wikipedia definition:

A troubadour was a composer and performer of Old Occitan lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages (1100–1350). Since the word troubadour is etymologically masculine, a female troubadour is usually called a trobairitz.

Right away you may notice a few things: 1) they wrote and sang in Occitan; 2) it was an equal-opportunity field (though it was rare for a woman to be one). The first Troubadours were mostly noblemen, but later ones could come from any social class. Yes, you read that correctly: egalitarian travelling poets! If that doesn’t sell you on these performers, I don’t know what will. The troubadours spread their tradition throughout Europe and the only thing that could stop them was the Black Plague.

As you’d expect, they mostly sang about love. A lot of their poems were about courtly love and chivalry, but they could also get bawdy. The especially good performers would be sought after by courts like famous painters. Troubadours are essentially the apex bards: romantic, witty, charming, talented, and able to make serious bank.

To finish this, I will leave you with one of the bawdiest troubadour poems I know of, Farai un vers, pos mi somelh (The Ladies with the Cat) by Guillem de Peiteus. It’s essentially the story of a dude who has sex with these women who pick up a knight on a pilgrimage (though it plays with reality and this guy’s fantasies). I’ll include it in the original Occitan, and then a translation by Robert Kehew (I believe), verse-by-verse. Forgive me for my commentary in between, but I just want you to understand how freaking clever this poem is!

Farei un vers, pos mi somelh Em vauc e m’estauc al solelh. Domnas i a de mal conselh,    E sai dir cals: Cellas c’amor de cavalier    Tornon a mals.

While sound asleep I’ll walk along In sunshine, making up my song. Some ladies get the rules all wrong;    I’ll tell you who: The ones that turn a knight’s love down    And scorn it, too.

The singer is establishing himself as a troubadour. The protagonist is dreaming, so we should be careful about what is real and imagined. He’s also invoking the trope of the philandering knight constantly falling in love and breaking his heart.

Domna fai gran pechat mortal Qe no ama cavalier leal; Mas si es monge o clergal,    Non a raizo: Per dreg la deuri’hom cremar    Ab un tezo.

Grave mortal sins such ladies make Who won’t make love for a knight’s sake; And they’re far worse, the ones who’ll take    A monk or priest-- They ought to get burned at the stake    At the very least.

The Middle Ages were not at all chaste; yes, monks and priests were having sex. This isn’t as sexist as it may come across on a first reading however. He’s not saying women shouldn’t have sex (he’s actually saying that it’s a sin not to being having sex), he’s just upset that women who are clearly willing to have sex are turning *him* down. He’s not going to get any awards for feminist of the year, but he’s not the worst. I’m sure this would rouse cheers from a tavern.

En Alvernhe, part Lemozi, M’en aniey totz sols a tapi: Trobei la moller d’en Guari    E d’en Bernart; Saluderon mi simplamentz    Per sant Launart.

Down in Auvergne, past Limousin, Out wandering on the sly I ran Into the wives of Sir Guarin    And Sir Bernard; They spoke a poper welcome then    By St. Leonard.

These are recognizable locations along a pilgrimage route. There’s a good chance that these names are replaceable (Bernard can be replaced with any last name that rhymes with a saint) and this song could be used to goad the audience. And no, he hasn’t had sex with these ladies yet. They’re just saying hello (for now).

La unam diz en son latin: “E Dieus vos salf, don pelerin; Mout mi semblatz de bel aizin,    Mon escient; Mas trop vezem anar pel mon    De folla gent.”

One said in her dialect, “Sir Pilgrim, may the Lord protect Men so sweet-manned, so correct,    With such fine ways; This whole world’s full of lunatics    And rogues, these days.”

I think most would agree that this is happening in the knight’s sex-dream because she’s just sweet talking him. The awesome part is that the “dialect” reflects the singer actually adopting a Northern French language (they’re mutually intelligible). Guillem didn’t have to go that hardcore, but he did.

Ar auzires qu’ai respondut; Anc no li diz bat ni but, Ni fer ni fust no ai mentaugut,    Mas sol aitan: “Barbariol, babariol,    Babarian.”

For my reply--I’ll swear to you I didn’t tell them Bah or Boo, I answered nothing false of true;    I just said, then, “Babario, babariew,    Babarian.”

This guy just mocks their accents as a reply. Wildin’.

So diz n’Agnes a n’Ermessen: “Trobat avem que anam queren. Sor, per amor Deu, l’alberguem,    Qe ben es mutz, E ja per lui nostre conselh    Non er saubutz.”

So Agnes said to Ermaline, “Let’s take him home, quick; don’t waste time. He’s just the thing we’d hoped to find:    Mute as a stone. No matter what we’ve got in mind,    It won’t get known.”

In this stanza we see two repeats and a new thing. First, the names are easy to replace (Agnes doesn’t even have to rhyme with anything) so that this can be done to call out a specific woman’s name. Second, the language skills are being flaunted again as this Occitan-speaker is just casually showcasing that he can sing about sex in other languages too, thankyouverymuch. Lastly, this is WOMEN voicing their desire, not men. The man is silent, they think he’s incapable of speech. This is two women in a poem/song getting to steer the story how they please. Stepping back, this is a guy’s sex-dream so you could argue he’s just got a kink for dominant women, but regardless that’s a pretty cool way to turn masculinity on its head.

La unam pres sotz son mantel Menet m’en sa cambra, al fornel. Sapchatz qu’a mi fo bon a bel,    El focs fo bos, Et eu calfei me volentiers    Als gros carbos.

Under her cloak, one let me hide; We slipped up to her room’s fireside. By now I thought one could abide    To play this role-- Right willingly I warmed myself    At their live coals.

Yes, this dude is saying he’s more than happy to let the women take charge. Don’t kink-shame him.

A manjar mi deron capos, E sapchatz agui mais de dos, E noi ac cog ni cogastros,    Mas sol nos tres, El pans fo blancs el vins fo bos    El pebr’ espes.

They served fat capons for our fare-- I didn’t stop at just one pair; We had no cook or cook’s boy there,    But just us three. The bread was white, the pepper hot,    The wine flowed free.

A capon is a castrated rooster, fattened for eating. He’s being fattened (and emasculated by letting them take control) before the women get down to their  fun with him.

“Sor, aquest hom es enginhos, E laissa lo parlar per nos: Nos aportem nostre gat ros    De mantenent, Qel fara parlar az estros,    Si de renz ment.”

N’Agnes anet per l’enujos, E fo granz et ac loncz guinhos: E eu, can lo vi entre nos,    Aig n’espavent, Q’a pauc non perdei la valor    E l’ardiment.

“Wait, sister, this could be a fake; He might play dumb just for our sake. See if our big red cat’s awake    And fetch him, quick. Right here’s one silence we should break    If it’s a trick.”

So Agnes brought that wicked beast, Mustachioed, huge, and full of yeast; To see him sitting at our feast--    Seemed less than good; I very nearly lost my nerve    And hardihood.

So yes, he’s joking about almost loosing his boner and there’s that language play again. The big part of the ending, however, is the imagery of the red cat. Cats are typically associated with women, and the color red tempts the mind into thinking of it as female passion or some kind of prowling sexuality (with undertones of evil). The subtext here is that they’re going to test him by letting this cat scratch him up to see if he’ll cry out. If he can keep his mouth shut and allow the womens’ passions, he can stay. If he can’t, he’s out. Ultimately, I’m going to say that this poem is subtly for women’s empowerment. Go scratch up your knights, ladies.

[cantankerouscatfish]

sometimes work involves, compiled from the last couple days bc brain melty:

- reading part of the wikipedia entry for ‘babka’ aloud bc the florists were talking about it and wanted to know the etymology. “they’re EATING GRANDMA??” no it is named bc it looks like floofy old lady skirts. knowledge! also florists are weird!

- florists singing: 🎵 on the bonnie bonnie banks of glaucoma~

- a topic that day was Scottish songs and besides that gem of a misheard lyric, one florist explained to another that one song about a ribbon and that “I see you won first prize” line. they play that on the radio sometimes which is wild.

- there was a boxwood tree in the cooler with a name on it but no order. an order is, like, the little folded stack of customer & recipient info &c that goes with each delivery item. florist remembered that there is a handwritten card that is supposed to go with this tree. we can reprint an order, but we need! to find! this card!!!  so we dropped everything to search for the order. we rifled through the holiday order boxes for next week in case it ended up in the wrong day. we checked the wrapped arrangements in case the order got stuck on a different tree. we checked the next-next week orders in case someone REALLY messed up. nothing.    then the other florist was like, “is it this order hanging on the board marked ‘tagged in cooler’? with a card on it?”  “why is it on the BOARD we’re not USING THE BOARD NOW it’s the HOLIDAYS!!!!!”   so everything’s fine now. 🎉

- one delivery driver loudly praising me for “dual-fisting staplers!” to make boxes. dual-wielding, man. wielding.

- another driver coming over to get coffee and asking if my silver hat was picking up radio stations. no. he was hearing my phone playing music lmao guys......

- oh but today was a skeleton crew just to sort of catch up on a few things, so I was able to hang out in the delivery bay to wrap stuff and blare my trash music and sing and dance along in peace yeehaw

- the floral shop manager brought in an absolutely massive flatscreen TV for to watch The Sportsball Game. she is the type to yell “go go GOOO” at the screen. can hear her from anywhere. endless amusement.