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

[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.

[talenlee]

How Do People Name Things?

Hey, gunna talk about world building in the context of names for people.

In the real world, we have a lot of stories for how and why people name things. A pretty common narrative people hear about surnames in English-speaking worlds, is that family names tend to derive from places and jobs. A family who made barrels might have the surname cooper, and people from the north might have the surname north. These are conventional and typical etymologies, which are almost always also extrapolations of complex information and therefore, best fits of maybes and could bes.

Not ‘we can’t be confident in these explanations’ but ‘we can’t be sure of these explanations.’

Thing is, that’s how the real world, English language names work (and I genuinely do not know how other cultures in the real world do it). In the context of worldbuilding, you know where all your names come from: you named them. Or you used a generator to name them, and selected from that, but the point is, you’re making choices about what to name things, one way or another.

When the time comes to name a character, for a story, it isn’t necessary for the name to make diegetic sense. You absolutely can name characters based on wanting their names to stand out and be cool. Consider that in Star Wars, the main cast of heroes are Director’s Name Reference, Does Things On His Own, Scary Mouth Monster and The Girl as they fight the Dark Father. The names are load-bearing, they outline the character’s position in the story you’re watching, rather than tell you about the culture they’re from in-setting. Star Wars names tend to be homogenous; mostly, if someone has a really weird name, it’s because they’re a really weird alien, but most people’s names have a sort of spoken vibe that projects the kind of guy they are. You’re going to find Ambassador Malbad and Senator Sunice and who is a baddie is not actually very hard to deduce.

(Indeed, you can notice that characters rename themselves to have mean names if they’re revealed as bad.)

Names are things that people interact with every day, which means names that are awkward or difficult to read to English speakers can be used to suggest that the language being spoken is one where such words aren’t awkward. Consider in this list of Xhosa names (taken from a probably not-trustworthy babynames style listicle site):

Nceba

Ndiliswa

Nomuula

These are not names that Xhosa speakers struggle with; according to a cursory search, these are common names, with nice meanings. But in English, they’re all a little awkward, because the phonemes nc, nc, and uu are not common in names like this. Back when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a regular feature in the news, you could hear the hesitation in the voice of commentators as they prepared to say his name (if they didn’t make a joke about him being ‘ah my dinner jacket’, a truly dated reference, as if anyone these days eats jackets for dinner any more). It’s not like any part of his name is hard, it’s just that the unfamiliarity with those syllables in that way created a hesitation. It’s not like the name is meaningfully longer than, say, Christopher, or Bartholemew, and you wouldn’t likely stumble over those.

If names have meaning in your story, remember that kids tend to get names given to them rather than pick them themselves. If you want to make it so people pick their own names, that’s a cultural practice, and therefore you have to address the question of when and how they do that. Otherwise, you’re talking about parents picking their kid’s names and giving them a name like Doomdead Lifewillsuck Butthell, which again, in Star Wars style stories, that doesn’t matter, because the names in Star Wars are clunky and load bearing and meant to make sense for exactly the 90 minutes of a movie and not to represent a greater, more expansive world where people actually do things like eat food or poo.

In Ursula K Leguin’s Earthsea series, there is much made of names, but those names in turn follow some good rules about being speakable. Characters have multiple names, some of which are the ‘starter kit’ names, then you have names as you progress through your life and achieve things. Knowing a name from a period in someone’s life is a sign that you were connected – somehow – to that period, and using it showed some element of relationship to that ‘identity.’ This is a really cool feature because it presents the idea that people, through their lives, change who they are and what matters to them, and the names serve as labels for those major transitional changes. But speaking of transition….

Thing is, we have a strong culture of people, in the real world, who choose their own names. In fact, we have two major cultural groups that do it: Elder millenials who didn’t enter the internet where you’re supposed to use your real name, and practically every trans person. Not all of them – there are plenty of trans nonbinary people who are happy to keep the names they got from the store! – but enough trans folk try out other names to see how they click that you have a community that has this kind of experience as a group.

This is also something that creates interesting trends. For example, there was a joke I made a few years ago that every trans woman was or knew someone named Emily or Zoe; this is a trick because those are two really common girls’ names from the cohort of my age (I even know a cis Emily!), and people tend towards things they find familiar. Especially for that body of trans women who want something that ‘feels normally’ or ‘typical,’ it makes sense they’d find names that are typical to their age group! Trans men I have less experience with (and oddly, a bunch of the trans men I know have Biblical names?) but I know that if I wanted to know more about rituals of name-choice, those are the people I would go talk to, because they aren’t people choosing to name others, but they are talking about choosing to name themselves.

To summarise, consider that names are:

Usable! People give names that they can use and reuse in natural conversation!

Reflective! Names show how people talk around them and use common sounds!

Intentional! People give names to things for a reason, and both when and how they do it reflect a cultural choice!

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[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.

Previous

Next

[lit-crits]

(2005) Tyneside: A History of Newcastle and Gateshead from Earliest Times, Alistair Moffat & George Rosie. 13/03/2025 - 02/04/2025

First time reading? Yes

Rating: 8/10

This is going to be a long review! Picked this up at the Mitchell Library, can't believe it took me so long to actually go. I actually learned a whole lot from this book and it was a really enjoyable read!

First thing it explains is Doggerland, which was an area of land in Northern Europe during the last glacial period that gradually became an island, then became completely submerged and is now somewhere in the North Sea. When it became an island it rang alongside the East coast of Britain and there is evidence that settlers from Doggerland landed in Newcastle and the surrounding areas. Apparently if you stood on a beach in the East at the time, you'd be able to see Doggerland clearly on the horizon.

At some point in time, there was a series of underwater earthquake/landslides (now called the Storegga Slides) which essentially caused a GIANT tsunami that flooded Doggerland and Britain (and probably elsewhere, it just isn't mentioned in this book). What is crazy to me is that Moffat and Rosie say that this tsunami literally shifted whole parts of the bottom of the North Sea - they give an example of deep sea sand being found during building works on Castle Street in Inverness, I have been here and it is wild to imagine that the whole area was flooded. They also write that the North Sea actually makes sound, it hums and we can't hear it without the use of technology - scientists still don't know why it hums or how.

It then moves onto the Roman occupation period, which I already knew quite a lot about but it was interesting to read more about Wallsend in particular (where I grew up) and just how much Newcastle was/is identified by this Roman occupation and Hadrian's Wall. People often think that the Wall was created to fend off the Scots, but that isn't entirely true - it was initially created as a set boundary of the Roman Empire because Emperor Hadrian was particularly worried about the Empire expanding beyond it's capacities. The book goes on to say that the Romans directly caused the establishment of the oldest national flag in Britain, the red dragon of Wales, by importing Sarmatian troops that charged into battle carrying a mounted wooden dragon head that had red fabric draping behind it.

The book talks about Bede, who was born and lived in Jarrow - which I am genuinely ashamed I didn't know until now. Bede is considered to be Britain's first ever historian and his writings are incredibly important sources to historians. He was very particular about his dates, and used the B.C./A.D. system - Moffat & Rosie argue he is a big reason this dating system is used in Europe today. Very cool to think that me and Bede are from the same part of the world!

Bede also calls Newcastle "Ad Murum" meaning "at the wall", there is also evidence of an earlier name of "Gwawl" - which is Old Welsh for "wall", so Newcastle as a city/settlement has historically been tied to Hadrian's Wall running through it. I'm not sure if Carlisle has a similar history, with it being the city on the other end of the Hadrian's Wall. Another, unrelated, etymological fact I learned is that modern day "salary" comes from the Latin "salarium" for salt, which is what Rome occasionally paid it's troops as a wage. "Northumberland" comes from "Northanhymbre" which meant "those who live North of the river Humber."

In later periods of history, the river Tyne became known as the "River Dragon" because of it's twists and turns that sailors were not keen to navigate. Despite this, Newcastle and the surrounding areas only grew like they did because of the Tyne and the industrial capabilities that came with it. Ship building became a huge industry in Newcastle, along with mining, and these industries are pretty much non-existent in the city now. The book is written in 2005, and the authors discuss the economic downturn of Newcastle, and how it went from a once proud working class city to one of genuine poverty. Moffat and Rosie write about a Newcastle City Council plan to turn the economy around by 2020, but obviously we know now that covid happened and any economic growth would have been stunted if not undone. Honestly, the book kind of ends with a sad note of describing the area as poor, rife with anti-social behaviour and a severe lack of opportunities.

[vidavalor]

*pops up in cloud of smoke; dusts off jacket a la Beez* Hi there! 💕I was paged in the comments by @turquoisedata & am glad that I was because I love the stuff you were mentioning in your first paragraph. I don't think it has much to do with why we're getting a 90 minute movie-- that's just an industry-standard length thing-- but you've tickled my brain on the other, multiple references to ninety as a quantity of something. Let's see what kind of word history magic I can stir up here that might be of use.

Ninety is a mix of the number nine and an evolution of tig, which meant ten. It comes from the fact that, obviously, ninety = nine groups of ten. So, if we're looking at what's going on with ninety, we're really actually looking mostly at the wordplay and other meanings of the number nine with a dash of the number ten, and we'd want to go to history for that and where it could tie into Crowley & Aziraphale's story & the story as a whole.

Let's do this backwards and start with ten because it might make more sense that way. The number ten, in Roman numerals, is the letter X. This is why the name that Crowley and Aziraphale gave to the bookshop that is noted in Furfur's copy of Demon's Guide to Angelic Beings Who Walk the Earth is Angelic Embassy X.

It's a layer of humor in the scene when Crowley storms out of the bookshop, all upset, after the argument with Aziraphale in 2.01: Oh, I can't do this, I'm just so angry [an ang is a fish]... One, two... ten!

So, why Angelic Embassy X?

The letter X means a whole variety of things: it can refer to something considered "wrong" in the view of someone else. It can refer to something experimental-- which we know the bookshop embassy is, as it's really the only thing like it. It can be used between two or more names to refer to a collaboration. It's shorthand for adult things (*Gabriel voice* pornography) and it also is part of the shorthand of xo, referring to hugs and kisses. In math, x refers to an independent variable.

The address to the bookshop also contains the number ten. Since Aziraphale has basically built the street for the last few hundred years, he probably was able to pick the number so we can count that as part of the wordplay, too (and we should anyway, as it's a detailed kind of story 😉...) The address, according to Demon's Guide, is 105 Whickber Street.

There are other angles to explore with the number 105. (Anyone else who is into Buddhism or used to watch Lost is currently like if only it were 108! ����) There might be things I'm missing but number 105 is not really that interesting and neither, honestly, is the number five from an etymological point of view. There are aspects to the number five's history though, that are really interesting and relevant to Crowley & Aziraphale.

You could get into iambic pentameter in poetry and its ties to Shakespeare, for one option. There are mathematical aspects to it that could be seen as fun applied to the story-- it's a safe prime number, for instance. There are ties to the Bible but Good Omens is a wordplay-happy religious satire... I'd look at the words with everything first before I got too deep into Biblical lore. It's not irrelevant but after a long time happily pouring over this story, the words >>>>>>>>>> everything else. Stuff from the Bible that doesn't fit with the wordplay or the themes isn't really relevant in a story that is only really using it to skewer religion anyway.

I'm sure that the real joke with 105 Whickber Street here is that 105 is 1 + 0 + 5 = 6. It's a reference to the number six, which comes from the Latin verb sex. Off the top of my head, other instances of wordplay around six/sex are in the six shots of espresso innuendo, which I looked at over here, as well as Aziraphale grinning flirtatiously with the whole "I have in my hand a sixpence..." bit in 1941. On the farthing, the other coin? A nightingale-wren bird. 😉 Aziraphale is flirting about their secret language in that secret language in that already-meta-in-ten-different-ways scene.

And so! We come to the number nine.

Nine is an odd prime number. You can multiply it by any number and the sum of the numbers you receive will always be divisible by the number nine. Because of how magical-seeming a number it is, it factors into different cultural histories. Of what I know of those things, the most relevant here off the top of my head would probably be The Nine Orders of Angels/Christian Angelic Hierarchy and The Nine Muses.

Good Omens has its own ideas about the power structure of angels in Heaven but it is taking the names of the levels of rank an angel could have from Christian theology and that has nine orders-- thrones, dominions, virtues, principalities, etc.. Good Omens has put its own spin on it for the purpose of its satire but Crowley & Aziraphale cheekily using wordplay around the number nine when it relates to Heaven in this way would make sense.

The other thing that's relevant is probably the Greek Muses, of which there were nine. The Muses are the goddesses of science, literature, and the arts. From them, the word muse evolved to mean artistic inspiration. There is wordplay around The Muses in Good Omens in the show and the novel in a few places, my favorite of which is a winking use of a word that derived from muse, which is amusing, used several times across both the book (the Milton Keynes paragraph, in particular, cracks me up) and in the series.

Something that is amusing, in the etymology-happy vocabulary of Crowley and Aziraphale and Good Omens as a whole, is both humorous and artistically inspiring. All art and music and literature is inspiring in many different ways to Crowley and Aziraphale. The two of them are both artists in their own rights and both really are the Muses themselves-- inspirational and influential goddesses of art and science and literature.

One of the ways that they find such things to be artistically inspiring😉, though, is probably best summed up by...

Dear Diary, Last month, Crowley and I both happened to be in Edinburgh and he insisted that I visit a graveyard at midnight! He said he had come upon something he thought would amuse me.

Would someone please write me Crowley's Archangel Gabriel jerkoff fantasies, I'm begging you. 😂

Anyyyyyway... that's maybe some of the reasons why they like the word ninety. Aziraphale might have had more (but not less) than ninety guineas in his wallet on their date in 1827 but he phrased the amount using words in their vocabulary. (Crowley was out of it at the time but, amusingly, not so much so that he wasn't also wording-- pretend and proper are Ineffable Husbands Speak/nightingale language vocab words.) Crowley can't do "90 miles per hour in central London" for reasons including he might hit someone and also the ninety stuff we've looked at and also that the word mile is one that has deep ties to ancient Rome. (See: fish-related meta linked earlier in post.)

Aziraphale getting his driver's license "90 years ago" is wordplay that's also riffing on some aspects of literal things. In the later scene when Aziraphale gets into the car, alone, to take it to Edinburgh, we see him basically magically getting the car to drive itself as opposed to actually manually driving it.

Aziraphale can drive the car with his mind, magically, and he probably has a piece of paper from the British government that says he can legally drive a car but he didn't actually go get a driver's license 90 years earlier. He doesn't really know how to manually drive the literal car-- The Bentley-- but he's not really talking about The Bentley in the "90 years ago" scene.

Aziraphale is continuing the sexual metaphor from S1 where he's the bookshop (which is an overall metaphor in the story, as well-- it's why the whole plot becomes will the demons get into the bookshop? in S2, metaphorical for a mental health breakdown). In this analogy, if he's the bookshop, then Crowley is The Bentley.

Aziraphale is poking gentle fun at the fact that he has long since been licensed to drive "The Bentley"-- Crowley-- but Crowley is reluctant to let Aziraphale drive the literal car. He's proposing they trade, as they always otherwise do in bed-- Crowley can take the bookshop and Aziraphale can take the car. The whole mock-bickering over taking the car versus going by train is really about which one of them is topping the next time they have sex.

Crowley bought the literal Bentley in the 1930s, which is 90 years ago when Aziraphale says that line in S2. So, if Aziraphale says he's been licensed to drive the car since Crowley first decided he wanted to own one, then this is really Aziraphale saying he's been licensed to drive Crowley (has had his enthusiastic consent) since Crowley first decided he'd like to go for a ride with Aziraphale.

Aziraphale passed that driver's test with flying colors! As he says, back then, they (Crowley) didn't even require tests but Aziraphale insisted.😉 The original meaning of require was actually inquiry-- it was to ask.

Back then, long before the invention of the car lol, when Aziraphale first was granted permission to "drive The Bentley", Crowley wasn't the one who asked. Aziraphale, as he says, insisted. Original meanings: to pursue, to urge, to encourage.

As we saw back in S1:

The Number 90

I couldn’t sleep last night, and for some reason, “‘How much have you got in your wallet, angel?’ ‘About 90 Guineas’,” kept running through my head. This morning, I was still thinking about it, along with, “You can’t drive 90 miles an hour in central London,” and, “I passed my driving test 90 years ago.” That’s weird. That’s a lot of random mentions of the number 90.

And of course, nothing in this show is random. I don’t know anything about numerology, so I did a quick Google search to see if I could find something. There wasn’t a lot, but it looks like the number 90 is supposed to be an angelic number, and represents embarking on a spiritual journey to achieve enlightenment and inner peace. It is a reminder to be more philanthropic, kind, and compassionate. Which kind of makes sense, given the contexts in which it was mentioned and Aziraphale’s general character arc. But, that’s still kind of random.

Apparently, the number 90 is also mentioned five times in the Bible. It is mentioned three times in the show, so then I thought maybe we were going to get two more mentions in the last season as some kind of biblical parallel (assuming it is actually significant in some way). And then I got sad, because it was probably yet one more cool little detail that was going to be cut out due to time constraints, because we’re not getting a full final season anymore, we’re just getting a 90…minute…movie. A 90 MINUTE MOVIE. The last movie is 90. MINUTES. LONG.

What does this mean???!!

Does anyone have any ideas about this?

[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

[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.

[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.

[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:

[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. 

[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.