#The Espio name is derived from the word 'espionage'

[fionaapplerocks]

For fellow film camera nerds who have been wondering, the silver camera featured in the 1997 Fiona Apple 'Criminal' video is the Pentax Espio 160 Zoom (1996). Also known as the IQZoom.

[sage-nebula]

I can't tell if this is supposed to be a "gotcha" or not, but if it is, it doesn't work because a.) obviously I know about Amy, and b.) she is still in the minority, right along with Miles. Most Sonic characters don't have human names.

As a quick comparison:

Human Names:

Miles (Prower)

Amy (Rose)

Claire (Voyance)

Belle

Zeena

Barry

Ray

These are the non-human characters with human names in present canon (games + IDW comics). Of them, one is a robot made by a human (Belle), and the other is an alien (Zeena). There have been others in previous adaptations (e.g. Sally in Archie, Sonia in Underground), but we'd be here all day if I had to include Archie's robust cast alone, so we'll leave it at that.

Non-Human Names:

Sonic

Knuckles

Big

Cream

Vanilla

Vector

Espio

Charmy

Shadow

Rouge

Silver

Blaze

Marine

Trip

Infinite

Mighty

Fang

Bark

Bean

Jet

Wave

Storm

Whisper

Smithy

Slinger

Mimic

Tangle

Lanolin

Jewel

Rough

Tumble

Clutch

Surge

Kitsunami

Now, you could try to argue one or two of these. Change the e to an a on the end of Marine's name and you get Marina, a perfectly normal human name. And you might encounter someone named Jewel. But for the most part, these aren't names that parents name their babies. Espio comes from the word espionage because he's a spy. Lanolin is the term for oil secreted in sheep wool. Big is named for his size. Shadow and Silver because of the color of their quills. So on and so forth.

So for the most part, mobian characters have names derived from physical characteristics / attributes, or a random noun. It's much rarer for them to have a human-sounding name, and while I'm sure no thought is put into that by the writers, it's fun to headcanon reasons for why these ones stand out.

So for Tails's birth name, I gave the explanation above, where it was an accident since he was born on West Side Island, away from humans.

For Amy, in Sonic the Fighters she was called Rosy the Rascal. It was one of the first names we had for her, so I personally headcanon that her birth name was actually Rose. But in the games she seems to live among human settlements, like Station Square or Central City. So I headcanon that when she moved there, she picked the human name Amy to fit in better with her human peers (and perhaps spending most of her life around humans made human names sound more appealing anyway), and kept her birth name as her last name.

(Barry is similar in my headcanon. His birth certificate spells his name as Berry, but he changed the spelling to look more employable to human eyes.)

Anyway, so there you have it. It's weird when mobian characters have human names. They're the odd ones out. So I like to headcanon in-universe reasons for why it is. If you aren't having fun, that's fine—but that just means my posts aren't for you.

Happy Halloween!

Tails' real name being a human name (Miles) is weird, so I've decided that his name being a human name was an accident (his full name being a speed pun is a happy accident). His parents did the same thing that Asriel's parents did in Undertale, where they took the first two letters of one parent's name and the last three letters of the other parent's name and mashed them together to get their child's name. In his case, his mother's name was Mist, and his father's name was . . . Puddles.