#disclaimer i'm not a linguist or fluent in chinese

[e-adlirez]

peeks Hi I heard my blorbo was mentioned

Warning: long rant ahead :3

So the English name thing. Vi mentions in Shipwreck (gonna use the Chinese translation of Shipwreck specifically for this example) goes into a bit of detail about her Chinese name and how it came about: her grandfather came up with the name upon seeing an out-of-season violet bloom in his greenhouse, and thus her Chinese name reflected that-- in the Chinese translation it translates to "陈堇", pronounced Chen Jin in Mandarin, Chen being her family name and Jin being her given name, meaning "violet".

In the next line (that was cut in the English translation), Paulina remarks on how beautiful the name sounds, but Violet quickly says "yeah but believe me, since I travel all around the world, it's way easier to just call me 'Violet'.", which y'know what that's fair :'D

The tough thing about Chinese names (speaking as someone who was given one as a kid) is that pronouncing it when you don't get Chinese pronunciation conventions is most likely gonna be a nightmare. Like, imagine meeting some guy you're meeting maybe for business and you're horrified to see on your notes that his name is "Fáng Shìlóng", and you, a non-Chinese speaker, are gonna have to figure out how to pronounce that monstrosity in order to greet him. (The example Chinese name I gave is Jackie Chan's real Chinese name btw)

Since Vi has mentioned a couple times that she's been to some of the venues the girls have been to before with her parents or something like that (COUGH COUGH and she's bougie), obviously the need for an English name came into question pretty early on in her life, and fortunately Violet's name was very easy to translate to English because of its straightforward meaning. Compare that to Xiao, which uh doesn't really have an English translation that wouldn't sound weird (also not that necessary since Xiao is easy to pronounce in English: "seow")

Vi probably started going by "Violet" either through the suggestion of her parents, or because one too many people mispronounced "Jin" and she was like "just call me Violet please for the love of god"

(Context, pronouncing "Jin" like "djinn" is not the correct pronunciation, neither is "jean")

Sooooooo ye

like you can’t tell me colette’s outfit isn’t gorgeous, violet and colette have the most amount of slay outfits, ALSO GUYS I HAVE A THEORY ABOUT VIOLET’S NAME-

ig one of the thea sisters probably knew what her name meant and translated it into english (or whatever language you read the thea stilton books in) and just told everyone “yeah her name means violet” so they just decided to call her violet (supporting the theory her name is the chinese word for violet)