#sometimes I’m willing to give leeway like Orion Pax but it’s thin ice

[quibbs126]

So on one hand, it does kind of suck that Elita isn’t allowed to have her pre-Elita name anymore with presumably the Disney copyright issues. Like it’s I assume why she can’t have her origin name in TF One and honestly I feel like she sticks out in that regard

But at the same time, I just have to say

Ariel is just a normal person name. Like that does not sound like a Transformer name to me, that could just be a human character’s name

Sure Orion is also a human name, but I feel like the full name being Orion Pax makes it slightly better? Like adding the Pax part as the second part of his name, it makes it not just sound like a human, at least to me. It’s flimsy but it’s something. And also Orion is the name of a constellation, so slightly more space-y

Ariel meanwhile is just a human name, no two ways about it

Hell, in her original design, she just kind of looks like a robot girl to me, rather than someone able to actually transform into a vehicle

And sure, you can change her spelling to Erial or Aerial to make it less human-like or give it a flight pun, but in the former it’s a bit weak, and in the latter case, while it’s nice and I like it, she isn’t known to turn into a flying vehicle other than her Power of the Primes toy, so it’s also a bit flimsy

I like the idea of Elita having a former self, giving her more parallels to Orion/Optimus, and I’d like to see more spins on this Ariel design, since I think Animated was really the only one to do so, but she’s also stuck with a very non-Transformer sounding name to me

It’s like when I hear there’s a bot called Minerva, though I’ve gotten more used to Ariel at this point. But also from what I can gather on the Wiki, the bot Minerva either is or is named after a human character called Minerva, so she’s got more of an explanation to have a human sounding name, even if that explanation doesn’t carry over continuities

Maybe she needs a new backstory-her name. Granted, I talk all this and I’m not sure what this new name should be. But I think she should have a new name, at least so that the character of Ariel can appear in some way again