"No, you don't understand," the White Knight said: "That's what the name is *called*."

[melannen]

Talk to me about what we call our characters.

And I don't mean in a story we're writing: that's its own problem, but it also always comes down to the story. I mean when we talk about shared characters outside of story - in our journals, in chatting, in meta, in captions - what names do we choose to use?

This comes up a lot in Untamed/MDZS fandom, of course, with the characters who all have three names, except the ones that don't, as complicated by filtering through different cultural understanding.

But it's not just fandoms in translation - one of my first fic fandoms was Earthsea, where characters all have a use-name and a truename. At least in Earthsea it's in-universe canon that a character's truename is always used (if there's anyone left to tell it) in the stories that are told about them after they're gone, so I am confident in calling Ged Ged and Estarriol Estarriol when I talk about their stories from this end (although Ogion is still called Ogion far more often than Aihal).

And even in fandom much closer to ours, there's the question of first names and nicknames and surnames. Is it Snape or Severus, Draco or Malfoy when I talk about them with others? I always call Holmes Holmes, because even Watson calls him Holmes, so who am I to call him Sherlock, but in modern adaptations it's Sherlock. When I was a kid, Captain Kirk was always Captain Kirk, but somewhere in there the Captain started feeling awkward (and in my head I often call him Jim, because, well, you know what 'Jim' means in Romulan :P), though half the time I still use it by habit anyway.

Meanwhile Captain Jack Sparrow is always Captain Jack Sparrow. Bruce Wayne is Bruce Wayne to me even though he's Batman to himself because it's Bruce Wayne I want to know better (but he's always Bruce Wayne because just Bruce is Bruce Banner.) Meanwhile Kal-el and Clark and Superman to me all refer to different facets of the same man, and I'll swap them around.

I sometimes feel like there's a general change as a fandom gets larger and/or older for fans in general to shift to less formal and more familiar forms of address for their characters, but I have no data on this, and maybe it's a general overall shift with time over all fandoms, more toward first names (do smushnames affect this?)

And, of course, there is the long and hallowed tradition of calling your fandom faves by embarrassing and/or mushy pet names whenever you can get away with it!

So what do you call your favorites? Do you have any fandoms where the naming of characters is especially tricky, or where something the rest of fandom does bug you or endears you? What are your thoughts on what we call our characters?

Comments

[pedanther]

In Doctor Who fandom, there's the additional challenge of identifying which version of the title character one is referring to. Common variations back when I was most active included both formal and casual versions of the ordinal, ie. "the First Doctor", "the Second Doctor", "the Third Doctor" vs "One", "Two", "Three" -- with some of the people using the formal version getting quite sniffy about how the casual version was Obviously Wrong -- and also formal and casual versions of the actor name, eg. "the William Hartnell Doctor", "the Patrick Troughton Doctor", "the Jon Pertwee Doctor" vs "Bill!Doc", "Pat!Doc", "Jon!Doc", etc.

[unfeathered]

LOL, I remember when I first got into DW fandom (I'd always watched it, but only entered fandom after Torchwood aired) and got so confused by people talking about "Ten" all the time. I thought it must be an abbreviation of "Tennant" (logical!) until they started mentioning "Nine" as well, and then it finally twigged... :-D

Because to me, as a viewer but not a fan, then yes they'd always been called by the actor's name. But calling them by number makes it so much easier! (You know, until you get ones who you don't know where they fit, and obviously it doesn't work with the Master either...)

[ruuger]

And then you also of course have the Doctor vs Doctor Who debate :D

(which is clearly happening behind the scenes as well :D )

[melannen]

Yes! I remember when I was a kid to my parents it was always by actor's name and it was a real adjustment to switch to numbers when I got mixed up in the fandom later - although to my parents it was usually just the actor's surname and no "Doctor" at all. Was the name/number split between casual fans/less casual fans, or a split between oldfandom and newfandom?

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I was in old fandom (no, not this old, though my PBS did get the Hartnell&Troughton package) and the 4th Doctor or the 3rd Doctor was a very standard way to talk about the character, though one would talk about scripts as being Tom Baker era or Peter Davison's acting ticks (I can't recall any of those, but he's the one we could have had a way to judge since All Creature's Great and Small appealed to its own fanbase.) JNT was how a particular behind the scenes person was termed, both because having to use three names that individually could be confounding was 'fraught' and long, and because TNT made it be a wordplay.

I've yet to drink from the NuWho well. I bounced off special effects that cost more than an armful of things bought from the local hardware on sale.