"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

[graveexcitement]

with danganronpa it's largely a translation issue, and where fans fall usually depends on how they consumed the canon. DR's first translation was a fantranslation that preserved the original japanese's name usage (referring to just about everyone with last names (and honorifics, depending on the character speaking.)) so, the fans who got into DR through the fantranslation or the anime tend to refer to characters by last names - "Naegi, Kirigiri, Komaeda," etc.

however, the official localization of the games switched to everyone using first names for the series. so fans who got into the series later tend to call everyone by their first names. it's not necessarily a strict dichotomy, however; for instance, i'm much more used to last names for the first two games because i read the fantranslations, but i also played the second and third localizations myself, so the first names are in my head too. i often swap back and forth between which names i use, but that helps less when i need to nail down which set i'm using when writing fanfic. i've definitely used different sets for different fics (but not, i hope, different sets in the same fic.) and that's without adding in honorifics, which i also go back and forth on using.

there are a few characters whose first names i feel weird about encountering; calling Komaeda "Nagito" or Togami "Byakuya" just plain feels odd to me. but the ones that really get my goat are a few "nicknames" that the localization introduced that totally weren't there in the original. i definitely get thrown when i hear/read fans talking about Hina (Asahina Aoi) or Taka (Ishimaru Kiyotaka) or Hiro (Hagakure Yasuhiro) (all examples are Lastname Firstname). like, really, what even were those nicknames about? i'm guessing it was to cushion the unfamiliar names -- all 3 examples were in Danganronpa 1, and there's only one other example iirc -- but like, seriously? i get that "Aoi" is gonna be weird for an english-speaker, but the other two really don't seem that hard :p

oh, and i almost forgot the other translation issue: the differing romanization of character names.

there's one main difference, but it crops up in a bunch of names. see, japanese お = o, and う = u. so, one method of romanizing おう is "ou." this is what the fantranslations, and generally fans who are more used to romanizations where おう = ou, do. however, おう is usually pronounced as a long "oh" sound, so the localization just romanizes it as "o" so that it isn't confusing for english speakers.

thus, we wind up with Ouma/Oma, Toujou/Tojo, and a few others along those lines. there's also a few cases where うう (uu) was localized as a single u, so Kuzuryuu/Kuzuryu and Shuuichi/Shuichi. ao3 tags are standardized to the localized version of spelling, in Lastname Firstname order. i understand this decision even if having to tag my stuff with "Oma" is bothersome :p

hmm, this got longer than intended. if anyone else has DR name preferences, feel free to share.

[caramarie]

I played the localised games, but with the Japanese voice track, so I usually end up thinking of the characters by their family names or however they're referred to most in the audio. What I hear overrides the written text for me (although I've found in other games where less is voiced that I'll default to the names as written instead). I spell things as per the official romanisation though.

Funnily enough, Byakuya is one of the ones where I will use his given name, just cos Fukawa uses it so much in Ultra Despair Girls I got used to it!