"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

[highlander_ii]

They really were. And i only use initials in private chat - otherwise it's too confusing. So it's shorthand w/ a friend b/c we know who we're talking about.

The Phantom thing - the fandom has a system where they do an actor initial and then 'Erik'. Which works out okay until you get to Ramin Karimloo who did 3 different versions of the Phantom - his West End run, the 25th Anniv performance, and Love Never Dies (tho no one talks about LND b/c it sux). So Ramin gets ! bangs to separate his specific styles of Phantom.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Wouldn't that be Love Never Happened, if it were to be talked about?

Did these ! bangs enter theatre fandoms from X-philes or was there a second vector from Olden Computer Days of Yore?

[highlander_ii]

re: LND - no idea. i've watched a production of it once (b/c it was free) and i will never watch it again b/c it's a hot pile of steaming garbage

no idea where the bangs ! came from - i picked 'em up through fandom osmosis, but i do think they migrated over from back-end computer coding.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I've heard that it is 'steaming' and that it's free currently; used to be Never Happened was a standard fandom applied amnesia when Canon didn't just jumped the shark but swerved straight onto the railroad as a train was coming.

The Sentinel Fandom used ! bangs when quacking or meta, and far as I can tell they'd gotten it from X-Philes, though clearly someone somewhere had gotten them from old Internet aka ARPAnet. I didn't see them there because I didn't have email that early.

[highlander_ii]

i dunno if they had LND up for more than 24 hrs or not (last week had 25th anniv POTO for 24hrs b/c of lic'ing stuff). i watched it to say that i have. and that i have no desire to ever do so again.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Offers brainfloss and "One Night in Bangkok" (or is it supposed to be Knight?)

[highlander_ii]

What's really funny is that I recently found out 2 things about that song - 1) that i saw the video for it several times back in the 90's and it's performed by Anthony Stewart Head's brother (ASH is Giles from Buffy), and 2) it's from the musical "Chess" - which Ramin just finished performing in, Japan, i think.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I did not know that it had a Buffy tangental relation. I've not seen Chess and yet, the ear worm continues. So, it should remove LND's residue like steel wool without scratching surfaces!

[highlander_ii]

The music - okay, like 2 songs, from LND are fine. The story makes no damned sense. And all the characters are wrong - b/c, iirc, it didn't start out as a POTO sequel, it got sort of sideways smashed into being that.