[APPROVED] (Fire Emblem) jp -> en names

elci said:

What this change means is that their real names are shafted in favour of something that only really non-fans will gain anything from, since real fans of the series will have no issues whatsoever with knowing which name connects to which character.

...Are you serious?

I know a lot of hardcore fans who don't know the japanese names of most units, maybe their favourite ones yes but not everyone's.

Even if there might be some slight confusion among some, the info page is literally one click away from knowing what the character is called in the localisation.

That is also true for the opposite. Plus there's the need to rework all the wikis and the character wiki (which i'm planning to pick up after this BUR passes).

Mysterious_Uploader said:

...Are you serious?

I know a lot of hardcore fans who don't know the japanese names of most units, maybe their favourite ones yes but not everyone's.

Anecdotal, but most of the people I know that have had an interest in the series prior to Awakening generally use the character's real names when referring to them. As do I. It's mostly people that belong in the realm of newer fans that are really stubborn about calling them by their made up names.

That is also true for the opposite. Plus there's the need to rework all the wikis and the character wiki (which i'm planning to pick up after this BUR passes).

It's true for the opposite, but for what reason? There are interesting aspects regarding the series' heritage to be gained by learning the Japanese names, which is what you'll probably do if you check the site regularly. The same can't be said for defaulting the English names.

elci said:

Anecdotal, but most of the people I know that have had an interest in the series prior to Awakening generally use the character's real names when referring to them. As do I. It's mostly people that belong in the realm of newer fans that are really stubborn about calling them by their made up names.

I know quite a bunch of people that are FE fans since before Awakening (myself included), and, again, they don't know every japanese name.
Regarding the "made up names", i can safely say that most names are similar to the japanese spelling, or if completely changed are related. Not only that, but actually most FE names are supposed to be english or at least foreign-sounding, which sound weird when you romanize them from their japanese spelling.

There are interesting aspects regarding the series' heritage to be gained by learning the Japanese names, which is what you'll probably do if you check the site regularly. The same can't be said for defaulting the English names.

I'll be honest - call me an ignorant but i personally are not on Danbooru for learning about the origin of character names. Although i can see your point, there's an entire wiki for that. And even then, i think most people only care about the origin of their favourite characters, and are not really that interested to look into others.

Your argument is essentially "make things harder for casual fans and taggers who don't know the character's names (read: around 70% of this site) because only real Fire Emblem fans who only play in japanese are worthy of looking at said pictures. And if they're not real Fire Emblem fans, they need to adapt."

I can see your point, but really, making things harder for a huge portion of the crowd to please a smaller portion is a bit of a dick move isn't it?

Plus the japanese names are going to be aliased, so you can research the japanese names and end up with the english ones easily.

Lastly, the current tags are 40% english already, but it doesn't look like you pushed a BUR to change them in japanese, so i think you don't really care as much as you look like you do?

Mysterious_Uploader said:
Regarding the "made up names", i can safely say that most names are similar to the japanese spelling, or if completely changed are related. Not only that, but actually most FE names are supposed to be english or at least foreign-sounding, which sound weird when you romanize them from their japanese spelling.

Sure, but then you also have incredibly jarring ones where the localised names look nothing like the Tiamo, Luna, Yuugiri, Soanvalcke, Flannel, Chap, Kevin, and Harold that they're supposed to look like. For me, seeing Cordelia instead of Tiamo is just stupid since the latter is the name I'll always refer to her by.

Your argument is essentially "make things harder for casual fans and taggers who don't know the character's names (read: around 70% of this site) because only real Fire Emblem fans who only play in japanese are worthy of looking at said pictures. And if they're not real Fire Emblem fans, they need to adapt."

A filthy elitist to the core, am I not?

Plus the japanese names are going to be aliased, so you can research the japanese names and end up with the english ones easily.

This statement dismantles your entire argument. And mine too, for that matter. That's how it works right now, is it not? We already concluded previously that the argument goes both ways. Look, here comes Jack! He's on a mission to find pictures of his favourite character Cordelia from Fire Emblem Awakening. Since Jack loves her so much, he knows what she looks like from the thumbnail alone and does not need tags to locate her. But what is this? When he clicked on one of her pictures, her name is Tiamo? Jack is confused, but intrigued. From now on, regardless of if he searches for either Tiamo or Cordelia, he will get to his destination!

And if for any reason that is not how it currently works, that is the real change that should be made. Defaulting the English or Japanese names and then having the corresponding set of names relink to the default one is how the end result should be like. So in actuality, this change is relatively useless since the alias function exists. Just keep the Japanese names and make the English names get you where you want. So why not simply keep things as they are? Problem solved.

Lastly, the current tags are 40% english already, but it doesn't look like you pushed a BUR to change them in japanese, so i think you don't really care as much as you look like you do?

I was actually not aware of this, as most I see are in Japanese. Searching for tags is something I rarely do. But it's definitely something I'd look into if I had the time for it. Never done anything like it before so I have no idea where to start.

elci said:

This statement dismantles your entire argument. And mine too, for that matter. That's how it works right now, is it not? We already concluded previously that the argument goes both ways. Look, here comes Jack! He's on a mission to find pictures of his favourite character Cordelia from Fire Emblem Awakening. Since Jack loves her so much, he knows what she looks like from the thumbnail alone and does not need tags to locate her. But what is this? When he clicked on one of her pictures, her name is Tiamo? Jack is confused, but intrigued. From now on, regardless of if he searches for either Tiamo or Cordelia, he will get to his destination!

Alright, let's use your example.

Jack is trying to find a picture of Cordelia, and he doesn't know his japanese name. Therefore he has to look for the Fire Emblem: Awakening tag... which is also in japanese.

After finding the Awakening tag (or giving up and searching for fire_emblem + red_hair, he searches for Cordelia, and finds, let's say, post #3230891

But look! There are so many tags! Jack is confused, and he clicks on every tag trying to find Cordelia's japanese name. He spends 3 minutes (including the previous actions) trying to find a tag that would have only took him 2 seconds to find if the tag was in english.

That or Jack searches for Cordelia on the search bar, doesn't find the tag, thinks that the character tag doesn't exist and migrates off to another site.

My objective is not pleasing "the superior fans", but rather pleasing both casual and veteran fans alike. I do appreciate your comment on this, but i don't agree with it.

With that said, i'd like to point out two things:
1) The score under the OP
As you can see, there are 18 users pro-BUR, 7 against, 3 neutral (19 vs 8 including us two). The ratio is over 1:2. But if you want a more "general" pool, you could make a pool on some site and post the link to Reddit and various FE Discord servers (or forums or whatever).

2) Hillside Moose has already approved of this BUR and this entire discussion was pretty much pointless.
forum #157684

Thank you for the constructive criticism. I think the best option for the minority of elitists out there is to alias japanese names to english names (even those that weren't originally in japanese, for consistency and complete coverage. Although it will follow Danbooru's howto:romanize , which doesn't specifically represent fantranslations).

You didn't respond to my primary solution. What exactly is there stopping us from aliasing the names? Because I really don't see the issue. That is the real way to "please casual and veteran fans alike". Having both Rai and Ranulf link to the same place while defaulting the Japanese ones in order to conform to the site standard is the best thing to do in my eyes.

elci said:

You didn't respond to my primary solution. What exactly is there stopping us from aliasing the names? Because I really don't see the issue. That is the real way to "please casual and veteran fans alike". Having both Rai and Ranulf link to the same place while defaulting the Japanese ones in order to conform to the site standard is the best thing to do in my eyes.

Mysterious_Uploader said:

Jack is confused, and he clicks on every tag trying to find Cordelia's japanese name. He spends 3 minutes (including the previous actions) trying to find a tag that would have only took him 2 seconds to find if the tag was in english.

There's your answer - you'd have to type in the search bar the tags of every character in order to find out who's who. I don't get why you won't accept english as standard when they're the most used names.

I don't really see the point of this argument. The justification Hillside Moose gave for moving ahead with the switch to localized names is not the popularity of those names, not how many people come to the site knowing or not knowing them, but that there aren't stable "Japanese" names in the first place.

Hillside_Moose said:

This jogged my memory regarding one Fates character: Before he was given the localized name "Xander," the fanbase translated his name as "Marx." Then the fanbook came out well after the game's release, which has the official romanization, "Marks."

For JP purists, you now have a conundrum: Do you go with the more popular and familiar fan translations, or do you go with the official romanizations (which are admittedly not very good)?

As much as I dislike the direction Fire Emblem localization is headed, at the very least it's a stable anchor, unlike the JP names which can change depending on fan consensus and official side materials. Therefore, the Fire Emblem series will be an exception to Danbooru policy and use the localized names for titles and characters.

This is a result of the original katakana names clearly not being Japanese in origin (with the exception of the Hoshidans in Fates,) fans attempting to guess what they were "supposed" to be before official romanizations appear, and sometimes guessing wrong. I see the only possible solutions that would let us achieve some degree of consistency as:

• (1) using ultra-literal romanizations of the katakana names, like "Maakusu"
• (2) using romanizations from official Japanese sources like fanbooks
• (3) using a stable anchor with romanized names, which exists in the form of the NA version of Fire Emblem Heroes.

All of these solutions could confuse people to various degrees if they come in trying to search for the "wrong" name in some way that tag autocomplete + aliases can't help them with. There's no fix for that beyond improving the search tools. So consistency is literally the only thing that matters.

Moreover, there's no guarantee #2 would actually be consistent. Sources like fanbooks tend to just list romanized names for the "cool factor" and not try hard to keep them standardized between different books. I don't know if Fire Emblem already has a problem with this, but they could release a Japanese character bible tomorrow that romanizes everyone's name differently. What then?

So unless you have a better idea, advocate for #1 or #3, not that one.

The bulk update request #2046 (forum #157788) has been approved by @Hillside_Moose.

Starting the OP BUR now. Shit's going to get real, so hold off on the follow-up BUR until it's completed.

The tag alias mariabel_(fire_emblem) -> maribelle_(fire_emblem) has conflicting wiki pages. maribelle_(fire_emblem) should be updated to include information from mariabel_(fire_emblem) if necessary.

The bulk update request #2038 (forum #157531) has been approved by @Hillside_Moose.

Just a friendly reminder that the majority of the character tags will be needing a category change (general -> character), people usually forget about this.

The tag alias mariabel_(fire_emblem) -> maribelle_(fire_emblem) has conflicting wiki pages. maribelle_(fire_emblem) should be updated to include information from mariabel_(fire_emblem) if necessary.

Hillside_Moose said:

Starting the OP BUR now. Shit's going to get real, so hold off on the follow-up BUR until it's completed.

It looks like the first part is done, now you can roll off the unalias BUR so i can reverse the aliases.

Edit: whoops, didn't notice you did that first. I will make the follow-up BUR soon.

*sigh* I somehow missed it, but soiree doesn't use the _(fire_emblem) suffix, but other than that everything's good. there's an unneeded alias that can be easily fixed, will include it in the follow-up BUR.

BUR #2049 has been approved by @Hillside_Moose.

create alias astria -> astram_(fire_emblem)
create alias cheine -> xene_(fire_emblem)
create alias gordon_(fire_emblem) -> gordin_(fire_emblem)
create alias katua -> catria_(fire_emblem)
create alias linda_(fire_emblem) -> linde_(fire_emblem)
create alias maji_(fire_emblem) -> cord_(fire_emblem)
create alias marich -> merric_(fire_emblem)
create alias nabarl -> navarre_(fire_emblem)
mass update nina_(fire_emblem) -> char:nyna_(fire_emblem)
create alias oguma -> ogma_(fire_emblem)
create alias riff_(fire_emblem) -> wrys_(fire_emblem)
remove alias soiree_(fire_emblem) -> sully_(fire_emblem)
create alias soiree -> sully_(fire_emblem)

Reason: I... just realized why i had a hunch that something was missing. Said something was the entire first game of the series, that i somehow forgot to add. The follow-up BUR contains a character tag currently used here, so i will wait for this being accepted before requesting it.

While i was doing this, i noticed that most english tags that existed before this BUR do NOT have the _(fire_emblem) suffix... I'll think about it after the follow-up BUR.

EDIT: The bulk update request #2049 (forum #157902) has been approved by @Hillside_Moose.

The bulk update request #2044 (forum #157705) has been approved by @Hillside_Moose.

The bulk update request #2049 (forum #157902) has been approved by @Hillside_Moose.

BUR #2051 has been approved by @Hillside_Moose.

Reason: Finally, the long-announced follow-up BUR is here! Here's hoping this and the next one (where i'm gonna add _(fire_emblem) suffixes to all characters that don't have it) are the last ones...

EDIT: The bulk update request #2051 (forum #157935) has been approved by @Hillside_Moose.