I wish people who have played the game could explain where these full names come from. It's frustrating to have these conversations when everyone who has played the game just assumes everyone else has played it too, and doesn't bother to explain basic information like how these names are known.
I finally broke down and started playing it myself just to figure this out. This is what I've learned:
- None of these characters (that I've met so far) tell you their full name upfront. I haven't found out anyone's full name yet after hours of play.
- There are in-game character profiles, and the one for Mona mentions her full name, but none of the rest do.
- There's a friendship leveling system, where as your friendship level increases, you unlock more of the character's story. Judging by the Genshin wiki, this is just more flavor text in character's profile. Some of these make brief mentions of the character's last name. I assume this is where most of these full names are known from.
- According to one thing I read, it takes two months of optimized grinding to max out a character's friendship level. You don't have to completely max them out to unlock their full story, but still, we're talking days or possibly weeks of grinding to unlock a few paragraphs of backstory briefly mentioning their name.
- Some characters also have story quests, but searching through the dialog transcripts on the Genshin wiki, I can't find any that mention anyone's full name.
- Speaking of the Genshin wiki, even they, the dedicated fan wiki, only use first names in their wiki page names (e.g. Jean, Eula). They only mention full names briefly, usually as minor trivia.
- Eula Lawrence was an event limited character. If you missed her event, you can't get her. I don't know how you're supposed to find out her full name if you didn't get her.
- Kamisato Ayaka isn't released yet. I don't know how you're supposed to know her full name when she isn't even out yet.
So overall, apparently the only time most of these full names even come up in-game is in character profile text locked behind a bunch of level grinding. I'm actually kind of mad I had to play the game this far just to find out this much.
GoldenRonald said:
I agree with OP. Too many boorus get bogged down in the "rules". E621 for instance is like a hellscape of stupid "rules" that hang like large black clouds that disallow any common sense to shine through. If a certain game character is strongly known by a single name, the tagging system should cater to that reality.
It's like on Wikipedia...the article for "Nicolas Cage" is TITLED "Nicolas Cage"...they don't force you to use his full real name "Nicolas Kim Coppola" they know that most people are going to know him by "Nicolas Cage" so that's what they use.
Wikipedia calls this the "Use commonly recognizable names" or "common names" rule (WP:COMMONNAME). This is something I very much agree with. Too many times we get caught up trying to use the "most official" or "most correct" name, and end up with a name nobody recognizes. See: how we originally used the Chinese name for Azur Lane (Bilan Hangxian). Genshin is a Chinese game, if we were a slave to the rules then we would be using the Chinese name for it (and everyone in it) too.
More broadly, one of Wikipedia's five pillars is "there are no firm rules". Meaning that the rules aren't set in stone; don't let the rules get in the way of common sense. There's a lot we could learn from Wikipedia.
NWF_Renim said:
It's still is horribly ironic that Eula Lawrence is being held up as the example of a character whose last name isn't important when it's such a central and crucial part of her character story and emphasized heavily in her own character lines. Like I could see argument with the other characters, but it's just such a core piece of her character that to ignore it feels outright foolish.
If her last name is important, then it can always be explained in the wiki. We don't have to pack everything in the tag name.
As far as I can tell, for most of these characters their last name is just obscure trivia. If the turbonerds at the Genshin Impact wiki are fine with just calling her Eula, then I am too.
NWF_Renim said:
And yet we push all these overly complicated character skin name tags that no one but the game players would know about, but then turn around and make the argument here that we can't even handle a last name.
Skin tags exist because they get a lot of search traffic. Especially when a new skin for a popular character comes out. But here, I think even people who have played the game aren't familiar with the last names of a lot of these characters.
It's just confusing when you see a Genshin Impact post and you see some characters are named like firstname_(genshin_impact), others are named like firstname_lastname, and you have no idea why. Why does Lisa Minci have a last name but not Ganyu (Genshin Impact)? Why does Ganyu (Genshin Impact) have a qualifier but not Lisa Minci? It's not obvious why. It's easy to think that a tag like Lisa Minci isn't a Genshin character when she isn't named like the other characters.
