As I remarked in this thread about EddyTeddyFreddy’s recent column, I now finally understand about the naming of racehorses and rock groups:
…and I now need to understand the naming of rap artists and anime. (I don’t want to hijack the other thread)
How did the naming of rap artists and groups, with their ubiquitous out-of-place single letters get started? Were there other options early on, using different kinds of names, and this style hjust “won out” by some Darwinian process based on customer preferences? If so, what were the other styles and why did they die? What are the rules (or rulez)?
And what the hell is behind anime titles, which seem to the uneducatede (like me) to be downright random. Cowboy bebop? Bubblegum Crisis?
“Oh my Goddess” I can undderstand, but some titles seem to have been generated by a computer program drawing words by random selection.
I may actually have asked this question in the past, but if so, I’ve forgotten the answer. think I need a memory upgrade.
This is a fairly new naming “system” for rappers. I think this type of name started out as a play on the rapper’s real name (2Pac for Tupac Shakur, Ludacris for Chris Bridges, etc) and sort of went from there. This is just today’s trend. Back in the day, a lot initials were used (DMC, KRS1, Davy D, Chuck D, Easy E, etc). Then there was a period where every other rapper had “ice” in his name (Ice-T, Ice Cube, Vanilla Ice, Ice Cream Tee, Doctor Ice, etc). Two years from now, it will be something else.
The Japanese often like English words for their sounds and the way they look. The meaning is not a factor. This applies to not only to Anime, but to commercial products, too.
I get the general reference, but haven’t read enough of the world of the Instrumentality (or whatever the universe was called) to get the specific joke.
"And the guard opened the emerald gate and saw a Tin Haberman and said
‘Enter and be welcome! For all owe homage to the Scanners and even the Lords Of The Instrumentality are pleased to give them praise!’ The True Woman and two Beasts were let in- Toto too."
In th early stories of the Instrumentality (especially “Mark Elf”) they talk about the leftover war machines, called “manshonyaggers” (from German “menschenjaegers” = “man-killers”). I just looked at it and thought “Munchkinyaggers”, which were logically machines to kill munchkins, and the rest followed, especially with the titles of the stories from Quest for Three Worlds.
And the name of the ship they live on is the Bebop.
What amuses the hell out of me is how they name follow up series or sequels for anime, usually by suffixing random letters, both English and Greek, sometimes with whimsical words thrown in. One joke is that if Star Wars had been produced as an anime, Return of the Jedi would have been “Star Wars: Double Zeta Ultima Finale Romance Express”
I think the adding of the “Zeta” in the Gundam series was supposed to indicate that it is the final story to be told, just like Z is the last letter of the alphabet. Double-Zeta is what you get when the producers realize they have a cash cow going and try to milk the concept for every yen, resulting in an endless waltz of side-stories, prequels, movies, and spin-offs.
Many - especially earlier - anime series are titled with a close approximation of the idiomatic translation of the Japanese; sadly, this doesn’t always sound so good in English (Super-Deified Machine Beast Dancougar, anyone?) when you try to get both a literal truth and a poetic-sounding name out of them. You could say that’s the same reason the lyrics in the original Bubblegum Crisis series sound like a cheesy 80’s chick-rock band - but then again, that was the 80’s, and Priss is a girl.
Even the incredibly popular Neon Genesis Evangelion, a title instantly recognizably to 99.99% of anime fans the world over, is still just an attempt at a balanced literal/poetic translation and might have gone completely the other way if somebody had decided that something else sounded better…
… or if they knew how it ended in advance and were simply disgusted with the entire waste of time. Maybe it is better that Studio Gainax be remembered for Gunbuster, which ironically had a better ending even though the final episode was unfinished and part of the plot has to be told by showing the storyboard art in rapid succession while the dramatic score plays in the background.
The way I heard it, too, was because the robots in that world had caused an economic “boom”—hense the nickname “boomers,”—or an economic “bubble.” Which, as dotchan s(hi!) says, plays well into the title implying a looming disaster.
So, I guess, by the same scheme, “The Great Gatsby” would have been something like Slouching Social Melancholia, if it’d been conceived as an anime series.
On Bleach, I’ve also heard WAGs that it has to do with the colour of Ichigo’s hair, being orange rather than dark brown or black. I have no idea if that’s the case though, and I think I’ve heard arguments that it’s not.
