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

BUR #2038 has been approved by @Hillside_Moose.

Reason: There are two main resons behind this decision:

*Consistency

The tags were half in english half in japanese.

*Easier to find characters

Danbooru is a western site. 98% of the Fire Emblem fans don't know the japanese names, only the english ones. The reason why i'm going for the english names instead of the japanese ones is because since 2003 we have been having official romanizations and localizations that came out at the same time as the japanese version, and thanks to Fire Emblem Heroes we're getting official romanizations of pre-FE 7 games. Not only that, but most japanese names aren't even japanese, which creates an awkward romanization, (for example Fae (Fa on Danbooru), or Idunn (Idoun), or Nah (Nn)).

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

Mysterious_Uploader said:

Danbooru is a western site. 98% of the Fire Emblem fans don't know the japanese names, only the english ones.

The same is true of every other series with changed names in the localization. It doesn't change our policy with very rare exceptions.

Mysterious_Uploader said:

The reason why i'm going for the english names instead of the japanese ones is because since 2003 we have been having official romanizations and localizations that came out at the same time as the japanese version, and thanks to Fire Emblem Heroes we're getting official romanizations of pre-FE 7 games.

Which official localization?

As I brought up in an older thread, take sheeda as an example. She is シーダ in the Japanese games, "Shiida" in European and Latin American versions of Shadow Dragon (the European version of which was the first to be released in any territory outside Japan) and Heroes, and "Caeda" in the NA version.

I don't know where "Sheeda" came from, but if we didn't use that, would we call her "Shiida" or "Caeda"? If we called her Caeda, would the justification be "98% of English-speaking Fire Emblem fans are Americans and we'll use the names they know best?" That feels weak to me, especially since, in this particular case, the direct romanization happens to match one of the names used in an English translation.

When situations like this exist it seems far simpler to stick to romanizations or official Japanese spellings everywhere.

7HS said:
I don't know where "Sheeda" came from, but if we didn't use that, would we call her "Shiida" or "Caeda"? If we called her Caeda, would the justification be "98% of Fire Emblem fans are Americans and we'll use the names they know best?" That feels weak to me, especially since, in this particular case, the direct romanization happens to match one of the names used in an English translation.

When situations like this exist it seems far simpler to stick to romanizations or official Japanese spellings everywhere.

Are you implying that Europe speaks japanese?

The Heroes english translation isn't really NA, it's general english. Since english is the lingua franca of the world, and most of the names remain unchanged in the Europe version from the NA translation except special cases, and not only that but sometimes european translations vary between languages, I personally think english should be used.

Also, the pokemon tags use the english names instead of the japanese ones, pretty much for this same reason.

The site tends to lean towards the Japanese names, such as the human characters in Pokémon, but I agree that the lack of proper romanization in most of the older names making it far easier to navigate if we used the Heroes English names, sussing out specific cases like Caeda.

Either way, we need to pick a side and do it. Having it be half and half is aggravating.

I'd be more receptive to making Fire Emblem an exception if the localization was decent or even consistent, but not when you have abortions like "Caeldori" or "Rhajat" as officially "translated" names.

Hillside_Moose said:

I'd be more receptive to making Fire Emblem an exception if the localization was decent or even consistent, but not when you have abortions like "Caeldori" or "Rhajat" as officially "translated" names.

Caeldori is supposed to be an anagram of Cordelia. Same with Rhajat/Tharja.

Even then, these are just a couple of names in front of a thousand characters. I feel like Danbooru romanization has far more and worse examples.

Really, I support either option but I do have to point out that most of the garbage translation names happened in Fates, especially with the Hoshidans. A lot of the older name issue are isolated (Caeda) incidents of awkwardly translating an archaic English name to Japanese and then having to come back 15 years later to translate it back.

Given the lukewarm reception, both in this and the older topic, maybe you should flip the request.

If there is an official English translation then go for it. Pretty much the only opinion I have for this.
Most media is in English when you try looking up a character in a specific game. I don't see the reason to keep the original Japanese term that is romanized, anyway.
Same goes for Pokémon names: Kasumi over Misty is something I'll never understand, especially because Misty is a localization that exists like forever and never changed.

I think that BUR won't have success simply because this is a minority opinion and I consider Danbooru as rather conservative but I don't think it'S all that practical. Especially because Non-English speakers (like me) refer to English sources instead of Japanese sources despite the origins being Japanese.

Lacrimosa said:

I think that BUR won't have success simply because this is a minority opinion and I consider Danbooru as rather conservative but I don't think it'S all that practical. Especially because Non-English speakers (like me) refer to English sources instead of Japanese sources despite the origins being Japanese.

I personally find that making life harder for an entire fanbase (not just searching for tags, but also tagging itself) because a couple people like the japanese names over the english ones is pretty dumb. Not only that, but pokemon names and Dragalia Lost characters are tagged as english too, so i don't really see the reason why not Fire Emblem too.

Searching and tagging is not made any harder by aliased tags, except when the most commonly searched/tagged name is ambiguous (such as "Idunn", which is a name from Norse mythology already used in multiple franchises and that we can expect to be used more in the future) and requires a qualifier like _(fire_emblem). Otherwise you search for/apply the aliased tag and it automatically gets changed to the correct one. People might not even notice it happening.

Dragalia Lost currently uses localized names based on forum #15691 where one might note that you were the one to recommend and start tagging them. There was most likely no disagreement in that topic only because Dragalia Lost is not very popular on Danbooru. It also has the advantages, compared to Fire Emblem, of (1) consistency in the localization, since it's a single game thus far (2) localized names that all bear at least some resemblance to the Japanese ones.

As an aside, I would personally be in favor of just moving Pokemon to their Japanese names at this point so that it's not a big glaring hole in our character tagging policy that makes it seem like more exceptions are warranted.

Mysterious_Uploader said:
a couple people like the japanese names over the english ones

Does this mean it's even with the number of people in support of reversing the entire site's well established original over localized policy.

Games should use English names unless there's a very compelling reason not to.

Using Japanese names for everything is not hard policy and it never has been. See:

I could go on. The real policy isn't to always use original names. In practice it's to use names that English speakers most commonly use. For anime and manga, this is usually the Japanese name. People usually watch or read the original Japanese version first and prefer it over the localization. But there are cases where the localization is more well known, and in those cases we use English.

For videogames the situation is usually the opposite. Usually people outside of Japan don't play Japanese releases and don't use Japanese titles or character names. Very often people have no idea what the Japanese names even are, which is not usually the case for anime.

I feel like the original names policy is widely misunderstood. Too often people insist on blind adherence to it without considering the reasons behind it. The original names policy was designed around anime and manga, not for videogames. Trying to force it on everything has led to a lot of unwise decisions in the name of consistency, which is foolish because we don't use Japanese names everywhere and we never will.

Copyright names and character names are different cans of worms. In the case of copyrights I would generally agree that the most widely known names should be used, because they might have to be added as tag qualifiers.

It's also worth noting that a good portion of the examples you called out are "English because it's cool" subtitles given to the work by the original creators. These in my opinion would have the same status as a romanization specified by the original creators, which we generally adhere to.

In the case of characters, it's of low importance how many people are familiar with the names we end up using as tags, because Danbooru has multiple features to redirect them to or help them find the correct tag (barring those few occasions where a name is ambiguous and needs a qualifier, which is probably going to end up confusing new users in any case.) As I see it consistency is the only thing that matters.

And when a franchise doesn't keep its character names consistent across different games and different translations of the same game, that particularly flies in the face of it, doesn't it?

If there were a hypothetical franchise that kept giving different Japanese names to what are clearly the same characters for no apparent reason, while the English ones stayed the same, I would be tempted to recommend against the Japanese names in that case.

7HS said:

Which official localization?

As I brought up in an older thread, take sheeda as an example. She is シーダ in the Japanese games, "Shiida" in European and Latin American versions of Shadow Dragon (the European version of which was the first to be released in any territory outside Japan) and Heroes, and "Caeda" in the NA version.

I don't know where "Sheeda" came from, but if we didn't use that, would we call her "Shiida" or "Caeda"? If we called her Caeda, would the justification be "98% of English-speaking Fire Emblem fans are Americans and we'll use the names they know best?" That feels weak to me, especially since, in this particular case, the direct romanization happens to match one of the names used in an English translation.

When situations like this exist it seems far simpler to stick to romanizations or official Japanese spellings everywhere.

Pretty much every playable character has an official Japanese name written using the Latin character set (this doesn't count as a localization). These are the names most often used on Japanese official websites (like the now defunct Fire Emblem Museum), in-game in Japanese game releases (like the character artwork in Radiant Dawn), and other Japanese merchandise (like the old collectable card game for FE3-5 as well as art books).

"Sheeda" is the name used in Fire Emblem Museum and the old collectable card game.

While we're at it, I can see various mistakes in the Japanese names in the original post, assuming we don't include fan names for characters that have official Japanese names. ("Krom" and "Gaia" are both fan names, for example. Their Japanese names are "Chrom" and "Guire".)

As for how to find characters, my personal opinion is that as long as the aliases exist with the correct names, they should be easily enough found regardless of if the Japanese or North American names are used. It might also be helpful to also include game names in the tags and aliases to help with some of the more easily confused ones, namely, but not restricted to, a certain "Leo (Echoes)", "Leon (Echoes)", "Leo (Fates)", and "Leon (Fates)".

evazion said:

Using Japanese names for everything is not hard policy and it never has been. See:

Those are all names of sources and not names of characters, though.

One particular thing of note for video games is that simultaneous worldwide releases did not become widespread until more recently and are still not yet the norm, meaning that many games that are likely to receive anime-style fan art (and more likely the narrative-heavy ones) will have art drawn long before an official localization would have had a chance to determine character names overseas. One advantage of using the original names is simply the fact that tags wouldn't need to change the "main" tag after a localization is released (sometimes decades after the original game, I'm looking at you, Trials of Mana) and that the tags would be consistently from one version of the game during the short phase before its first localized release where some localized names are known and some are not.

On the other hand, there's also sometimes the case where the Japanese game never releases official Latin-character names for its characters, though that's generally not the case with Fire Emblem (outside of enemies and NPCs).

EDIT: Some other food for thought while I'm here.

While the Japanese names rendered in the Japanese character set don't ever change, the Japanese names rendered in the Latin character set do change about as often as they do in the actual North American localization ("Jeigan" and "Jeigun" have both been used officially before in Japanese, for example, similarly to how "Raquesis" was changed to "Lachesis" and "Thite" to "Thea" in English Heroes), which is to say "not terribly often". Both are generally fairly consistent, at least for character names. (There is the strange case of Blazing Sword's subtitle being retconned to Blazing Blade for Heroes.)

The main supporting point for using North American names is that there are fewer strange spellings that plainly look like typos, though this phenomenon seems most notable in games from the GBA era and older. For example, Eliwood is officially "Eliwod" in Japanese. Rebecca is "Rebacca". (Both despite the fact that the names in the Japanese character set are pronounced as "Eliwood" and "Rebecca" correctly.) Minerva (the person, not the dragon) is "Minerba". Sigurd as "Siglud". The localized names aren't completely immune to this, but cases of strange spellings are less common in the localizations ("Linde" and "Wil", for example).

7HS said:

As I see it consistency is the only thing that matters.

What consistency? There already are various franchises with english character tags.

Inarticulate said:

One particular thing of note for video games is that simultaneous worldwide releases did not become widespread until more recently and are still not yet the norm, meaning that many games that are likely to receive anime-style fan art (and more likely the narrative-heavy ones) will have art drawn long before an official localization would have had a chance to determine character names overseas. One advantage of using the original names is simply the fact that tags wouldn't need to change the "main" tag after a localization is released (sometimes decades after the original game, I'm looking at you, Trials of Mana) and that the tags would be consistently from one version of the game during the short phase before its first localized release where some localized names are known and some are not.

While I do agree with you, it is also true that FE was pretty much unknown to the west until Super Smash Bros. Melee. From Blazing Blade (2003) onwards, the western releases have always appeared within a year. To give a very recent example - Three Houses will release in japan and in the rest of the world at the same time, like Dragalia Lost. Since the japanese names never really took roots in the western fandom, i'd suggest using english names.

It is also of note that Radiant Dawn, while being one of the worst-selling FE games in Japan, has been one of the most well-received in the west.

Mysterious_Uploader said:

What consistency? There already are various franchises with english character tags.

Which are these other than Pokemon and Monster Hunter (you mentioned Dragalia Lost but only you and one other person participated in the forum topic that was discussed in,) and why are they not listed on howto:character under "Names and Name Order" as exceptions?

Apparently pro-BUR voters outdo the ones against by over a half...

I personally still think that we should look towards making Danbooru easier to use rather than following extremely strict guidelines. While i do agree that making guinelines too lax would bring to an overall decrease in quality, too strict doesn't help either. After all, the active users are a speck compared to all site visitors. Some of them probably don't even know that a forum exists.

WIth that said - as with what evazion said, game localizations usually are more popular than anime and manga, mainly because these days they usually get released both japanese and western version within less than a year.

Lastly, i honestly do not want to go "fuck japanese names lmao", i agree that most of the franchises should use japanese names over english names. But, again - following the guidelines too strictly results in a lower user experience.

I'm okay with policy being changed. I was bothered by the justifications given in early in this thread which sounded to me like like "let's ignore Danbooru policy just this once because of my personal preference" or "let's ignore Danbooru policy just this once because this franchise is popular" which is why I adopted a confrontational tone.

That said, I would strongly recommend the following:

• Nothing happens until an admin agrees "yes, this is a good idea"

• We adopt an objective policy of when we are using localized names and which ones we are using. Something like "Japanese video games with official North American releases use the character names from each character's first appearance in a North American release. All other types of copyrights of Japanese origin use the official Japanese spelling." Limiting it to games released simultaneously in JP and NA is another option, but would require more research on the part of taggers and tag gardeners.

• Someone in support of the change prepares BURs for at least the most popular video game series that could be affected by this. Looking at tag counts above 5k: pokemon, final fantasy, persona, fate/extra, street fighter, tales of (series), blazblue, mario (series), splatoon (series), dragon quest, neptune (series), yuu-gi-ou, guilty_gear, the king of fighters, vampire (game), rockman, nier (series) (note that some of these like Persona and NieR probably wouldn't be significantly affected, but we should check anyway.)

7HS said:

I'm okay with policy being changed. I was bothered by the justifications given in early in this thread which sounded to me like like "let's ignore Danbooru policy just this once because of my personal preference" or "let's ignore Danbooru policy just this once because this franchise is popular" which is why I adopted a confrontational tone.

Ah, i'm sorry if i came off that way, i just wanted to make both tagging and finding characters easier for everyone, since i think very few FE fans prefer jp names over en (i asked some of them their opinion of this, and everyone agreed with me, but then again i don't represent the entire FE fanbase).

Regarding the other series, i honestly don't know since i'm not deeply into their fanbases. You should leave it to their fans, maybe opening a topic about it could be an idea. I can say though that Fate doesn't really need it since most games haven't been officially translated in english yet, and the few english translations that strayed from the fan romanizations have mostly been rejected by the fans (Artoria -> Altria for example, but there's also meltlilith -> meltryllis that has been accepted).

7HS said:

• We adopt an objective policy of when we are using localized names and which ones we are using. Something like "Japanese video games with official North American releases use the character names from each character's first appearance in a North American release. All other types of copyrights of Japanese origin use the official Japanese spelling." Limiting it to games released simultaneously in JP and NA is another option, but would require more research on the part of taggers and tag gardeners.

Within just Fire Emblem, you're going to run into trouble with using the name from a character's first appearance. I'm pretty sure no one prefers the name Raquesis (Fire Emblem: Awakening) over Lachesis (Fire Emblem: Heroes), for example, and Lachesis, being the name used in Heroes, is the one that will be most recognized. If localized names are to be used, I'd argue that the most recent localized name be used in all cases rather than the first because if the names are different, there's usually a good reason why the name was changed in the first place.

Other extremely weird cases outside of Fire Emblem include Valstrax and Bloodbath Diablos from Monster Hunter: Generations Ultimate, which were officially localized as Valphalk and Massacre Demon Diablos in Puzzle and Dragons (and still use those names today) before Monster Hunter: Generations Ultimate was finally released outside of Japan. Sure, all of these examples come from cases where a character appeared outside of their "real game", but if that argument is to be used, then there's also no way to argue that the names used in Fire Emblem: Heroes are more legitimate than in Fire Emblem: Awakening for its SpotPass characters (as neither of them are a localization of Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War for the case of Lachesis).

I would also argue against limiting it to simultaneous releases because that also does weird things within series if you stick to the restriction to the letter. Within Fire Emblem, only Heroes and Three Houses are simultaneous releases, which means any non-Three Houses character that appeared in a localized game before their appearance in Heroes would use their Japanese name. And that would be weird. And that's not even getting into, say, Pokémon or Monster Hunter.

At best for an objective criterion, I think it could be limited to "all games with official localized releases outside of Japan where the game is the original source material", though that might still run into strange cases if an adaptation to a different medium becomes more popular.

Or alternatively just decided on a case-by-case basis.