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Try Quattro Bajeena five times in a row.
Spanning more than 4 decades and countless animated series, complex games and plastic models, the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise tells mechanical pilots caught up in vast planetary wars, describing the atrocities of armed confrontation at shocking major points and also huge cool robots.
Through all those interstellar wars, floats with faces and child soldiers, the Gundam series has become a giant of pop culture, with its iconic mecca designs jumping off toy shelves around the world. But no robot can do much without a human in the cockpit, so for all the toys they want to sell, gundam authors have to bring memorable humans inside. To make other flesh-and-blood people memorable enough to compete with the mechs, author Yoshiyuki Tomino and later authors of the franchise have discovered a style of character names with, say, memorable nicknames.
The following are genuine calls of Gundam’s characters: Zechs Merquise, Allelujah Haptism, Garma Zabi, Annerose Rosenheim, Biscuit Griffon, Trant Clark and, tell me now, Quattro Bajeena (now granted, the latter is someone’s alias, but still). To be clear: those calls are amazing. By giving their characters calls that don’t respect classic naming conventions, or even existing words, Gundam writers create characters with calls surrounding their character through word texture, intellectual disposition, or an allusion, all tactics to build a character in the way someone calls her.
But, to quote William Shakespeare (who, although he had a big problem, has never noticed a call as intelligent as Paptimus Scirocco, so that he can stray from the path), “what’s on a call?” Let’s look at some calls from Gundam’s characters and see how we give them meaning. First, Amuro Ray, the young protagonist of the original cell suit gundam series. Its surcall, Ray, of course evokes a ray of light, a bright spot, a heat source, but it can also recommend a ray of lightning or a death ray, basic elements of sci-fi weapons. His first call, Amuro, is a sweet word, loose of any harsh prevention consonant, so that his total call can roll smoothly over the tongue, crossing the two Rs like two gentle hills. The widespread sensation in the mouth of “Amuro Ray” is sweet, harmless, a kind of blank verbal slate that we can stick to in his open youth.
Compare this to the call of Amuro’s main rival, Char Aznable. Tomino showed Anime Expo New York in 2002 that Char’s call is derived from the Franco-Armenian singer and diplomat Charles Aznavour. In addition to this arrangement with Frenchman Frank Sinatra, Char’s call also comprises more linguistic layers. The first call, Char, suggests a charred, burnt and burnt earth. The hard CH provides a combative sound, and the 3 sharp syllables of its overcall, Az-Nah-Bull, reinforce this hardness. Its surcall is also homophonic to “As Noble”, adding an additional distance between Char and the rest of the world. This makes sense to Char’s character, as he is a spicy, remote and ruthless individual, who pursues his own secret calendar even in the midst of a great war. He is detached from everything that stands in his way and is in a position to leave the scorched earth, or deserves to say charred. The so-called Amuro is an outstretched hand, while the so-called Char is a stootched sword.
There are countless other examples, such as Bright Noa, the captain of Amuro, with a similar call that evokes a gentle call and a moment with a strong biblical association. There is the Gundam tropo of idealistic political woman, more or less a link with the main villain of the series: Sayla Mass, Relena Peacecraft and Kudelia Aina Bernstein. Each of these women has calls pointing to higher society. Sayla Mass, evoking Catholic Mass, Relena Peacecraft, um, forging peace (and if that tells you the nose, don’t do it with other people in the global genuine with overcalls like Taylor, Fisher, Potter, Gardener, etc.), and Kudelia Aina Bernstein, with her 3 calls adorned with an Elizabethan sound – Kudelia an approximation to the so-called Cordelia, a Shakespearean association.
To see a parallel example of profiling memorable characters only through the call, let’s go back to the elegance of eighth-grade English and remove dust from our overlooked copies of Great Expectations to examine the idiosyncratic naming conventions of a confident Charles Dickens. From Nicholas Nickleby stumbling and squeezing to the whimsical Mr. Fezziwig, Dickens had a spirit of giving his characters that were less similar to existing surcalls or call trends in his surroundings, and more connected to that character’s inner emotions.
For example, Pip, the bright-eyed dreamlike protagonist of Great Expectations. His genuine call is Philip Pirrip, a repetitive call that could recommend the whimsical trill of birdsong or the fundamental monosyllabic babbling of a baby learning to speak. When his call is abbreviated to “Pip”, it is necessarily an onomatopoeia, a sound effect, like anything that sprouts over Batman’s head in a comedy book. The sound of an excited kid going crazy: Pip!
There is also the protagonist of the famous vintage Muppets, A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge. All those “e” of his first call revolve around the Z threatening the accented syllability, reminiscent of Geezer, stinger, fleas and nozzles. His surprise was filled with all the negative connotations of similar words like cruel, ghoul, stooge, “scrouging” (an English word meaning “crush or squeeze”) and fuck, a 19th-century British jargon for a greedy, and also in our fashionable language. , a smart descriptor of what Scrooge should do with his employees, his enemies and everyone else in the world.
Dickens needs you to have an opinion about a character, feel what a character is when you meet him, as illustrated through other names of characters like Uriah Heep, Mr.Pumblechook, Woolwich Bagnet and Mr.M’Choakumchild (who is, as a course, a teacher). Regardless of the concepts you may have about those characters just by reading those names, it’s closer to correcting what you think.
Now, of course, many other writers have many ideas on how to create unique and memorable names for their characters. But the maximalist taste of Gundam franchise names stands out as an example of the tone of construction and global construction through the kind of other people that exist within it. Many stories have giant robots, but very few can boast of having giant robots and other people named Thirteen Khushrenada, Chibodee Crocket, Ramba Ral and … Full Front. All of these elements are real, and all recommend the intensity and scope of the identity allowed in the time frames representing the name of the Gundam logo.
Names are how we differentiate ourselves from the rest of the world, and how we add up each and every impulse, interest, and aspiration we have. The names of fictional characters are portrayed in the same way, and through representation with so many brushes in so many grammatical and linguistic styles, even if they may seem comical in or out of context, Gundam’s characters feel unique, memorable and distinct. It’s not a small feat for a franchise over 40 years old.
These names are like architecture: brutalist, baroque, Byzantine, rococo; no matter what you call it, those words have a sense of dimensionality, they contain feeling, texture and weight. Say those names aloud, force your mouth to adopt unusual forms, giving global gundam a power and mental eye that would be missing in a series with newer names. By transcending the concepts of what can and cannot be a name, Tomino and his successors in the franchise have created a deep streak of characters whose names will live forever, whether in glory or in infamy.
And to that we say, long the Quattro Bajeena.
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