Name Puns

Reckless · Apr 2, 2015

From Bleach's Ichigo Kurosaki to DBZ's numerous, vegetable-named Saiyans amongst other characters, to Yuigoh, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Sailor Moon and lots more, certain animes and manga tend to follow a particular kind of naming convention when it comes to identifying each character in their respective series; that being either a play on words, or a direct reference to an object, place, a thing or even something from pop culture!

The famed mangaka for Dragon Ball, Akira Toriyama once mentioned that naming certain groups of characters in a particular way helped him to keep track of certain characters.

What are your thoughts on such practices? Does it amuse or annoy you? Would you prefer more traditional names be used in place of puns?

Riobhain · Apr 2, 2015

It's the Riobhain of my existence.

Absolute Zero · Apr 2, 2015

I think they can be kind of a unifying central point. I mean if I were to start a team of some kind, like a bank heist squad, I would have my teammates and I have themed codenames. Boss would be codenamed brain, the lookout is ear, demolitionist is fist. Something like that.

I think probably the best execution of this is Pokémon's Kanto and Johto town names; colors and plants. It wasn't outrageous or gaudy, just a consistent reasonable theme.

On the other hand, it can be done poorly. Back in the day when I saw some One Piece, there was a gang of kids who were all named after vegetables for some reason. Like Onion, Celery, and Gourd or something. Those aren't clever or reasonable, and there's no underlying meaning to the nomenclature. They're just lazy names.