• he/they

It's a horrible day on the Internet, and you are a lovely geuse.

Adult - Plants-liking queer menace - Front-desk worker of a plural system - Unapologetic low-effort poster

✨ Cohost's #1 Sunkern Fan(tm) ✨

[Extended About]

--
Three pixel stamps: a breaking chain icon in trans colors against a red background, an image of someone being booted out reading "This user is UNWELCOME at the university", and a darkened lamppost.(fallen london stamps by @vagorsol)


posts from @bazelgeuse-apologist tagged #this is why I normally cheat and just pick a name off of a list of Known Names for characters that have a reason to have a non-English name

also:

bazelgeuse-apologist
@bazelgeuse-apologist

the incalculable relief of googling your chinese OC's name and finding a news article about someone with the exact same name, with the exact characters, confirming that it is indeed a real name that real people use and that you are not doing the name equivalent of getting a Cool Chinese Tattoo that says "bread"


bazelgeuse-apologist
@bazelgeuse-apologist

the thing about figuring out a Chinese name as someone who doesn't speak Chinese, who only speaks English and whose social sphere is also mostly English-speakers, is that it's like doing matrix multiplication. if you want the name to be legit and not the equivalent of tattooing "bread" on your OC, you can't just pick one based off of how the Englishified name looks. you might be familiar with the fun fact that Chinese is a tonal language, and that saying the same sound with a different tone will result in a drastically different meaning - for perhaps the most famous example, mā/妈/媽 (mother) and mǎ/马/馬 (horse). names are no exception.

in addition to that, Chinese names are quite purposeful - unless you're a name nerd or an anxious parent-to-be, most English names are just going to be sounds to you. Like, you're probably not going to hear "Alicia" and go "oh, that means 'noble'!" Chinese names, though, are often assembled from word-words, and thus have much more Upfront Meaning, which means that you have to contend with whether some words-in-names have Implications, including Unfortunate Ones (including implications that exist Only In Combination With Certain Other Words (Including The Family Name)) or are just like... That's Not A Word You Use In Names. like how "Mauve" is an actual name, but "Red" is going to make everyone think of the Pokemon character, and "Blue" is out of the question unless you're trans.

this is not even getting into cultural connotations - such as if the name is shared by a historical or literary figure. see this Quora post about the name "Xīfèng" (熙凤) (and ignore the bot answer up top, it's lying to you as usual)

...and on top of that, you still have to contend with how the name looks in English. because unfortunately we still live in a world where people can't be normal about ordinary names and words from other languages