When You Name Your Character "Testicles"

So we all know Ryuu's the greatest thing since sliced bread. His characters are AMAZING and entirely original, his stories are going to be remembered ages from now, his sprites are so good he could work for Nintendo, and most of all he's got these amazing names! 

Names like...  

Fun fact: Typing that hurt more than the Ryo-Muk shoop.

Incidentally, if you have a complaint about the lack of festive Christmas stuff in my graphics?  Here's your festivities! Thank Yiazmat, as he showed it to me.

Anyway, on the (extremely) off chance you couldn't tell, all of the text preceding that bastard child of typography and spriting contains an inhuman amount of sarcasm.

Which is about the only way I think I can handle Ryuu's bullshit naming conventions. As yes, that is what we're going into today. NOT LIKE YOU CAN TELL THAT OR ANYTHING.

Right. I hope you all have your haz-mat suits ready as we're going into a giant pile of toxic waste.

We've covered Samantha-Rei Nebulus Dark (and touched briefly on some of his minor characters in that same article), Ryo, and his general name theft , but I wanna cover more than just that, because the scale of this garbage is unbelievable.

I'm gonna start with Rebé Anjeliia and her family pretty much because she's hands-down my most hated character of Ryuu's, even more than Ryo.

(And I will be calling her “Rabies” for the remainder of this article, incidentally.)

I have... several major issues with Rabies, ranging from the unprecedented amount of sexism that was clearly involved in her creation to racism, Orientalism and general xenophobic bullshit.

But there'll be plenty of time to explain that after Christmas, as it's the holiday season and I frankly don't want to deal with that right now.

So we'll start with her parents, Justiis and Sabé Anjeliia.

And I threw up in my mouth a little just by typing that.

We were briefly introduced to Mr. I'd Like To Buy ALL THE VOWELS YOU HAVE, PLEASE and his wife in this sketch's description:

“Sabé and Justiis tried their best to keep their girl out of the Gerudo's hands, but their were out-numbered.”

I'm gonna try to ignore the abysmal grammar there and just... ever so casually move on here.

Brief, actually relevant anecdote: When I was in late elementary school/early middle school, I was borderline obsessed with Star Wars.

While I'm mildly embarrassed about the Star Wars thing, it DID come in handy. Because the first thing I noticed about Rabies is that her name looked really similar to one of Padmé Amidala's handmaidens in Episode I.

As it happens, I was not far off:

“Rebé's name is similar to a name of one of Padmé's hand maidens in Star Wars.”

There was in fact a minor handmaiden called Rabé during Star Wars episode one. I think it's pretty clear that this is a rip, even if Ryuu didn't admit it.

Incidentally, I was actually operating under the assumption that he ripped a different handmaiden's name because this girl got shit-all in the way of screentime.

There was a different handmaiden who played a minor but very important role as Queen Amidala's body double, and her name is one letter off from Rabé's.

This girl's name is Sabé.

While I think it's pretty obvious this is not a name Ryuu made up himself, I dislike leaving things open-ended. So I did some research and can definitively confirm this is theft.

While the name Rabé seems to actually exist outside of Star Wars, Sabé is not on any reliable baby name sites. It does not seem to exist outside of the Star Wars universe and fandom.

I say that because IF I DO A GOOGLE SEARCH, EVERY RESULT ON THE FIRST PAGE BAR ONE LEADS BACK TO STAR WARS FANSITES, FANFICTION, ET CETERA.

Which is to say, THIS NAME DID NOT EXIST PRIOR TO STAR WARS EPISODE ONE.

Therefore, Ryuu, who just admitted to thieving a name, seems to have stolen two.

He just neglected to mention that second one.

So, onto daddy-dearest. Justiis.

I really have NO idea what the fuck it is with Ryuu and double letters. It's clearly not a cultural thing as he just slaps them wherever the fuck he wants (Vvortox, Tozaak, Envvi, etc.), so the only conclusion I can draw is that he thinks it's gonna make his characters stand out and be speshul.

I say that because if Ryuu wanted to call his character Justice, it'd be pretty crappy symbolism on his part (a shock, I'm sure) but it'd be acceptable. And there is one very basic fucking reason for that.

JUSTICE IS A NAME.

There's a whole fucking family of names based off the Latin Iustus, ranging from JUSTICE to Justin to Justine. You don't need to make up a name WHEN THE NAME ALREADY EXISTS, moron!

And their surname is Anjeliia. This is way too similar to angel or angelic for my comfort, especially when Rabies in particular already has a bazillion and five Sue traits.


Also, it's cheesy. BUT NOT AS CHEESY AS ENVVI 'S FAMILY.

FUCKIN' VERCHU.

But as I've already covered them, I'm just going to point out that not only are they named Malice, Kindness, Envy and Virtue, their surname is Skorm.


Or, for people who aren't familiar with Ryuu-speak? SCORN.

Which is appropriate, as we're moving on to Ryuu's Dragonball Z character, Callock. Which Ryuu claims to hate. He hates it so much he feels the need to create fancharacters for it, add bits of it into his art and favorite a fair bit of Dragonball/Z/GT fanart. That makes perfect sense IN OPPOSITELAND.

Anyway, Callock is everything I hate in this fandom. He's a blatant ripoff of Gotenks straight down to the clothing, has a background partially ripped from future Trunks and partially pointless and cliche, and his villain is a cliched to hell ripoff of Palkia from Pokemon (with Charizard's tail).

(Note to Ryuu: Get out of my fandoms, fuckface.)

Anyway, Callock's name seems to be inappropriate on several levels. According to Ryuu, he's a Saiyan:

“One of the reasons for his lower confidence is that all around him, the Saiyans seem to have been able to go super since they were little, Trunks and Goten for example learned when they were children. Callock has never been able to reach that. Because of this, he often feels inferior. When dealing with this for so long, he begins to accept the notion that he's weak... a bad thing for a Saiyan to believe.”

There's a problem here. Well, okay, there's several (and I'm going to cover all that at a later date) but I'm just focusing on the name today

Anyone who's done more than five minutes of research about the Dragonball series knows that Toriyama has several sets of name-related puns. The Briefs family are named after various kinds of underpants, Nameks have slugs/snails, etc.

This is relevant because Saiyans have a naming system too.

Full blooded Saiyan names are plays on the English names of vegetables and/or herbs.

Goku's birth name was Kakarot (carrot) and his brother was Raditz (radish), Napa is named after a type of cabbage, Vegeta is clearly based off the word “vegetable”, Vegeta's dubiously canon brother is called Tarble, the lunatic from a few of the movies is Broly from “broccoli”, and so on.

This seems to be flexible where part-Saiyans are concerned (Vegeta and Bulma's kids follow the Briefs family naming conventions, for example).

But as it's implied Callock is a full-blooded Saiyan (someone correct me if I'm wrong, by the way), he should have a vegetable-related name.

And so should his dad, actually. Satto seems to be an actual name, but it is NOT related to veggies or plants. So it's not just Callock who needs a name change.

Callock seems to be a surname, incidentally. Though I doubt Ryuu is aware of that. On the surface I'm guessing he ripped it from Goku's father, Bardock, but again, correct me if I'm wrong.

However, “Callock” also is very very similar to the word “bollock”. Which is slang for testicles. And it also anagrams out to “all cock”. Yiazmat has literally read the name as Bollock on at least one occasion (which was, as I recall, followed up by Rinku pointing out that Callock also anagrams into all cock. Now none of us can unsee any of that mess. But I digress yet again.).

You're, erm... Probably going want to change the name under those circumstances, chief.


When your names are this clearly ripped, filled with horribly lame puns and symbolism, or creepily similar in spelling to assorted genitalia (VOLVOX, I'M LOOKING AT YOU TOO, BUCKO), it's time to take a step back and ask yourself, “What the hell am I doing?”

-EDIT (8/12/12)- A friend pointed out a couple errors that I fixed during the draft, but apparently managed to undo on accident shortly after. Fixed those.