prismatic-bell: timemachineyeah: t-unmasked: Find more Sailor Moon trivia at: www.tuxedounmasked.com
prismatic-bell:timemachineyeah:t-unmasked:Find more Sailor Moon trivia at: www.tuxedounmasked.com this fact is the source of one of the most convoluted things my fan brain ever came up with, but I guess I’ll share it now, because, eh, might as well. Here’s where my thinking came from: The name “Black Lady” is a problem to English speakers. If the problem isn’t obvious enough to you, one time I was at an anime convention and there was a white Black Lady cosplayer with a black girl friend hanging out and when I saw the cosplay I did a delighted gasp and said “Wow, look at that Black Lady!” and approximated 60% of the people in the surrounding area thought I was Amazed To See A Black Person And Kind Of Racist and I had to melt into the ground with embarrassment while both cosplayer and friend laughed their asses off. So, the problem: If you were to rename Black Lady, what should she be called?The DiC dub went for “Wicked Lady” and it’s a little on the nose, but not bad. I thought, well it makes sense she’s Black Lady in that they are the Black Moon Clan, maybe she could just be Black Moon Lady. Add the word “Moon”, solve most of the problem. Or maybe, like, their bad guy is Death Phantom. Death Lady? Phantom Lady? Phantom Lady isn’t bad. Or just try to invoke the dark side of the moon, Dark Lady (ehhhh, this one has similar problems), Shadow Lady. Something like that. She no longer wants her defining feature to be “small”. But she’s doing so by tying her identity to shadow, to Death Phantom. So something there. Phantom Lady or Shadow Lady, probably. And then I thought, well, her name is “Black Lady” as a mirror to “Small Lady”, but “Small Lady” isn’t the full name. The full name is “Usagi Small Lady Serenity”. So has she become Usagi Black Lady Serenity? What if you tried to find mirrors for every part of her name?And so THEN I thought, well, what’s a good mirror for “Usagi”? Well I googled and Usagi means rabbit, but there’s also “Kouto” ( 狡兎 ), which means specifically a cunning or nimble rabbit. It’s even a root for a word that means basically “cunning escape”. That’s sort of symbolic. And then I thought about Serenity, and at first I thought the good place to find a mirror would be to explore mythology to find a mirror for Selene, but nothing I found there was very useful. So then I thought, well the name also comes from the Sea of Serenity on the moon. Maybe there’s another Lunar geographical feature I could use. That’s when I found out people used to believe there was a Mare Desiderii on the moon. It was the name of a huge lunar sea believed to be on the dark side of the moon, but was later revealed by better imaging to not exist. It was an optical illusion created by several smaller lunar seas. It’s colloquially known as the Sea of Dreams, but the proper definition of desiderium (the singular) is dēsīderium n (genitive dēsīderiī second declension1. longing, desire, wish2. grief, regret3. need, necessitySo we have a lunar sea selling itself as the greatest of all but its size and very existence is an illusion, and it’s named after wishes and grief. And I was like “HOT DAMN THAT IS SYMBOLIC AS FUCK”So then we have Kouto Phantom Lady Desiderii as the full (revised) name of Black Lady. And then, if you’re me, you look at that and gookayyou learned some neat shitand that’s coolbut actually imagine trying to have her intro herself as this longwinded thing in, like, a villain speech. Does it sound self-indulgent as fuck? … yeah kinda.And so then, if you’re me, you give up on the idea, but you spent so long thinking about it that you never ever forget it. And it’ll just be there. In your brain. Forever. You call it self-indulgent, I say:“But I don’t need you anymore, Mama! I know things now … the real power inside me! Lady Desiderii, the real me! I’m not just your shadow anymore! Now you’ll suffer, the way I did!”Sounds pretty legit, is what I say. I am honestly so pleased. -- source link
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