a fire emblem translation mill

i'm going to be completely upfront. this is the first time i've been this genuinely excited for the future of fire emblem in a very, very long time. the gaiden remake looks absolutely phenomenal and i'm so glad that the mobile game seems to be fully embracing the series' history. granted, there's a good chance i'm setting myself up for one hell of a fall here, just like i did with fe13 back in the day, but for once i don't care. it's nice to not be a living pile of salt for once

anyway, i'm here to talk about the reason i woke up this morning to a fuckton of people showing me things and asking questions on twitter (or at least, what passes as a fuckton for me)



i've often spoken of my preference to defer to the localisations when it comes to the names of characters, and that if a future localised fire emblem work included characters from jugdral, i would come back to incorporate them into my translations. well, it's happened. the character voting section of fire emblem heroes' site has given us the complete playable casts of genealogy and thracia, as well as a couple of randoms like sandima

here's the plan. i intend to go with whatever the app says, but i'm going to wait until the app is out and datamined before i do anything at all, just to be safe. official english sites for fire emblem have a habit of being a bit confused and error prone with the finer details (e.g. the fe13 site had a hard time remembering that celica and cecilia are not the same character), and it's entirely possible that any of the choices exhibited on this website will be inconsistent with what the app actually goes with. in addition there are cases where the site's listings are inconsistent with what pre-existing localisations already call a character (e.g. marduk instead of murdock, nimue instead of niime, lachesis instead of raquesis, osian instead of orsin), so my preference is to wait and see if any of this changes. my current theory is that all the obvious, significant shifts away from the form of the original name (e.g. astolfo, erinys, gwendolyn, delthea) exhibit clear thought and premeditation, such that they can be safely assumed to be final and unchanging, but that anything else is still a crapshoot at this point. hell, in the few days that the poll's been up, they've already edited some of the listed names! (e.g. the johabros have been changed from "luchar and lucharba" with an l to "iuchar" and "iucharba" with an i)

if it turns out the app does not include any of these characters at launch, however, my plan is to disregard the website until the characters actually show up in the app itself, if ever. i might take inspiration from it if it offers genuine improvements over my current ideas, but i won't treat it as hard and fast English Canon™ or anything. for what it's worth, i was already seriously considering renaming faval to "febail", so i guess this gives me an excuse

as for my opinions, reactions and potential explanations for specific characters? those are all over my twitter and tumblr right now, if you're really curious, but the last thing i want to do is ramble about them at length, because god knows my opinions will change over time. i wasn't partial to fe13's contributions to the characters at first, but obviously my opinion has changed since then

in conclusion,

(last edited 11-6-2016)

let's face it, as much as i profess to not give a shit about namewank anymore, i was going to have to do this sooner or later. i was hoping this would wait until the complete translation was in patch form, but eh

i should reiterate that i am absolutely not open to any suggestions/demands/begging with respect to changing my changes. i cannot emphasise this enough. fe4's patch is out the door, and while i'm still editing the script, the names are done. finished. set in stone. changing them now is much, much more trouble than it's worth. fe5 is still obviously a work in progress, but the same goes for it as well because i'm not interested in having it beleaguered by endless namewank when frankly, we all have much better things to focus on.

i also want to mention that i did not take this lightly at all. i've been around the fire emblem block more than a few times, and i've seen again and again just how apeshit people go over namewank. where i felt a tweak or outright change was needed, i spent a damn long time mulling it over and grappling with whether or not it was really worth punching the fe fandom in the snout. when you spend three years working on a thing, that gives you an absolutely obscene amount of time to think, research and plan, to thoroughly vet your ideas to make sure you haven't just gotten your dick bitten off for basically no reason. i knew exactly what i was doing when i made these changes, i did the research and i talked most of them through with people who know what they're talking about

also, yes, names inevitably change in translation. this includes fan translations, believe it or not. sometimes a name needs to be tweaked to properly make the reference the original work intended, and for the most part this is what i was concerned with and what i did
( i feast on fanwank tears )