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Talk:Eternity Larva

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Regarding Etarnity Larva's name

エタニティー, エタニティ, and エターニティー are all variant spellings of "Eternity" in Japanese. Information that I got from jisho.org. So I believe that her name should be Eternity Larva. --SupremeExplosion (talk) 07:03, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

yeah ditto :V Gilde (talk) 07:20, 7 May 2017 (UTC)
Same, I think that's pretty obvious to anyone who can read it, which is why it's kinda funny people are instead moving towards reading it as Etanity like in the omake. It's just ZUN not being able to into English and going hard with the タ there. Really though, unsure if we should be overwriting what's shown in-game??? Drake Irving (talk) 07:59, 7 May 2017 (UTC)
There are times where we ignore blantantly clear errors like Faily Wars or Double Spoier or names that don't match with our preference for Hepburn or don't jibe period like Flandre/Frandoll or Maribel/Maeriberri. It should be fine in this case, too. UTW 08:28, 7 May 2017 (UTC)
ZUN has a track record of inconsistent romaji, not to mention that English isn't his first language, so it's very likely to be a mistake. The romaji given may be 'Etanity' and 'Etarnity', but the katakana used, like SupremeExplosion specified, are all spellings of 'eternity'. The wiki/fanbase has previously revised the spelling of official character profiles (ex. Hoan Meirin, Huziwara no Mokou), even if the revised English spellings do not appear in any official media. It only makes sense to do it for Etarnity/Eternity too. --MagicNineball (talk) 14:33, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

Considering that we seem to be in agreement here, I'm going to move the page. Feel free to let me know if it should be reverted. --MagicNineball (talk) 14:41, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

The problem

Alternate romanizations are not even wrong. If anything, it's Hepburn that's wrong, especially when you use the macrons version (fortunately this wiki doesn't). But we aren't even dealing with alternate romanizations, we're dealing with foreign or made-up words. World of difference.

"Cirno" is the great example. It's totally wrong, no matter how much you try to work with it. The clear intent was "Chillno", and I don't even need to go into detail about why because of how obvious it is. Yet we use Cirno, and we refuse to use anything else. The vast majority of people actually pronounce this name wrong ("sir") because of the totally wrong and misleading spelling, especially outside of English speakers.

Why do we go against ZUN's word with one fairy, but not another? Simple tradition? Like "Flandre", also pretty much entirely wrong, Cirno's just too old to be reviewed? Too many memes, right? But what's the point of tradition when it causes huge inconsistencies like this? If you're going to "fix" something that isn't really broken, you need to do it across the board. But see, then you're left with miles of literally made-up names that have absolutely nothing to do with what's in any actual printed work or game.

The solution is obvious: what ZUN actually says goes. "Cirno" is fine, but so is "Etarnity" (actual game supersedes printed manual). First, it's his work, period, no questions asked; it is not yours or mine, we do not get to make things up for any reason. Second, his word, the word of someone who's a Japanese native making a game in Japanese for Japan (even if it involves Latin (not "English" characters), is more important than absolute guesses of people who are not Japanese natives trying to talk about a game that is neither in their language nor even sold in their country or otherwise intended for their consumption (and who mostly don't know any Japanese anyway).

There's no need to cling to such an arbitrary and contradictory list of "standards", no matter what year you're in. It didn't make sense back in 2005, and it doesn't make any sense in 2017. Let's do something about the whole wiki, not just this one character. Despatche (talk) 17:25, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

To be fair, by the same logic, if an author makes an obvious typo about something that happens in a book, everyone has to assume what the typo suggests is actually the case no matter how little sense it makes and how obvious it is that it's a typo. Personally, I feel names that are actually English words should be corrected, but Cirno is such a staple and doesn't even mean anything even if "corrected".
I am Risa. Best of fortune be with you. (talk) 18:12, 7 May 2017 (UTC)
Cirno, Flandre and Rumia are good examples of characters who could have better-translated names - but sadly, being EoSD characters, they've become such a prominent part of the fandom that changing it would be pointless and only cause confusion. And you're absolutely right - Cirno's English spelling is misleading and leads to difficulty pronouncing it. So for the newer games, shouldn't we try to avoid that, and give characters the most sensible names? Especially in cases like these where the name is a word that has a definite spelling in English, and isn't something made-up like 'Chillno'. We can't change EoSD's, but we can at the very least set standards for newer games. Sure, we could stick with ZUN's spellings for 100% consistency across the board, but what's the point in setting our consistency standard to something that has a tendency to cause confusion? --MagicNineball (talk) 19:05, 7 May 2017 (UTC)
Just like everything else in Touhou, it's inconsistently inconsistent. I am okay with 'Eternity' because the alternatives give me a massive headache. Mamizou (talk) 01:09, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
It's really nothing complicated. We are talking about ZUN's English translation of the original Japanese name, which just happened to be wrong. If you want you look to the most accurate version of their name, just look at エタニティ, and translate it from there. And according to jisho.org, it's "eternity". This isn't Rumia or Cirno or even Maeriberi which are names that aren't even words, this is clearly supposed to be an English word and ZUN just made a error. --SupremeExplosion (talk) 01:14, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Regarding Okina's Speculation of Eternity Being a Tokoyo God

I recently took the liberty to add information about Okina's comment in Cirno's extra stage dialogue seeing as this directly had to do with Eternity. Someone had revised this due to it being speculation by one character, and that makes sense and I respect the choice to remove it as probably the better choice. However, I don't think we can just disregard this comment made by Okina. There is obviously something there otherwise Cirno's extra story wouldn't even be possible. Both correlations with the myth itself and Eternity's own character title also points in this direction. Maybe what I said wasn't quite right and could have been misleading, but I see it as a large misguidance of information to leave this out completely. How should this be included in the wiki?

DFG3 (talk) 02:54, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

imo the other person is wrong. The fact that it's even mentioned at all is proof that ZUN took the idea into account when developing the story/Larva, which means it deserves at least some mention under Larva's origin. I think we can leave off labeling her species as "possibly god", but the Origin section you had seemed fine at first glance. Polaris (talk) 06:31, 16 August 2017 (UTC)