is it genocider syo or sho? also does komatsuzaki rui have a twitter or a site?
It’s time for a Crash Course in Romanization!!!
So when you’re transliterating Japanese to the Western alphabet, there are different styles you can choose from:
Hepburn Romanization: Comes in both original and revised flavors. The most widely used method of transcribing Japanese into English, because it best represents how to actually pronounce the words to Western speakers. I use this one in general, though with some exceptions (as I’ll get into below).
Nihonshiki/Kunreishiki: The “official” romanization system in place for Japan (though, hilariously enough, junior high textbooks primarily use Hepburn). I don’t like using this one, because rather than trying to match the sounds phonetically, it just ignores phonics and instead stays loyal to the consistency of the Japanese kana table. This is how you end up with “si” making a “shi” noise and “z” being pronounced as “j” etc.
“Syo” comes from Nihonshiki/Kunreishiki style romanization. 翔 is pronounced しょう which gets transliterated to “Syo”. However, as an English speaker, when you look at those letters, does that tell you anything about how to pronounce that name? And if it does, does it at all reflect the intended pronunciation of “Sho”?
Which is why Japanese-style romanization is falling out of practice–yes, it does tell you that the “sho” sound is made by combining “shi” and “yo” from the kana table, but honestly no one cares about that, and if they do, they are probably already studying Japanese.
Meanwhile, the “correct” romanization of 翔 should be “Shou” to represent that the final “o” sound is long, but I dropped the final u for some reason I now forget (probably laziness). It’s pretty common for Japanese people to drop a long vowel in their name for simplicity’s sake (e.g., most of the people I know named “Andou” write their name as “Ando” because they think it looks cleaner). You’ll notice that even in the Nihonshiki version, the long “o” sound isn’t represented, either.
I really should be consistent, but at this point I’ve used “Genocider Sho” for so long that changing it up now feels weird.
tl;dr It’s technically both Syo and Sho (really Shou). The game has “Syo” in the art assets so if you want you can go by that, but later material in the DR series writes it as “Sho” so hey. (And personally I think a system that’s supposed to tell people who don’t speak your language how to pronounce words from it but then ignores the rules of phonics in the target audience’s language is pretty pointless. That would be like taking English words and applying katakana based on spelling rather than how the word sounds…which often happens when foreign words get imported to Japanese too. Atsugiri Jess gets so frustrated with this.)
As for Komatsuzaki-san, he’s got a Twitter.
