Add Pronunciation to Character Bios
Recently I've found a large chunk of the community on social media spouting the most racist things I've ever heard in response to content creators correcting the pronunciation of Feng Min's name, despite video of the dev team pronouncing it properly in a video upon her release.
Being a multicultural game with a large community all over the world, and characters with more unique names coming into the game, could we please add a text line in character bios to officially state the pronunciation of a character's name?
This would eliminate any excuse for not respecting the name (and therefore, the culture of) our international characters and players. Perhaps a community member from the same country as the character could also provide a spoken pronunciation which could be heard by clicking a button (like on Wikipedia).
It's so difficult to see a huge part of our community be so prejudiced that they refuse to go to the effort of saying a name correctlyjust because they're "used to saying it their way."
If I had the same/a similar name as a character like Feng Min, and had to see people say it wasn't worth the effort to say it properly, I'd be very disheartened and less willing to engage with that community. Obviously we can't control others, but this may be helpful to the people who ARE willing to be respectful.
Comments
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Is it not a bit of a stretch to compare how you would treat a real person's name to how you speak of a fictional character that doesn't have feelings though.
Forgive me for this, I hate to ask this question but do we really have to consider the thoughts/feelings of a "character" which has none to begin with?
Like obviously people shouldn't spew hatred, that's not what I'm saying but when did simply pronouncing a name wrong become the same as that (In the context of DBD)
I do like your idea though, some character names idk how to pronounce so I just go with how it's commonly done or i look it up
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I'm not referring to the feelings of a character. I'm referring to the feelings of people who are represented by a character, and to hear the community say that it's not worth the respect of pronouncing the name right would feel pretty shiddy.
A lot of these players are blatantly doing it for racist reasons or to be trolls. (i.e. I've screencapped multiple players saying "Nah I'm gonna keep saying Fang because I speak English not [slur for Chinese people]. Many, many people saying this and worse.)
It's also just common sense at this point. Some people don't know how to pronounce Élodie, or Zarina. It would just make things easier.
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I do agree, some people are just offensive for the sake of it and that's not right. I was a bit confused about the topic of this thread. People behaving like that is generally unacceptable regardless.
I was reminded of the whole discussion surrounding Sadako's nickname. It seemed to me like people just giving a killer a funny sounding nickname like people do for all killers was being conflated with people intentionally trying to offend others.
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Nicknames are something else entirely. I don't understand the Onryō/oreo controversy, mostly because I'm aware of how to say it properly, so I stayed out of it. We should definitely have a voice line or something that says, for example, "Sadako Yamamura, The Onryō" for all killers as well.
But yeah, my point was that for a lot of people, representation of their culture or country in this game is important to them. It's one thing to pronounce someone's name wrong, and if you say "Actually it's (correct way)", generally, you would expect people to go "Oh okay, sorry about that!" and move on. But if I were a Chinese American player with the family name Feng, and had to sit here and read a bunch of people saying that they refuse to say that character's name right just because they don't think it sounds right in THEIR language, or because they're used to saying "Fang", I'd think pretty poorly of the community.
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