#nomino nonomi

[kurayamineko]

#bleach: sennen kessen-hen #nomino nonomi #hiuchigashima mera #tonokawa tokie #hashihara hasuka #tsuchimiya tsumiko

[idontthinkimokaymentally]

Hello there Nonomi Nomino fans.

#nonomi nomino #bleach

[littleeyesofpallas]

(I used the black and white because without any official color work, I don't actually trust the digital colorist's guesses to reflect much of Kubo's intent. Save for Mera's red hair... given the use of toner and her fire powers, I can't imagine her hair would've been anything but bright red, like Renji's.)

Hiuchigashima[燧ヶ島] MERA[メラ]:

"signal fire/hand-drill* island," "ME-RA"

*like a hand-drill for starting fires. Also a homonym with hiuchi[火打ち石]: "flint" and I've seen this part of her name somewhat erroneously translated as "tinder." Basically the common thread in all these readings being fire starters.

**taken from the onomatopoeic or mimetic sound/phrase meramera[メラメラ]: the sound of flaring up, or the sound of bursting into flames.

Tonokawa[砥ノ川] Tokie[時江]:

"Whetstone/Grindstone's River," "Time Bay"

Hashihara[箸原] HASUka[ハス花]:

"Chopsticks Field," "HA-SU* Flower"

*with HASU[ハス] here being a homonym with hasu[蓮]: Lotus/Sacred Lotus/Indian Lotus.

Nomino[鑿野] Nonomi[のの美]:

"Chisel Field," "NO-NO Beauty"

*technically it's the same either way but no[の] as hiragana is the grammatical possessive, where as in a name you'd normally expect it to be the kanji no[乃] but they mean the same thing. And incidentally the name Nonomi would normally be written [乃々実].

Tsuchimiya[槌宮] Tsumiko[罪子]:

"Hammer/Mallet Princess," "Guilty/Criminal Child."

I dunno why I thought to tackle these 5 as they really don't do much, but it feels like a neatly compact example of Kubo's naming sensibilities, because unlike characters that got to actually speak and interact with others and have any kind of a story of their own, their names are almost all we know about them; that and a few simple tonal notes in how they talk or carry themselves in the one scene most of them show up in.

Obviously the girls are each named after a tool used in sword smithing and serve that role in assisting Oh-etsu. And since they're each a zanpakutou, like the rest of Nimaiyas harem, it feels like it's implied that they are each literally said tool, instead of the more conventional katana. It's kind of weird considering how zanpakutou have worked up until this point in the story, but like much of the final arc we just kind of move on and never elaborate or explore this idea... (It almost feels like an entire Soul Eater thing is implied here, but we'll just never know...)

Its also weird that the girls get full names, with distinctly humanlike etymology and what appear to be full on surnames considering they're all zanpakutou and so you'd expect them to have a singular name, almost more like a title, and more in line with the zanpakutou names we already know.

You can probably tell Kubo decided to lean into this weird alliterative thing with the names. Ironically Mera is named after the meramera thing I mentioned, but her actual full name is the only one without the repetitive phonetics. Otherwise the girls all evoke the repeated sounds, Meramera, TokiToki, HasuHasu, NomiNomi/NonoNono, and TsumiTsumi. I feel like there are some sort of homonyms, or sounds like meramera, or other wordplay at work here that I just don't know enough outside of textbook Japanese to pick up on...

A random note: I find it funny that Mera's design feels like it was a last minute twist on Kubo's usual wildtype that he just knew he'd never get the chance to throw in there otherwise... Bazz-B's mohawk and fire powers, Renji's hair color, Grimmjow's eyeliner... kind of some Hiyori/Shino adjacent spunky girl energy? She feels like she'd fit that whole character type, even though we barely got to hear from her. It would've been nice to see a spicy tomboy actually involved in the story.

And maybe it's just a coincidence but it almost feels like there's a wuxing thing going on with the girls with the classical 5 daoist elements reflected in their names and tools: Fire-starters, Water-quenching and river/bay, wood "Chopsticks"/Tongs and flower, metal Chisel, and earth Hammer.

#bleach #tybw #tonokawa mera #hashihara hasuka #nomino nonomi #tsuchimiya tsumiko