I don't know why I go to webpages that I know will start out interesting and then slowly begin to annoy me...
Regardless, if I see one more site complaining about Rini's English name(s) one more time, I'm probably going to start screaming.
All right, I can understand complaining about Serena's name. Fine. "Bunny" would have been more accurate. I concede that. It makes for an interesting coincidence that Sailor Moon's earth parents gave her a name so similar to that of her past name.
This whole Chibi crusade however...
Let's assume Serena is, as in the manga, called Bunny. So what the hell do you call her daughter? Bunny Small Lady Serenity? Again, fair enough. Now, what the hell do you call Small Lady when she travels to the past? Little Bun?
Hell, if you can live with a character called "Little Bun", I'll build the time machine for you to go back to 1995 and suggest DIC call their new sailor suited heroine Bunny.
However, Serena's name is Serena, and I've got not problems with shortening Serena to Rini. I think it works damn fine.(I don't know where the hell the manga got "Rini" from since Serena is Bunny...)
Moving on, I've noticed a large amount of disgust with the name Sailor Mini-Moon. The term "Mini-Moon" seems to be even more hated than the whole "kissing cousins" incident.
I know this is going to get the crap flamed out of me, but I'm just sick of this whole thing. Unlike the people loudly protesting "Mini-Moon," I don't know Japanese. Not on any grand scale. So, the word "chibi" is pretty much meaningless to me. I'm probably not even pronouncing it right in my mind.
And I have a feeling that I'm not alone on this. In fact, I'm willing to bet that the majority of people who would watch the dub have no idea what "chibi" means either.
Well, I've figured out what chibi means--small, right? Something like that? Yeah. Until I entered the magical realm of fandom, I was oblivious to the meaning of the word. Had anyone on the TV announced that they were Sailor Chibi-Moon, I would wonder to myself, "What the hell's a chibi moon?"
Look, it's a translation. The quality of translation can be debated in another place(hopefully at a safe distance, because as you've probably noticed, I don't really care. Hell, if it was always good, I wouldn't need to go to comparison sites that cause me to write beautiful prose like this!) And even if Sailor Jupiter can't remember her attack names from one day to the next, the translators seem to have hit the whole Chibi/Mini Moon thing fairly dead on.(Perhaps you would prefer Small Moon, Tiny Moon, Little Moon, etc. But then there wouldn't be any Mini-Me jokes)
"Ahh, Zelda, but what about Chibi-Chibi?" you may ask.
Damned if I know. Personally, that thing is too cute for me to stand. Yes, I like Rini(well, after seeing S and SuperS. During R I constantly wished for her death...) I like SuperS, but Chibi-Chibi...Too many hearts, too much cute little kid crap, and the thought of a whole season of something like that that only says its name...
There's always "Mini-Mini." I don't think it's even worth contemplating, since we've all gone back to the "it'll never be dubbed attitude." I know we all said, "Oh, they'll never dub S. It's got lesbians in it" and they dubbed that and we all said, "Oh, they'll never dub SuperS. It's got alcoholic transvestites in it" and they dubbed that. Still, I'm not expecting to see the "Ken" Seiya, "Ken" Taiki, and "Ken" Yaten and their twin sisters anytime soon.(See? I gave 'em Western names and got their whole first name, last name thing in the right order. Hell, I'll work on the dubbing of Stars. Seiya, Taiki, and Yaten'll have twin sisters, but that's just because I think it'd be funny as hell.)
Boy, I've really made a lot of friends with this one...in summation, chibi crusaders should stop their bitching and Chibi-Chibi makes me violently ill.