Forum:Furigana

So I've been really confused as to how you guys do things here with regards to. On pages like Deva or Royal Knights, you insist on using the literal kanji reading when the point of furigana is that it overrides that reading. If some material says in some written form but you only ever hear デーヴァ in the anime, what is the purpose of providing the "Jūni Shinshou" literal reading to people who come here? Only 十二神将 by itself is "Jūni Shinshou". When it's written as it's just "Dēva".— Ryulong  ( 琉竜 ) 23:11, January 8, 2018 (UTC)
 * The kanji are supplementary to the katakana, and providing a secondary meaning. For example, the Deva are just the, in meaning, pronunciation, and most spellings. The "Twelve Heavenly Generals" bit is given in rare, supplementary descriptions, and is as if I said in English "The Deva (y'know, those twelve general dudes)". It's not as if the furigana was "fureimu aro" and the kanji was "an arrow made of flame". It's not even like Matadormon, where there's a clear pun on the pronunciation of the kanji being performed. These instances are pure abusing the format for purple prose.
 * From what I understand of how furigana are usually done, the original Digimon merchandise is bastardizing that format for puns and in-jokes. We are attempting to mimic that usage here, without miscommunicating that the kanji are actually intended to be read as the primary meaning. 16:06, January 9, 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm not entirely sure that's the intent of the author(s) here. In all works I've come across, furigana is used to provide the intended phonetic reading of either an esoteric word or something that the author intends to be read differently, but still provide the original meaning to the Japanese reader. In the Deva example, the author(s) want to make sure that people call them "Devas" (デーヴァ) but also inform the reader that these Devas are the "" (十二神将), a concept that Japanese readers would know about.
 * This doesn't really carry over to the English-speaking fans that you have here. As it stands (and particularly how you are formatting the romanicized text in Ruby as well), you are placing too much emphasis on the literal reading that is not being used within the context of Digimon. is just read as Dēva, which you should be informing the readers of first and foremost.
 * I can understand adding a statement to the effect of "kanji literally means 'Twelve Heavenly Generals'", because that's what they do over at Bleach Wiki for all the Spanish and German words that the author set to kanji strings. Their set up is this: Official Term Name (Japanese text (with furigana)). They don't bother with the original intended reading of the kanji if furigana is in use because they know that the name is intended to be different and it's meant to be read differently within the context of their subject anime/manga. They don't use ruby, but they want to have the alternate readings more easily readable.— Ryulong  ( 琉竜 ) 03:24, January 10, 2018 (UTC)
 * As we went through before as an example, see ZeedMillenniummon. It is painfully clear that Millenniummon's name was not ever meant to actually be written as "Last Millennium Monster". It is blatantly a format-based gag.
 * With Deva, the anime itself explicitly specifies that the meaning of the name is primarily based on the actual Deva, not the Twelve Heavenly Generals, and virtually every written form of the word uses the katakana. We only have the kanji in the first place for completeness, to include information on the one-off gag. They are not meant to, in any way, be translations or pronunciations or anything -- it's literally two disparate phrases that are merely tied together in the original manga/cards for the sake of a gag. It's not like Bleach where a spelling would be used consistently.
 * "because they know that the name is intended to be different and it's meant to be read differently within the context of their subject anime/manga." -- that's the key point here. Digimon isn't intending it to be read differently. It's not intending for the kanji to be read as the katakana at all. It's literally just putting the name, as spelled in katakana, adjacent to a one-off purple prose take on the name. For example, for the Royal Knights, the kanji is only used in a single issue of V-Jump -- everywhere within the franchise, it's just the katakana.
 * We're using the furigana format not because this actually was intended to be used as furigana, but solely because that's the format the original one-off gag used. I don't know about the rest of the community, but I would be amenable to shuffling off one-off gag uses of furigana into ref notes, specifying that it was a gag use of furigana and that the katakana and kanji had nothing to do with each other, in any way. 15:32, January 10, 2018 (UTC)
 * None of what you are saying makes any sense. This "gag" makes no sense. I don't understand why you're extrapolating that because in one instance some manga or video game wrote out "" once that it means that for every future instance of an alternate kanji name that uses furigana that you format it in the exact same way and make the romaji for the non-furigana portion have more precedence over the actual intended reading. If that's the case get rid of the kanji names all together instead of sticking to some joke that only makes sense to you and you alone. At the very least if you want to keep this nonsense, at least make the intended reading the larger text like this.— Ryulong ( 琉竜 ) 23:32, January 11, 2018 (UTC)
 * It's not "once". It's basically once-per-topic. Each of the applicable situations has done that kind of thing in one or two locations. It's a recurring gag, but still plainly a gag. There are also instances of the kanji being read literally as done on the card image for Deva.
 * It's okay if the gag doesn't make sense to you. That doesn't mean it's not a gag. And it doesn't make sense to "just get rid of the kanji names", because that would be removing information. We're not inhibiting anyone's informing themselves by being comprehensive. It's also a bit odd to describe it as "a joke that makes sense to me and me alone" because (1) it's an official gag within the official material, and (2) pretty much all the rest of us and the fandom get it. For example.
 * Flipping the reading like that misattributes the katakana's romaji to the kanji, and vice versa. That's not what's going on. I'd be open to flipping both the romaji and the kanji, but I'm concerned that (1) that wouldn't be matching what the actual published materials did, and (2) would be hard as shit to read. 18:48, January 18, 2018 (UTC)