Annotated 19-12
I knew what I was doing with yesterday’s references to Rodolphe Töpffer and the antivirus programs, but one thing that slipped right by me until too late was that we’d named two characters with a few scenes together “Carol” and “Ferris.”
Carol Ferris, ICYMI, was Green Lantern’s first and arguably most memorable love, and the villain-eventually-turned-hero Star Sapphire. This was just a (possibly fourth-wall-breaking) coincidence, but once it was established we just ran with it. It’s not like we could rename either of them, and it (hopefully) wasn’t really that big a deal.
But here’s the weird part: last year, I was helping edit a translation of a manga series (Tomo-Chan is a Girl) that had the same thing going on, with the same two names (the Carol in that series is one of the main character’s best friends; the Ferris in that series is Carol’s mother). I mentioned that it might be an issue to the publisher, but they just shrugged; English-language manga publishers get in enough hot water for changes as it is. So, y’know, whatever.
It was important to me that both Carol and Shanna make some reasonable but incorrect guesses as they start to suss each other out. Based on everything they know about each other, Carol could’ve been feeding a dev team in the basement; Shanna could’ve been a mole working for EA.
I like that manga series. I definitely read it 100% legally!!
Seriously though, it’s pretty cool that you get to work on stuff like that though.
The comic geek in me is ashamed that I didn’t register the Carol Ferris thing until you pointed it out, T. Then again, Neil Gaiman got me really well with an even more obvious thing in American Gods, so I think my brain just has faulty wiring. Either way, it’s neat.
I’d always wondered if that was deliberate…
“Won’t happen again.”
True, that.