Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Darth Tahwtiaw

THIS MEME MAKES NO SENSE. I mean, it's funny because butts are funny. But the underlying premise is absurd.

There seems to be a pretty well-established formula for coming up with Sith Lord names. The canonical ones are:

Darth Bane
Darth Plagueis
Darth Sidious
Darth Maul
Darth Tyranus
Darth Vader

(And if you're deep on the old, pre-TFA Extended Universe you might throw in Darth Revan, Darth Caedus and Darth Traya, too.)

These aren't backwards names! I've never met somebody named Luam or Suoidis, have you? More to the point, they're not even random combinations of letters the way you could argue some minor Star Wars characters (or other fantasy/sci-fi creations all across the genres) appear - Nien Nunb or Mon Mothma and whatnot.

They are English words or word-fragments and they are about as subtle as chainsaws in signalling that their bearers are Evil Bad Guys. "Bane" means the undoing of something. "Maul" means to seriously wound. (See also "General Grievous", not technically a Sith but definitely squarely in the "Title and Straight Up Word For Something Harmful" camp.) "Plagueis" is just the word "plague" with some extra letters at the end to make it sound slightly less on the nose and more like a name, and the same goes for "Tyranus"/"tyrant". "Vader" sounds like "invader" with the first syllable dropped, just like "Sidious" is a foreshortened "insidious".

(It's hard to tell with the other three if they were subverting or ignoring the rule or what, although to be fair I think a lot of the EU Darths were introduced even before the prequels, which really hammered the rule home. Still: "Revan" could be a clipped form of "revanche" or "revenant" or even good old "revenge"; "Caedus" is about one letter off from being an anagram of "seduce" and seeing as how he's the conceptual predecessor of Kylo Ren's origin story, that tracks; and "Traya" is close enough to "traitor" that I rest my case.)

So yeah, you want to come up with your Mos Eisley Cantina Regular Name (Momaw Nadon) or your Maz's Tavern Hanger-On Name (Wollivan) go ahead and mash up or rearrange your middle name and the city where you were born. But if you're planning on introducing yourself as you fire up a red lightsaber, you'd better be leaning towards something like Darth Corruptus or Darth Quisition or something. Otherwise people are never going to take you seriously.