Talk:Bride of Godzilla/@comment-3367060-20150313231002/@comment-26357212-20150430080449

While I appreciate the acknowledgement at all, I'm far less thrilled at the near-complete replication of my public articles on the subject, even going so far as to use the same nickname for the giant robot character, but then just go ahead and not cite me as a source. Granted, I'm not a primary source and I've never claimed to be, in fact much of what I know is from that same Japanese blog, but if you're going to use my interpretation and independent research (which again isn't any more complicated than simply searching for the name of the story in Japanese, something I continually find myself shocked that I'm apparently the only one doing) it would at the very least be considered less rude (and at the most not disingenuous) to give my articles credit in the actual article instead of down here in this weird little pseudo-forum you've got going on here.

I find it most odd that you're citing Enshoma, despite the fact that it was I - and I alone - who researched this story and brought it to the English world. Curious as to the mention, I looked it up and found a journal entry on deviantart, which presents an extremely stripped down (more so than even this article) overview of the story, and makes the assumption that "Robomusume" is a nickname given to the giant robot by Japanese fans. And this is where it all starts falling together...

"Robomusume" isn't a name. I've specified this on my own blog and that specification appears here too, but there doesn't seem to be an understanding here or in Enshoma's post that I'm not joking about this. The Japanese word "musume" means daughter. "Robomusume" means robo daughter in Japanese. That's not a proper name, it's a literal description of the character, whose transliterated name I applied to the character AS a name in much the same way that English speaking fans continue to refer to Oodako and Ookondoru (and much more infrequently Ooumihebi) as if that's their name. It was an attempt I made to have a thing to call her without introducing my own fanon or speculation on something that was supposed to be a factual account of research I was doing. What this tells me is that no one involved in the reporting cycle of this story in English after my initial research bothered to try and actually understand the imperfect, often garbled auto-translated versions of the Japanese blog post from 2010.

But I'm not actually here to complain or brag or anything - this is the internet and dissemination of knowledge is a complicated thing, and my "hyper intensive research" of READING WIKIPEDIA is easily replicated by any person with internet access in the first place - instead I'd like to use this opportunity to shed a little light on how exactly these sorts of rumors and misinformation get started. See, from here on out no one's going to look to my posts or even this Japanese individual's posts as a primary source. This place, as a wiki, IS the source for your average layperson now. Although I haven't been very publicly critical of this wiki as I do enjoy it a fair amount and I understand what it is and don't hold it to the same standards as an actual encyclopedia and realize that it's going to be full of errors and rumors and questionable content, it's also important to realize that the majority of the traffic coming through here is going to think the exact opposite, that this IS a primary source and it CAN be trusted as completely accurate 100% of the time. The line between fansite and objective information source is blurry here because of a combination of outside expectations and internal lack of cohesion, and while it's not a big deal that someone may leave this page thinking "oh, well that character's name is Robomusume," this problem becomes way more alarming when you realize that... well, you still list "Godzilla vs. Bagan" as being a thing, when there is absolutely no evidence for it and in fact there have been interviews with Kawakita that reveal he was never aware of such a project at all. And if Kawakita never knew about it, you're basically creating a conspiracy theory, not reporting the details of the development cycle for Godzilla 7. This instance is only an example, but I think you understand what I'm talking about here.

There are many kinds of information that are difficult for your average individual to obtain or understand. We can't all dive into peer-reviewed scientific literature and expect to come out being an expert. The history of Godzilla's development, and the voluminous number of untold stories hiding in there, is not one of these things. Wikipedia is open for anyone to view, and the simple task of using a search engine is more than open to people of all kinds of physical and cognitive abilities. I can not stress enough how easy it is to stumble onto the exact same sources I've come across and find that Yoshio Tsuchiya suggested the name "Gyottos" for Anguirus during that film's development, or that the original suit was painted a bright emerald green. Either don't be dishonest, don't be lazy, or don't be either.

One final comment - I would actually love to contribute to this place myself, but I constantly find myself utterly bewildered at the formatting and style that you're supposed to be presenting. It's very fundamental things that I don't understand, like what constitutes a new article, for example, of which there are a number of disparate criteria that often directly contradict each other. In particular the articles on Mechagodzilla make zero sense to me. The closest I ever got was perhaps six months ago when I came across the pathetic shambles of what called itself a Gotengo article, and the lack of any information at all regarding G-END. Incidentally, G-END was more or less the spark that got me wondering what else was absent from the English speaking world. I wish there was more I could do for Godzilla, but I've got a limited amount of time, means, and patience, and I rarely get the impression that anyone actually cares about or understands him. But that's an entirely different conversation.

Thank you for your time and for bringing this to a wider audience,

93/93

Mal