Thanks @vacuummeister for bringing this up on my post about names in DMO, because the more I think about it the more weird it feels.
It would work seamlessly within a nebulous setting and with made-up names that have intuitively understandable roots and affixes in the original language (Smeshariki/Kikoriki example). But My student spirit is very obviously still set in Russia in the English dub. In a real, well known, named Russian city. So it just doesn't work and looks out of place.
There is no way in hell you're gonna meet a single Elijah in Moscow, unless it's Elijah Wood who came specifically for an autograph session on some kind of big fan convention. Elijah is very much not a Russian name. The person who was born in Russia, had Russian parents and lived their whole life in Russia (which we know Olezha is) with 100% certainty cannot be named Elijah. That's just not a thing people do here.
So why is he named like that? That's like if we took John Constantine and randomly made him Ivan Konstantinov in Russian dub while still showing British cultural things and flashbacks of him growing up in England with notable landmarks like Big Ben in the frame. It just doesn't make sense. Same with Olya. Elisa is not a Russian name. Liza? Yes. It's shortened for Elizaveta (Elizabeth). But not Elisa. I kind of understand the thought process behind swapping Anton for Anthony, and like his mom is a French woman named Maria (after a quick google search possibly Marie, with the Russian variant Mariya being the name she uses when living in Russia, that's my new headcanon)
and she calls him Tony in canon, but Anthony is still not Anton. They're cognate, yeah, but it's like Michael and Mikhail. Both names came from the same source and Mikhail is sort of an adaptation of a biblical name to better fit Russian pronunciation and stuff bc Christianity enforcement, but it had its own history and evolution in language and culture, so it can't be seamlessly replaced with Michael. Also diminutives are an important part of this discussion, because you won't call Russian Mikhail Mike, he's Misha. Russian Alexander is not Alex, he's Sasha or more rarely Shurik. If you call random Russian Alexander Alex you'll be considered pretentious obnoxious and not funny.
And like… English-speaking people most likely heard names like Anton and Olga before. They're not talking about Anthony Chekhov in the textbooks, they're talking about Anton Chekhov. It's Olga of Kiev, that's her name. Those are both examples of well known Slavic names. So why change them? Luckily, Dmitry is an almost exact transliteration (Dmitriy, Dmitrii, Dmitrij, however you wanna spell it, I don't understand the differences), so it looks like just an English spelling of a name that Russian person realistically can have. Like Moscow instead of directly transliterated modern Moskva. But fucking Elijah??? What's up with that?! It doesn't even sound like some cognate different variant of a Russian name, it's just straight up some American or British guy! Even though it's origins are from Hebrew. You wanna know what IS it's Russian cognate? Fucking Ilya. (Ilia if we're talking about more religious texts). It makes more sense to call Ilya Petrovsky Elijah than it does Olezha.
And don't even get me started on the surnames. I understand wanting to adapt charactonyms (names that describe characters through a trait) but… Bratsky? Douchnov???… It sounds like some guy in Hollywood who knows about Russia solely because of cold war propaganda decided to slap some shit together to make it "sound Russian" and ended up with Boris Jerkoff. For the love of god I'm tired of this bullshit we don't need to do this to ourselves too! Please just give me normal not stereotypical Russian names that make sense in foreign media I'm begging you. (Also don't make female characters with a surname that ends with -ov or -off! That's masculine, feminine would be -ova. Russian is a very gendered language. And stop calling USSR Russia. That's like calling the entirety of USA Texas. But that's an unrelated tangent.) Sticking Russian suffix to an English root and pretending like it's a perfectly good Russian name that's natural and could possibly happen IS STUPID! And bad! (Unless done for parody/satire purposes).
Whoa. I am way more mad about this than I expected to be. Like. We already have dehumanised and villainised boiled to stereotypes that have lost their connection to reality thirty years ago image in mainstream media (Hollywood, comics, primarily American based pop culture things). And we're also doing this to us ourselves?? Playing into the trend instead of doing it right??? I don't think Leena or the studio thought about this AT ALL when brainstorming adaptations. Their primary concern was probably something like names being hard to pronounce or read for English-speaking audience.
But like. If I get pissed off by people fucking up basic details that are easy to learn about foreign cultures in fiction, it would only be logical to be pissed off about this in relation to my own culture as well. Like, yeah, modern Russian culture and traditional Russian culture are a bit different things, and what we call our culture today has elements assimilated (or forced upon kh-khem Christianity kh-khem) from other cultures, but we are not whatever the fuck average western film director pictures in their head either. The least you can do is give a character from the culture you know nothing about a realistic name. And even here absurd amounts of people fuck up. When you can google that shit in mere seconds now. Or ask a random person from that culture on the internet. AND DMO IS US DOING THIS TO OURSELVES. HOW THE FUCK.
Okay, I think I'm gonna encourage y'all to use transliterated/written according to English grammar rules Russian names now, actually. Like, this wasn't the intention of the post, but now that I'm here, I think it's actually important. So, please.
Also, if you are writing a Russian character or using words/sentences in Russian briefly in your work, even if it's for a fandom I don't know or for OCs, you can ask me for help or advice. I volunteer as tribute. Machine translation is NOT it, you're making goofy or unintelligible blunders and never realising it. Ask real people. Please.
