#locria

Not that it's ever been relevant to anyone's anything, but I've mentioned before that there was a really odd missed opportunity with Team Plasma's weird Seven Sages thing and how they have six of seven colors of the visible light spectrum accounted for, but then are awkwardly missing indigo, while Ghetsis makes a second green member... and also Ghetsis and N(atural Harmonia) have a musical theme yet the sages don't fit any kind of musical theme, you'd sort of expect a Diatonic scale since it's made up of 7 Modes...

But you know what iconic Nintendo JRPG DID have

a set of 7 mystical wise"men" type characters

themed after both the 7 color spectrum

and the 7 modes of the Diatonic scale

which was also missing an indigo member

and whose odd member out of the group serves as the game's villain?

(also who raised a weird orphan kid to be their protege and erroneously told them they were royalty?)

The Magypsies (named after the Gypsy scale) in MOTHER 3

musing once again...

was just browsing fassad's wiki page, noticed this bit about him knowing leder

i didn't remember this so i went to go check and yup, mostly like they say (though i'm not totally sure where he mention's leder's "real name," since it's not in either of these)

what's got me thinking about this though, is that from these two lines, it seems like fassad actually ISN'T super familiar with leder?

he only seems to know two things about him

he never leaves the bell tower

he never talks

which are all just things anyone can easily observe about him so i'd say it shows that fassad's been casing the village in preparation for his and porky's scheme

BUT... why would all of fassad's knowledge about leder come from this? isn't that actually incredibly weird?

the villagers arrive in the nowhere islands they meet the magi, and together they plan out tazmily leder is chosen to be the guy who retains all his memories of the old world, takes the job as keeper of the bell-tower, and starts a vow of silence for the next like 2 decades all this is decided, surely with input from leder himself, in this meeting with the magi

but fassad, locria, the seventh magi, only knows leder as the strange guy in tazmily who never talks

now i'm having all these ideas locria never shows up to that initial meeting he never witnesses the humans' pain and grief never learns to "understand the pain of others" he stays living on his own, isolated from the others, selfish, only bothering to learn the secrets of tazmily later so he can exploit them for his own gain

Do they get transfered to their afterlife and reapers just have the option to either go by their name or the number? Or do they get to choose their own names once they get reborn as reapers?

Names aren't really official in the human world, at least they aren't for reapers, since they are just ways to identify each other. It would make sense if the dispatch refused to use names of the reapers from when they were alive.

But that leads me to wonder whether UT could actually be Cedric?? Don't get me wrong, I'm fully on board with Grandpa!UT theory, but if he always went by his ID number, that could mean he never chose a name for himself, which would mean Cedric can't be his name since he has no name! That is of course, in the case that reapers have to name themselves.

I might just be thinking a bit too far into this though hehe 😅

Reaper names

Well, now that I'm reading Scythe by Neal Shusterman, I started to consider that perhaps Kuroverse reapers choose completely new names when they become reapers. Much like how royals can choose what name to use when they ascend to the throne or how clergy can choose new names to go by, "scythes" in that book series do this, usually choosing the last name of a scientist they particularly respect. Faraday, Curie, etc. In Kuroshitsuji we've seen a nod to Shakespeare himself, as well as to a priest who wasn't even born until February 17, 1888 (Ronald Knox).

However, we've also seen a Shakespearean character (Othello), a nod to a serial killer who wouldn't be born for several decades (Sutcliff), and two names (in the manga) that seem random (Sascha and Ludger). We haven't been given Sascha's or Ludger's full names -- or Othello's -- but it's probably safe to assume they have them.

It's entirely possible these are their actual names from before they died. If they go through karmic reincarnation (get reborn as reapers with their old souls), these could be the names they were born with as reapers.

The mere fact that Undertaker's name isn't known to Othello, since he preferred to use his registration number, increases the chances of it being Cedric K. Ros-- (whatever that is, like Rosewood, Rosedale, etc.). This allows Yana-san to make us wait even longer to learn the truth about him. Then, for some unknown reason, Undertaker wanted to cut ties with his old self. Even back then.

And Othello makes it sound like they usually go by names they had before they were registered. More specifically, these are "given names".

This suggests that, wherever the names come from, reapers don't typically choose them for themselves. Undertaker, despite being the epitome of a reaper, was breaking customs right from the start by using his registration number.

I'm curious now why Othello just says "most of our kind" instead of "all of our kind, except this one". What other reaper changed their name, and why?

Of course, this all lines up very well with one of Undertaker's parallels in Mother3. There are 7 Magypsies in the game, just as there are 7 named reapers in the manga. (Eric and Alan's names have never been mentioned in the manga; Anderson hasn't either.) They are all named after musical modes: Aeolia, Ionia, Lydia, Doria, Mixolydia, Phrygia, and Locria. Locria deserts the others and changes their name to Fassad (like a façade). We don't learn that Fassad was a Magypsy until a while after they're destroyed. But this works with how Undertaker uses a given number instead of a given name... and then changes it to something else when he deserts his position.