New tag: "fun with furigana"

While normally just used to indicate the reading of a particular kanji, furigana can also be used for certain Shenanigans.

With furigana, a word's pronunciation can be totally decoupled from the characters used to write it, and you get a hypertextual sort of additional layer of information. When you write one word and then read it as a totally different word, it's a bit like both words are being used at once. This is sometimes even applied to words that are already written in kana and should therefore already have a single, unambiguous pronunciation.

Alison Airlines' "MOCOHUASCA" (pool #14779) goes absolutely ham with all this:

• On page 3 (post #3441417), Marisa says「『アヤワスカ（これ）』はかなり強烈」– "Ayahuasca (this) is really strong stuff." In this case, we have a pronoun applied as furigana to the name of the pronoun's referent for the sake of disambiguity.
• On page 4 (post #3441419), Marisa says「私は魔女（プロ）」– "I'm a witch (professional)," saying two words at once to communicate something like, "As a witch, I'm an expert on this sort of thing"—all in the space of a single word.
• On page 8 (post #3441431), Mokou thinks「混沌（カオス）」, pronouncing (subvocalizing?) the Japanese kanji word for chaos as the Western loanword kaosu.
• On page 9 (post #3441432), Mokou thinks「『深（イキ）』すぎてる」, simultaneously saying "I went too far" and "this is too intense". A sentence later she says, 「この『領域（レベル）』」– "this place (level)", referring to her psychedelic experience as a "place" while still acknowledging it as an altered state of consciousness.
• On page 13 (post #3441441), the narrator says「舞踊（ダンス）」and「交響曲（シンフォニー）」, using the Japanese kanji words for "dance" and "symphony" and pronouncing them as dansu and shinfonii.
• On page 17 (post #3441447), Mokou says「空（すべてはひとつ）だ」– "Nothingness (all is one)." Almost the entire sentence is compressed into a single kanji.
• And on page 21 (post #3441454), she mentions「１３８億年も続く宇宙の輪廻（ダンス）」– "The 138-year samsara (dance) of the cosmos," using substituting in the same loanword the narration did before, but this time applying it to a very different Japanese word.

We don't have many tags relating to the text on images, but I think this might be an interesting one. We can start by going through the furigana tag and looking for examples—it's likely that a good portion of that tag qualifies, since manga that are meant to be read by people with adult-level literacy usually don't have that much regular pronunciation-aid furigana to begin with.

What do you mean by pool #3441417? post #3441417?

This might be pool material like the Clever pool #330 and such, if the term "Fun with Furigana" is objective enough, it better go as a tag.

Oops. I meant pool #14779.

The theme is objective. It's "furigana that apply a nonstandard reading to a word". Other examples (all taken from the furigana tag):

• post #3373683 – "beer" becomes "wife"
• post #3368096 – "we were reborn" becomes "we became animal-girls" (context: kemono friends)
• post #3053298 – furigana are used to represent muffled speech
• post #3019962 – the same, but in reverse (the base text represents the muffled pronunciation and the furigana represents what's trying to be said)
• post #651236 – Tenshou Juuji Hou becomes sou nano ka (is that so)

In searching for these examples, though, I did discover that there are in fact many comics on the site that use furigana in the normal way. I think that would increases the value of this tag: furigana -fun_with_furigana could be used to find posts that use normal pronunciation-aid furigana, which could be good reading material for people still learning Japanese.

Tags are generally less meme-like and more straightforward descriptions than pools. In that sense, I would go with something like alternate_furigana.

That's a bit misleading because one of the things that fall under this tag is applying furigana to a word that's already in kana, which is never normally done. In this case the furigana are remarkable not because they're alternate, but because they're there at all.

Possibly nonce_furigana?

Just to remind everyone, many of the examples in pool #1527, "Alternate Kanji Readings," abut on or overlap with the examples given here. Maybe the description of that pool could be expanded to include "fun with furigana."

Youkai_Chili said:

Just to remind everyone, many of the examples in pool #1527, "Alternate Kanji Readings," abut on or overlap with the examples given here. Maybe the description of that pool could be expanded to include "fun with furigana."

Didn't know about that pool. Strange that it's a pool; isn't that a taggable theme?

Anyway, that pool seems to be mostly about puns and so on based on alternative standard readings of a kanji, like Tenshi being called Tenko. What I have in mind for this tag is furigana that express a pronunciation totally unrelated to the kanji or kanji compound to which they're applied.

I know what you're talking about, it's when the artists use furigana for goofing off and such. It's objective enough.

Maybe something like "novel_furigana" as a tag? That's the best description I can come up with.

When I saw this topic, the example that came to mind was that of post #4166888, which uses furigana in a silly way. Something like faux_furigana could work, but that doesn't exactly seem to match what you're asking. Perhaps something like nonstandard/nontraditional_furigana? BE and Dream's suggestions are also good.

Damian0358 said:

When I saw this topic, the example that came to mind was that of post #4166888, which uses furigana in a silly way.

Actually, that's a great example.

It turns out that there's a word for this in Japanese: gikun. It would of course be unfamiliar to most taggers, which would hurt its use, but gikun_reading is a possible name.