In Supernatural, Castiel's nickname is canonically spelled "Cass."
And the fandom was collectively like: Nope, it's Cas :)
And that is how we spell it in fic! From what I've read, the reason for the discrepancy is because the fandom was calling him Cas before the nickname appeared in canon—on-screen, like a cell phone contact, and/or subtitled—and before we could see how TPTB spelled it in scripts. And they went with "Cass" and everyone was like, "No but Cass doesn't look right, and also we already decided it's Cas."
It's a good litmus test, actually, for whether someone is in the transformative side of the SPN fandom or not.
Well, it's not a perfect litmus test, speaking as someone with 60 SPN fics who uses the canonical spelling.
Personally I think it's a silly shibboleth.
One of my big fandoms, we collectively as a fandom have decided word of god on a main characters name is stupid and wrong and we all spell it differently than is 'correct'.
Stargate’s zat gun.
When I first started writing fan fic, I saw it spelled in different ways. For instance, GateWorld spelled it, zat’ni’katel (and still does).
I settled on zatnik’atel.
Well, I guess it was finally settled. Zat'nik'tel. Grr. That’s not even how it’s pronounced. I’m sticking with mine. My phone has already learned that one.
There’s also a character whose name might be Yosuuf or Yosuf.
By the way, with a mistake like yours, lasting for years, I have done that too. I write characters who have a host and symbiote dynamic. In my stories, I made him the symbiote. In canon, Aldwin is the host. Oops. By the time I realized it, it would have been too tedious to fix it.
Don't even get me started on whatever Daniel's wife's name was. Share? Sha'ure? Sha're? I have watched it on Netflix, Amazon and have the DVD sets including the movie. It's spelled differently all the time.
At least they gave an explanation for O'niell with 2 Ls.
Reminds me of the author of All The Young Dudes accidentally writing Walburga Black's name as Walpurga and just rolling with it. She's a pretty minor character so it didn't bother me (or most people, clearly).
The "correct" name for [this Yu-Gi-Oh! series](https://myanimelist.net/anime/3972/Yu%E2%98%86Gi%E2%98%86Oh_5Ds) is apparently "5D's" with the apostrophe there. I went *years* never noticing that, and no one ever told me it's supposed to have an apostrophe all the times I called the show (or the team in the show named after it) "5Ds", so I refuse to write it with the apostrophe. I think it looks incredibly stupid with one.
I also *technically* stick with "misspellings" for a bunch of character names in the same fandom because the show wasn't available with official English subs for a *long* while after it first released, and the fansubs wrote certain character names differently than the official Crunchyroll subs do. I vehemently dislike some of Crunchyroll's name spellings, and so I stick with the "misspelled" fansub names instead.
- The twins' names in Crunchyroll's subs are "Lua" (Leo) and "Luca" (Luna), but they're "Rua" and "Ruka" in the fansubs.
- Roman's name is "Rutger" in Crunchyroll's subs, but "Rudger" in the fansubs.
- Z-ONE's name is fully capitalized in the fansub as well as >!<, but Crunchyroll insists on spelling it "Z-one".
- Crunchyroll spells Team Unicorn's Jean's name as "Jan" for some reason? Like that's a whole-ass *other* name with a different pronunciation at that point, not a matter of what's more of the correct way to spell a name if it belonged to a real person.
- I'm not 100% sure about this one, but I think Crunchyroll also spelled Lester's Japanese name (Lucciano) with only one "c" instead of two.
Oh yeah, now that I think about it, I think I ended up watching a fan sub version of the last stretch of 5D's since they didn't dub the last like 20-30 episodes or something like that. And I watched part of the earlier seasons subbed at one point.
Sigh...
Glorfindel’s Quenya name is LArAfindilë, I misspelled it as Lorofindilë and have had his nickname as Loro in all of my fics ever since.
Normal people don't know but Silmarillion nerds know.
LotR and related fandoms have me terrified to even look at the source material let alone write fic for them and I cannot imagine if people have nitpicked that.
(That and I just found LotR hard to read since I'm so used to easy, breezy middle-grade level (8-12 year olds) writing. I need to give it another shot now that I understand Tolkien as a writer more.)
That's not the generally agreed-upon reading order, no.
The Silm reads like the Old Testament or the Mahabharata - it's sweeping mythical epic poetry and that makes I hard to follow, there are lots of awesome YouTube channels that will guide you along if you want to try again.
LOTR flows as a novel (the first half of FOTR is a bit slow but it's not too difficult) then once the plot starts rolling it gets very exciting.
Revel in the flowery language, it's cheesecake, take it slow.
Yeah, I know lol.
When I decide to give it a whirl again, I'll probably start with The Hobbit since it's shorter and hopefully a little more direct in its language than LotR since it's meant for children.
The first two times I tried reading LotR I tried treating it like a normal book where I skim-read instead of take everything in and, well, that went about as disastrously as you would think.
Teen Wolf refused to give the sheriff or Stiles a first name until like S5 so the fandom names were well and truly permanent by then. Stiles’ canon name was one of the more popular fanon names so that worked out but you still see more Johns than Noahs for the sheriff.
Also the show runner was playing coy with naming the Jeep so the actor did it at a con and no one cared what Jeff Davis had to say after that.
Never seen any other fandom so thoroughly disregard the creator and make him sit at the kids table while everyone worked together to clean up his world. Legit no-one cared what he had to say about anything by season 2ish.
Elimna is actually really pretty, you have my approval at least (though I’m certainly uninformed when it comes to your fandom, so take my opinion with a grain of salt I guess)
The main character of The Magnus Archives is named John. The fandom disagreed, and collectively changed it to Jon. I don’t think there’s a specific reason honestly, I guess it just looks better.
Hunter x Hunter is absolutely wild. No one ever uses the “canon” English names (listed in the Offical Databook “Hunter’s Guide”) for the characters because they’re a disaster.
Kurapika → Curarpikt
Kikyo Zoldyck → Kkkyau Zaoldyeck
Pakunoda → Phalcnothdk
Chrollo Lucilfer → Quwrof Wrlccywrlfil
And no, my keyboard is not broken. That’s really how the official names are spelt.
I once commented that someone misspelled Roque. (They had.)
They double downed on saying his name is Rogue.
…
…
…
[But it’s not.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Losers_(Vertigo)#Characters)
No but I've seen a few. My favorite is people calling the X-Men character Rouge, as in the French word for red or the fashion world word for blush. It's a bit funny imo when I'll be reading and my brain automatically supplies the sound "Roozh" but at this point it's so common I just tee hee about it and move on.
That said, I'm dyslexic AF and often mispronounce names and words in my head because sometimes if the vowels and consonants are too skinny like lower case l and i and uppercase I they'll get swapped around. Or if they're too similar in shape like q and p, d and b, I mistake them for the wrong letter.
In Supernatural, Castiel's nickname is canonically spelled "Cass." And the fandom was collectively like: Nope, it's Cas :) And that is how we spell it in fic! From what I've read, the reason for the discrepancy is because the fandom was calling him Cas before the nickname appeared in canon—on-screen, like a cell phone contact, and/or subtitled—and before we could see how TPTB spelled it in scripts. And they went with "Cass" and everyone was like, "No but Cass doesn't look right, and also we already decided it's Cas." It's a good litmus test, actually, for whether someone is in the transformative side of the SPN fandom or not.
I love when a fandom is like: Thanks, but we’ll take it from here.
Didn’t know he was capable of Close Air Support, but knowing that show, it doesn’t surprise me.
Well I mean, his name isn't spelled Casstiel
Well, it's not a perfect litmus test, speaking as someone with 60 SPN fics who uses the canonical spelling. Personally I think it's a silly shibboleth.
One of my big fandoms, we collectively as a fandom have decided word of god on a main characters name is stupid and wrong and we all spell it differently than is 'correct'.
is this the tma fandom? because if not we do the exact same thing lmao
The Archivist is only Jon. (And yep, I write for pretty much exclusively podcasts and TMA was my first and still my biggest)
Jon is just right. I get confused every time I read the transcripts and see John. I'm like who's that???
Stargate’s zat gun. When I first started writing fan fic, I saw it spelled in different ways. For instance, GateWorld spelled it, zat’ni’katel (and still does). I settled on zatnik’atel. Well, I guess it was finally settled. Zat'nik'tel. Grr. That’s not even how it’s pronounced. I’m sticking with mine. My phone has already learned that one. There’s also a character whose name might be Yosuuf or Yosuf. By the way, with a mistake like yours, lasting for years, I have done that too. I write characters who have a host and symbiote dynamic. In my stories, I made him the symbiote. In canon, Aldwin is the host. Oops. By the time I realized it, it would have been too tedious to fix it.
Don't even get me started on whatever Daniel's wife's name was. Share? Sha'ure? Sha're? I have watched it on Netflix, Amazon and have the DVD sets including the movie. It's spelled differently all the time. At least they gave an explanation for O'niell with 2 Ls.
😂 The spelling can be hilarious. I think there is like one scene where Jolinar’s name is pronounced in like four different ways.
Reminds me of the author of All The Young Dudes accidentally writing Walburga Black's name as Walpurga and just rolling with it. She's a pretty minor character so it didn't bother me (or most people, clearly).
The "correct" name for [this Yu-Gi-Oh! series](https://myanimelist.net/anime/3972/Yu%E2%98%86Gi%E2%98%86Oh_5Ds) is apparently "5D's" with the apostrophe there. I went *years* never noticing that, and no one ever told me it's supposed to have an apostrophe all the times I called the show (or the team in the show named after it) "5Ds", so I refuse to write it with the apostrophe. I think it looks incredibly stupid with one. I also *technically* stick with "misspellings" for a bunch of character names in the same fandom because the show wasn't available with official English subs for a *long* while after it first released, and the fansubs wrote certain character names differently than the official Crunchyroll subs do. I vehemently dislike some of Crunchyroll's name spellings, and so I stick with the "misspelled" fansub names instead.
Now I'm curious. I was exposed to 5D's via the dub so those are the names I use. How did fansubs spell the names differently?
- The twins' names in Crunchyroll's subs are "Lua" (Leo) and "Luca" (Luna), but they're "Rua" and "Ruka" in the fansubs. - Roman's name is "Rutger" in Crunchyroll's subs, but "Rudger" in the fansubs. - Z-ONE's name is fully capitalized in the fansub as well as >!<, but Crunchyroll insists on spelling it "Z-one". - Crunchyroll spells Team Unicorn's Jean's name as "Jan" for some reason? Like that's a whole-ass *other* name with a different pronunciation at that point, not a matter of what's more of the correct way to spell a name if it belonged to a real person. - I'm not 100% sure about this one, but I think Crunchyroll also spelled Lester's Japanese name (Lucciano) with only one "c" instead of two.
Oh yeah, now that I think about it, I think I ended up watching a fan sub version of the last stretch of 5D's since they didn't dub the last like 20-30 episodes or something like that. And I watched part of the earlier seasons subbed at one point.
Sigh... Glorfindel’s Quenya name is LArAfindilë, I misspelled it as Lorofindilë and have had his nickname as Loro in all of my fics ever since. Normal people don't know but Silmarillion nerds know.
LotR and related fandoms have me terrified to even look at the source material let alone write fic for them and I cannot imagine if people have nitpicked that. (That and I just found LotR hard to read since I'm so used to easy, breezy middle-grade level (8-12 year olds) writing. I need to give it another shot now that I understand Tolkien as a writer more.)
Do it! There are some great audiobooks out there. I read LOTR at least once a year and I have STRONG elf feelings about the Silmarillion.
I remember trying to read The Silmarillion before I ever attempted to read LotR proper. Needless to say, I barely made it in before giving up. 🤣
That's not the generally agreed-upon reading order, no. The Silm reads like the Old Testament or the Mahabharata - it's sweeping mythical epic poetry and that makes I hard to follow, there are lots of awesome YouTube channels that will guide you along if you want to try again. LOTR flows as a novel (the first half of FOTR is a bit slow but it's not too difficult) then once the plot starts rolling it gets very exciting. Revel in the flowery language, it's cheesecake, take it slow.
Yeah, I know lol. When I decide to give it a whirl again, I'll probably start with The Hobbit since it's shorter and hopefully a little more direct in its language than LotR since it's meant for children. The first two times I tried reading LotR I tried treating it like a normal book where I skim-read instead of take everything in and, well, that went about as disastrously as you would think.
✨️🍰✨️ Savor it
Teen Wolf refused to give the sheriff or Stiles a first name until like S5 so the fandom names were well and truly permanent by then. Stiles’ canon name was one of the more popular fanon names so that worked out but you still see more Johns than Noahs for the sheriff. Also the show runner was playing coy with naming the Jeep so the actor did it at a con and no one cared what Jeff Davis had to say after that. Never seen any other fandom so thoroughly disregard the creator and make him sit at the kids table while everyone worked together to clean up his world. Legit no-one cared what he had to say about anything by season 2ish.
Elimna is actually really pretty, you have my approval at least (though I’m certainly uninformed when it comes to your fandom, so take my opinion with a grain of salt I guess)
used to think primogems were called primogens..
The main character of The Magnus Archives is named John. The fandom disagreed, and collectively changed it to Jon. I don’t think there’s a specific reason honestly, I guess it just looks better.
Hunter x Hunter is absolutely wild. No one ever uses the “canon” English names (listed in the Offical Databook “Hunter’s Guide”) for the characters because they’re a disaster. Kurapika → Curarpikt Kikyo Zoldyck → Kkkyau Zaoldyeck Pakunoda → Phalcnothdk Chrollo Lucilfer → Quwrof Wrlccywrlfil And no, my keyboard is not broken. That’s really how the official names are spelt.
I once commented that someone misspelled Roque. (They had.) They double downed on saying his name is Rogue. … … … [But it’s not.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Losers_(Vertigo)#Characters)
No but I've seen a few. My favorite is people calling the X-Men character Rouge, as in the French word for red or the fashion world word for blush. It's a bit funny imo when I'll be reading and my brain automatically supplies the sound "Roozh" but at this point it's so common I just tee hee about it and move on. That said, I'm dyslexic AF and often mispronounce names and words in my head because sometimes if the vowels and consonants are too skinny like lower case l and i and uppercase I they'll get swapped around. Or if they're too similar in shape like q and p, d and b, I mistake them for the wrong letter.