Template talk:AppearancesIt's Coming
Japanese kids
Regarding the two kids who spit spitballs at Hiro and Ando, they are credited as "Japanese kid 1" and "Japanese kid 2". It's not racist to call them that. "Japanese" is a legitimate descriptive term for these two people, just as the Haitian describes Jimmy Jean-Louis's character, or Mexican shop describes the place where Derek was killed, or Japanese schoolgirl describes the character that Hiro saves. However, it's not ideal to use a numbering system to name characters (see the naming convention). Not only that, we can distinguish among these two characters by their genders: one is a boy, one is a girl. There's no need to use the generic "kid" for both. Credited names provide a good fallback if we need, but we do not have to slavishly stick to the credits. Since we're already going to change the credited names (to remove the numbers and to swap "boy" and "girl" for "kid"), there's no point in keeping the rest of the credited name, in my opinion. "Japanese boy" and "Japanese girl" would work fine, but why not be more specific? I'm not saying that "spitball boy" and "spitball girl" are the best names, but they're better than "Japanese boy" and "Japanese girl" because they help the reader remember who the characters are a lot easier and succinctly. -- RyanGibsonStewart (talk) 00:48, 22 November 2008 (EST)
- Hence the old guidelines to use the credits when naming characters is off? --Pierre 12:21, 22 November 2008 (EST)