fineillsignup:

niaruto:

sasaukage:

It’s funny bc sakuras name is literally a flower name and yet ino assigned her another flower for her flower metaphor

*chair screeches gently as I pull up to the group to be unnecessarily pedantic*

Soooo Japanese names can be written with kanji (Chinese characters with inherent meanings but often many potential pronunciations) or hiragana (syllabic phonetic system without inherent meanings) or katakana (…another syllabic system for reasons that I can’t be bothered to explain why they have two right now).

Kishimoto chose to write Sakura’s name with a mixture of kanji 春野 haru-no “spring field” and katakana サクラ sa-ku-ra. Sakura’s surname is also a pun because while the “no” has a meaning (field) it also sounds like the “no” that means “possessive particle” (think English “of” only in reverse) so “haru no sakura” sounds like “cherry blossom(s) of spring”. But! He did not actually name her 桜 the kanji for “cherry blossom”.

Soooo back to cosmos. Ok. So the cosmos flower is written 秋桜 in Japanese and can be pronounced “akizakura” but it can also be pronounced Ao, Aki, Akio, Kosumo, or even Shuo, among others.

But what 秋桜 means is “cherry blossom of autumn.”

So Sakura is like “I’m barely a flower. I’m like a bud.” And Ino is like “nooooo you aren’t a bud, you aren’t even a spring cherry blossom, you’re an AUTUMN cherry blossom! In fact you might become something even better than that.”

these cuties~

*slowly squeaks away on my chair and awkwardly maneuvers it through the doorway never to be seen again*