#NOT putting this in the main ninjago tag oh my god | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

autisticjon · 4 years

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Well now I need to know about ninjago ship names

okay i'd like both of you to keep in mind that you willingly stepped into this bear trap. that being SAID welcome to my twisted ninjago!

this is operating solely in show!verse btw because the movie ship names are simply piggybacking off show names. why are they piggybacking off show names you ask? good question! it's because tlnm is essentially a ninjago high school au. pretty good if consumed detached from canon is what i'm saying. i've already strayed from the topic so that's a testament to how coherent this post is gonna be. oh well.

so some background knowledge. in lego ninjago: masters of spinjitzu, each of the main characters, as well as some of the minor characters, has an elemental power. generally these are pretty simple things (fire, ice, earth, water, lightning, and... whatever lloyd's is, green/power/life/nature/spirit/etc.) which will come in handy when we implement shipping.

5 out of the 6 main characters can be shipped together in various ways (excluding kai/nya because they are siblings as well as any lloyd/ninja ships because of the age gap). now, for some ships the pre-established pattern of smushing the characters' names together is followed, such as jaya (jay/nya) or wusako (wu/misako). for other ships, however, the ninjago fandom they were going to make things more complex than just frankensteining names together.

take, for example, cole and kai. this is a ship between the elemental master of earth (cole) and the elemental master of fire (kai). what do you get when you combine earth and fire? there's a few answers, but the one the ninjago fandom settled on was lava. this means that cole/kai is called lavashipping, or lava for short. essentially the same thing happened with plasmashipping (kai and jay, elemental master of lightning), glaciershipping (cole and zane, master of ice), and some other more niche ships, such as thinkfastshipping (neuro, master of mind and griffin turner, master of speed).

"wait!" i hear you cry, "what about if the fandom can't decide on a name!" well then we end up with situations like bruise/geode. cole/jay is typically known as bruiseshipping- i can't remember whether this is due to the fact that their representative colors, black and blue, are similar to that of a bruise or whether it's because they fight a lot. either/or probably. while bruise is the typically accepted name for the ship within the fandom, there's another name based on the elemental master scheme from above. geodeshipping is the alternate name for it, because presumably putting lightning and rocks together creates geodes. idk. for someone who's mother used to be a geologist i don't know a lot about rocks.

it's the same for kai and zane, which most people call oppositeshipping. i've also heard it called steamshipping though, because of the whole fire meets ice and creates steam thing. i didn't learn that from my geologist mother though i just did well in chemistry.

"wait!" i hear you cry again, "what about people that don't have elemental powers!" well, like i mentioned earlier with wusako, sometimes people just mush their names together. however sometimes alternatives can be found that fit within the -shipping theme. ronin/dareth has been dubbed scruffshipping because, in the immortal words of artofthecol, they are both gross pathetic older men. i don't actually know the reason behind scruff as a name i just know that it's the name. other examples are techoshipping (jay and zane, bc one's a robot and the other's a tech nerd), samuraishipping (pixal and nya, because they were both samurai x), forgivenshipping (lloyd and brad, the bully from that one darkley's episode), and greencheerleader (movie!ship but WHATEVER, lloyd and chen, the bully from tlnm).

there's a few ship names that are even more confusing (mountain, blizzard, heavy metal, hailstorm, citrus, etc.) and some that are just straight up what's written on the tin. polyninja (cole/jay/kai/zane)? good shit. electricdjinnshipping (jay/nadakhan)? bad shit but at least it's tagged so i can blacklist it without having to put in 7 variations of a ship name.

"wait!" i hear you cry a third time, "how does this relate to tma? also stop using this format from 2014 tumblr posts to signal focus changes in your impromptu essay about ninjago ship names please" alrighty will do. i tagged a post about jonmartin, the dinghy, and assorted theoretical jonmartin ship names with something along the lines of "thank god we don't have the ninjago ship naming system", which while i understand it in-depth i still felt the need to write a super long post explaining it so y'all could suffer with me.

my original thought when writing this tag out last night was that a similar naming convention could be implemented by taking each avatar's fear they're aligned with and figuring out what happens when you combined them. it's similar to what we have currently with lonely eyes, peter/elias, and "sightless flame" as a name for gertrude/agnes that i saw used in a post earlier today in that it's based on the characters' powers rather than their names. HOWEVER, after a day of ruminating on this topic, i've realized that it would be nearly impossible to implement this new system because of how fast the already large fandom is growing and the amount of dedication that would be required on everyone's parts.

issue one: unaligned characters. this is the most glaring issue to me, namely because martin, one of the characters i took as an example for this, could be argued to be aligned with any of 3+ fears right now. this means that he has no definitive powers or entity tied to him. we could still go with the non-power approach: survivorshipping, because both he and jon survived the institute? teashipping, because of tea? seeingisbelievingshipping, because of the whole i see you thing (it would not be the most ridiculous ship name i've seen)? there's quite a few options, which leads into my next point.

issue two: indecisiveness. again, tma fandom is a lot bigger than the ninjago fandom already and it's growing every day. let's say you managed to find a ship with two avatars: off the top of my head, annabelle cane and daisy. not sure how that'd work in canon but whatever. annabelle's tied to the web (no pun intended) which means anything related to spiders, manipulation, lying, etc. could fit in her wheelhouse. daisy's the hunt, so anything about hunting, pursing, the thrill of the chase, so on and so forth. there's a lot of space for you to put those two together in. unfortunately, this means that it'd be hard to settle on one option that made everybody happy, and inevitably newcomers would have to decipher the ship names and possibly be spoiled by them.

in conclusion, [insert gif of tim stoker doing the harlem shake here]. thanks for coming to my ted talk

#i don't have a read more because i'm on mobile so i will simply avoid tagging this #ask #sam.txt #long post

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