Alternative Ship Names Archive and Discussion

[Welkamo]

Across the Pokémon fandom, there are many ships, and many of these ships have many different names. Sometimes this is the product of decentralized fandom, either in the early days of fandom or more recent times. Sometimes this is because the original ship name is too offensive, too violent, or too not safe for work. Sometimes this is because of different names across different languages, with different naming conventions. Sometimes this is because the original name was shared by two or more ships, and an alternative was created for one of the ships.

This is a place to collect all of those alternative names, both to preserve history and to help people who may be confused by all these different names. This is also a place to discuss names and to learn a bit of shipping history!

- Please note that just because a ship is listed here, does not necessarily mean Bulbagarden endorses it.

- All global forum and Shipper’s Paradise rules apply.

- To submit ship names, go on over to the Neverending Romance thread.

Spoiler: Alternative Ship Names

Coming soon

Spoiler: International Ship Names

シソソニ (shisosoni, seesawsoni) - RewriteShipping (Swordward x Sonia)
ミクナギ (mikunagi) - GracefulShipping (Wallace x Winona)
食事会組 - FeastShipping (Grant x Valerie x Siebold)
dnkb - TrueRivalShipping(Leon x Raihan)
dnsn / ダンソニ (daisoni) - LionHeartShipping (Leon x Sonia)
kbnz / キバネズ (kibanezu) - E-BoyShipping (Piers x Raihan)
rrsn / ルリソニ (rurisoni) - AquaHeartShipping (Nessa x Sonia)
sgao / スグアオ (suguao) - DipplinShipping (Kieran x Juliana)
nmao / ネモアオ (nemoao) - AcademyAceShipping (Juliana x Nemona)
ppao / ペパアオ (pepaao) - HerbaMysticaShipping (Arven x Juliana)
ziao / ゼイアオ (zeiao) - CrystalPoolShipping (Carmine x Juliana)
sghr / スグハル (suguharu) - CandyAppleShipping (Florian x Kieran)
aktr / アカタロ (akatako) - ChefsKissShipping (Crispin x Lacey)
aocr / アオチリ (aochiri) - (Larry x Rika)
ppbt / ペパボタ (pepabota) - (Arven x Penny)
yrrr / ヤロルリ (yaroruri) - WaterLilyShipping (Milo x Nessa)

 

[sleepwick]

this is a rly good idea and is going to be rly handy for a lot of people i imagine!! ^^ if you need any help putting things together lmk, bc i know quite a few ships that have multiple names; (i dunno if i can help much if anyone is looking for the origins of ship names though)

 

[Welkamo]

this is a rly good idea and is going to be rly handy for a lot of people i imagine!! ^^ if you need any help putting things together lmk, bc i know quite a few ships that have multiple names; (i dunno if i can help much if anyone is looking for the origins of ship names though)

That would be super helpful!!! My knowledge only really extends to how Japanese ship names are made ft. is it DaiMikuNagi or MikuDaiNagi and which will get more reach

 

[sleepwick]

honestly im not too sure myself for how japanese ship names for poly ships tend to work since i dont see a lot of them unfortunately i only know of my own main one since obviously i talk about it in japanese occasionally for practice (so if it would act well in addition to the list for the record we call them seesawsoni. it is literally written as シソソニ/shisosoni rather than シーソーソニ mostly bc of length and bc i had seen someone do something similar when referring to another combination that involved shipping someone with both of the twins)

honestly, i think it'd probably be up to your own preference or personal portrayal of them that'd decide if it'd be ordered as daimikunagi or mikudainagi!

also while this knowledge would be covered by japanese shipping names in general, it might be good to do a list of the 4 letter abbreviations that people use for ships ? such as dnkb(leon/raihan) and the likes

 

[Welkamo]

Was searching for poly ships and 食事会組 (something like "food party group") seems to be popular for Grant/Valerie/Siebold. makes me want to come up with a kanji ship name for DaiMikuNagi

also while this knowledge would be covered by japanese shipping names in general, it might be good to do a list of the 4 letter abbreviations that people use for ships ? such as dnkb(leon/raihan) and the likes

I am a fake fan and as such I don't know the four letter ship names

 

[sleepwick]

makes me want to come up with a kanji ship name for DaiMikuNagi

you should, that'd be fun! also don't worry, the 4 letter names are pretty simple, just abbreviations of their japanese names, obvs polyships will be longer than the standard 4 letters: for example daimikunagi would be dimkng i believe, and people use dnkbnz for leon/raihan/piers!

obviously there is some overlap with these, particularly the case of kabu and raihan, where both have been shortened to kb in ship names due to raihan's japanese name being kibana (and obviously, kabu's is still kabu in japanese). i don't know if theres any possible way to indicate distinction that people make, since to be fair i haven't seen any kabu ships outside of him and raihan (kbkb)

it's quite bothersome because it's useful to use the 4 roman letters to avoid clogging up searches when people are looking for art, but it could also cause some confusion

 

[sleepwick]

i just thought i'd dump here a kinda extensive list of the 4 letter abbreviations i know of as well as the katakana for that ship name for reference~! (list in a wip so i'll probably edit it throughout the day if there's anything i forgot)

Spoiler

dnsn / ダンソニ - LionHeartShipping (Leon x Sonia)
kbnz / キバネズ - E-BoyShipping (Piers x Raihan)
rrsn / ルリソニ - AquaHeartShipping (Nessa x Sonia)
sgao / スグアオ - DipplinShipping (Kieran x Juliana)
nmao / ネモアオ - AcademyAceShipping (Juliana x Nemona)
ppao / ペパアオ - HerbaMysticaShipping (Arven x Juliana)
ziao / ゼイアオ - CrystalPoolShipping (Carmine x Juliana)
sghr / スグハル - CandyAppleShipping (Florian x Kieran)
aktr / アカタロ - ChefsKissShipping (Crispin x Lacey)
aocr / アオチリ - (Larry x Rika)
ppbt / ペパボタ - (Arven x Penny)
yrrr / ヤロルリ - WaterLilyShipping (Milo x Nessa)

you'll find very often that these names can be reversed particularly for m/m and f/f pairings based on dynamic, and a lot of jp fans of said pairings can be slightly picky abt name order. idk if it's worth listing them separately but if needed i can take note of some of them and add them to the list. i just kinda took note of some i've seen personally. there are some left out where i'm unsure of the shipping name if there is one and i'll go back and edit those if i find out what its called ^^

some notes i'd like to add is that regardless of dynamic theyre being portrayed with, i'm pretty sure aocr is always the go-to referral for larry/rika, because the reverse tends to be used for rika/juliana, so just keep that in mind and be cautious if you're searching for content of them since i'm aware that rika/juliana is a very uncomfortable pairing for many.

 

[Manqoba]

Geez, if the main list is the Incomplete Nightmare, I don't even know what you'd call this lol

There's a lot you could compile, but if you're interested in some sources and history:

• Neverending Romance hosts a partial archive of Japanese names. Many of them are the common four-letter portmanteau names that are still common in the fandom, like SatoKasu or SatoSere.
• Neverending Romance also hosts the untouchables, and all names under Old, Alternate, Inappropriate, Outlandish, and Questionable are considered alternates. Several of them are still free to be named to the main list.
• Finally, Neverending Romance has also occassionally listed more than one name for the same pairing on the main list for various reasons. The most I know of is six, for various pairings between Gary and his hands. Allegedly, they were hilarious if you were there, and wherever "there" was, it was too late to be there by 2006.
• Bulbapedia's Project Shipping is now largely defunct, but archived articles can contain a lot of information about alternative names, along with origins of those names. There's a list of articles here.
• Several older pairs have English shorthands, like AAML (Ash And Misty Love) for Ash x Misty and AAMayL for Ash x May. The practice died out by the end of gen 4. Ash x Misty also uses AAMRN, Ash And Misty Romance Novel, on some of its fanfiction. I'm not aware of any other pairing using an RN tag but there could be some.
• If you're interested in submitted names, accepted and rejected, there are thousands of them in the tumblr archives maintained by Luna Tiger and esm8m.
• In that same vein, 20 years of forum posts are still available on Serebii from the ship naming threads, versions 1 (link), 2 (link), 3 (link), and 3.5 (link). Bulbagarden's much larger equivalent from before my time was unfortunately purged and little of it was archived.

I might have some other posts with information sitting around somewhere, particularly from the naming process of major Ash ships. I was around in the fandom by the time Ash x Serena was being named (and I remember writing quite a bit about its naming history at one point), I was involved in organizing polling for the gen 7 ships, and I've been managing the list since gen 8 started (as you know lol), so if there's any kind of information you'd be interested in, let me know!

 

[sleepwick]

Several older pairs have English shorthands, like AAML (Ash And Misty Love) for Ash x Misty and AAMaL for Ash x May. The practice died out by the end of gen 4. Ash x Misty also uses AAMRN, Ash And Misty Romance Novel, on some of its fanfiction. I'm not aware of any other pairing using an RN tag but there could be some.

this was a super interesting list to me bc i've read up quite a bit on the history of shipping names in the fanbase but i've never come across this before! i think it's in part probably because i don't engage much with the anime, but i'm still kinda surprised

 

[Insanish Danish]

AAML (and the like) is such a nostalgic term! I remember so many of the shipping fics I read back in the day being labeled as such - AAML for Pokeshipping, DAML for Contestshipping and so forth. The "RN" names had fallen out of fashion by this point, I think, and from what I remember most of the Pokeshipping fics labeled AAMRN were from the early 2000s. I also recall a few Rocketshipping fics being labeled as JAJRN.

 

[Manqoba]

this was a super interesting list to me bc i've read up quite a bit on the history of shipping names in the fanbase but i've never come across this before! i think it's in part probably because i don't engage much with the anime, but i'm still kinda surprised

I've always known AAMayL from my days of bingeing AdvanceShipping fanfiction twelve or so years ago now lol, but it's definitely an old practice and it was outdated even then. I think it primarily existed for tagging on fanfiction.net, but even when PearlShipping was new, tagging fics with AADL was unheard of.

AAML (and the like) is such a nostalgic term! I remember so many of the shipping fics I read back in the day being labeled as such - AAML for Pokeshipping, DAML for Contestshipping and so forth. The "RN" names had fallen out of fashion by this point, I think, and from what I remember most of the Pokeshipping fics labeled AAMRN were from the early 2000s. I also recall a few Rocketshipping fics being labeled as JAJRN.

That makes a lot of sense for RocketShipping! It's one of the only other pairs that comes close to PokeShipping in terms of age. According to this long lost Angelfire page there's also BAMRN for GymShipping and GAMRN for EgoShipping, but it doesn't seem that PalletShipping ever got the same type of tag. Same page notes that AAMRN is the same tag as "Gakishipping, Twerpshipping, Pokeshipping, Willowshipping" if you're looking for those alternatives.

I also just feel compelled to give a special shoutout to the only fanfic I can find using the "JAJRN" tag published after 2004. It's called "Pokemon Goes to School" and it was published on Wattpad, which I just love because the newest JAJRN fic on ff.net is older than Wattpad itself.

 

[asiryn]

for alternate ship names, there's 3 that i know off the top of my head, where the ships have an official name, but it's rarely used in the actual fandom, which favors a different name:

• Matt (Aqua) & Tabitha is officially recorded as GaslightShipping, but it became far more commonly known as SeaMountShipping when ORAS came out
• Ash & Kiawe is officially ZclassShipping, but as a shipper of this ship, I've only ever seen them referred to as ZRingShipping (technically whenever I reblogged or posted about the ship on my own Tumblr, I did tag it with the official name bc I knew I was "supposed to", but I also tagged it as ZRing, which is the ship name that I actually associate with the ship; so if I ever mention the ship on one of these forum threads, I'll probably call it ZRing, lol XD)
• Kiawe & Mallow is officially NaheleAhiShipping, but from what I saw on tumblr at the time of gen 7, the shippers for the most part decided that they didn't like that name, and so started calling it SpiceShipping, and didn't care that the name was already "officially" spoken for; this was during the time when no one was at the helm for the official shipping list, and given how long the gap was before the Revival, it was starting to be considered obsolete, and since the original SpiceShipping (Ginger & Hazel, whoever they are XP) was pretty much never seen in the fandom, especially as compared to Kiawe/Mallow, adhering to the etiquette of the Official List was deemed to be unimportant.

i forget who it was (so, my sincerest apologies!!), but i remember someone mentioning that they called Clemont/Gary "GoldenOakShipping" instead of its official (awful, and hopefully soon to be phased out w/ the return of the Untouchables for being inappropriate) name, PimpNerdShipping; i remember being very enthusiastic about this potential alternative name, and said that I would likely start adopting that ship name as well, but I don't know if GoldenOakShipping is actually officially noted down on the list somewhere, or how widespread its usage is in the fandom at large.

And when I brought up on the main Revival thread the possibility of giving alternate names to ships who are doubled up on a singular name, using "PerfumeShipping - Brock & Erika / Erika & Misty" as an example, I stated that if the notion was approved, the alternate name that I would submit for Erika/Misty would be "CascadingRainbowShipping". iirc, Manqoba responded and said that if alternative names in this scenario were allowed, my proposed ship name would likely stand as being the "first to file", which is their policy for officializing rarepair ship names. but idk if CascadingRainbowShipping is at the point where it can truly be counted as a valid alternate ship name to PerfumeShipping for Erika/Misty (as someone did comment to say that, to their recollection, PerfumeShipping was more commonly associated with Erika/Misty, rather than with Brock/Erika).