I noticed that in some visual novels (and presumably other anime, comics, and games) that the titles of certain things such as a magical item in the story might have two “titles” attached to them.
For example, in this scene in the visual novel Fate/hollow ataraxia,
https://imgur.com/a/jz0pZNI, the main text says “後より出でて先に断つもの” while the smaller text above says “アンサラー”. In [this context](https://typemoon.fandom.com/wiki/Fragarach), these two lines are names or descriptions for a weapon. Also, I’m not sure if this is the same thing, but I’ve seen something similar in other contexts where the soundtrack for a game might have two “titles” such as “フォールオブフォール ～ 秋めく滝”, which is the name of a soundtrack from the Touhou franchise
The closest thing I found was [Ruby characters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character), which seem like the same format, though Wikipedia says that’s usually used for explaining pronunciations and in this context it’s more like two distinct titles referring to the same thing.
My questions are
1. is there a name for this practice?
2. is there any history or explanation for how this practice came about? Is this something unique to Japanese / the ACG subculture?
3 comments
Welcome to the world of [gikun](https://morg.systems/Gikun)
Also shameless plug: https://twitter.com/OddFurigana this might be fun to look at
>Also, I’m not sure if this is the same thing, but I’ve seen something similar in other contexts where the soundtrack for a game might have two “titles” such as “フォールオブフォール ～ 秋めく滝”
It’s a different thing.
“Ruby text” in general is called *furigana*.
u/morgawr_’s links look interesting… never heard of *gikun* before!