Why is it called GUNNM?

[marco75]

The kanji are 銃夢, the romanji are GUNNM. Why?

I understand mixing English and Japanese looks cool, but why isn't the romanji one of the following?

JIMU
GANMU
GUNDREAM
GUNMU
GANDREAM

GUNNM, ending in triple consonants, just looks nonsensical and unpronounceable to me.

Would a Japanese reader get the pronunciation from the kanji, and ignore 'GUNNM'?
Do the GUNNM letters just look aesthetically pleasing?

When Japanese ask me about the name of my favorite manga, and I say 'GUNNM', they just hear 'GUNDAM'.

'Hyper Future Vision', on the other hand, I really like that, it really captures the essence of YK's universe.

[Sergio Nova]

The kanji are 銃夢, the romanji are GUNNM. Why?

Quoting Lewis Carroll in Alice's adventures in Wonderland: I haven't the slightest idea.
The Mad Hatter said that, so It is enough to me.

[TankTreads]

It's spelled GUNNM but pronounced "Ganmu". There are plenty of manga out there with awkward titles stemming from certain Kanji readings, especially when loanwords are involved. Take Blame! for example. It's a romanization of "Buramu". In other words, the title of the manga is not supposed to be the word "blame", but the onomatopoeia "blam". As in, the sound Killy's gun makes when it totally ruins someone's day.

[LumpyCat]

I stumbled upon this a few months back.

"Gunnm" is formed from the two kanji characters "gan" and "mu", which together mean "Gun Dream"--indicative both of the violence in Kishiro's world and of the often surrealistic images he uses. Although the name is properly pronounced "GAHN-mu", the transliteration "GUN-m" is also widely used.

Source: http://www.reimeika.ca/marco/gfaq.html#Q2

I really don't know why one of the ideas you suggested weren't used, it's just the way it is I guess.

[Cailon]

I don't know about the english BAA edition but my german edition contains a 2 page afterword by Kishiro, and the respective part says:

"Alita" directly derives from the designs of "Rain Maker", a longer, completed story. In the final version of this story, Alita appears as a side character. Mister Tomita, my editor, liked that character and suggested to draw a story with her as the heroine. The first designs included neither the scrapyard nor Zalem. Alita was a grown-up from the beginning (and had no pout by the way) and worked as a Tuned. Lou already appeared as her operator. In this story Alita actually uses a gun and in the showdown fell victim to a nightmarish psycho-attack, that resembled the "Ouroboros" (this led to the mysterious japanese title GUNNM, spelled "Gunmu", made up of "Gun" and "Mu" (=dream).

Btw, do you know this afterword? Otherwise I could translate it fully (if someone checks my grammar afterwards).

Also the combination of gun and dream is sometimes used in GLO, like in volume 6 it was one of the Panzer Kunst codes with Tzycrow: "Spirit" was to answer with "Freedom", "Sword" with "Scabbard" and "Gun" with "Dream".

[AR-99]

No need to go through the trouble, here's the afterword from the Viz reprint (not the original, because they kept out all the omake in that version). See 2nd paragraph:



The mention of the words gun and dream in LO v. 6 as part of the Panzer Kunst code I think is the only time that they are actually used together in the entire series.

[Cailon]

That was it, thanks.
When I first read it back in the days I was amazed that at first he didn't really know what Tiphares is/going to be. The whole story of Ketheres and Arthur he later constructed around this "scrapyard with a sky city" feels so logical as if he had it all in his mind from the beginning. It's not like "oh, yes, and there also exists this kind of magic which can do that, we've never heard of it before because... well it's so secret." Much of it is hard-facts or hard-scifi theories and it all adds up.

@Gun dream: You're right... well dreams or, at least the subconsciousness plays a role more often, the gun could maybe be seen as a metaphor for all the fighting that's going on? Pretty farfetched...

[Martin]

I always thought knowing that the real title was "Gun Dream" was just incredibly cools sounding, and not knowing Japanese, I just accept that Gunnm is pronounced gun-mu. Kind of the same deal for all of the oddly translated names and what not I got by reading the Viz monthlies...which is cool, because YK made fun of them with a bit of a wink wink way back in book 8 or 9 i think.

When I read the issue where it is revealed that Gun-Dream was the Panzer Kunst salute/greeting of the day, I was pretty well chaffed. Nice pay off, after a long wait.