Volume 9

This time, I'm going to talk about where the characters' names are from.

• Shiki: The main characters in a lot of my works are named after seasons, so this time, partly as a way to put them all together, I went with Shiki, which means "four seasons". Incidentally, my early drafts had him as Ziggy. This would later become the Demon King's name, and it comes from David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust". That's the album I'm always listening to when creating this story. You might like to try listening to it while you read EDENS ZERO.
• Rebecca: Shiki is always going on about "friends, friends", so I thought of Rebecca, the rock band, whose most famous song is "Friends".
• Weisz: I think I named him "wise", because it meas smart or something.
• Pino: I asked myself, "How can I make EMP sound cute?" and this is what I got.
• Homura: I gave her a name meaning "flame" because I wanted the name to make people think of red and fire.
• Sister Ivry: Just because. I liked the sound of it.
• Valkyrie Yuna: I wanted to make her a darker-skinned character with a clasically Japanese name.

Witch and Hermit have names, too. You'll see those in the main series eventually.

• Mosco: He had this mysterious catchphrase of "Moscoy" first, and the name came from that.
• Elsie: There was a character named Erza in my last series, and I tweaked her name. The "-sie" also sounds like the "sea", because she's a pirate.
• Justice: Because he has a strong sense of justice. Incidentally, this is a code name, not his real name.
• Labilia: Because it sounds kind of like "lovely".
• Drakken: From a retro video game.
• Jinn: From a wind spirit.

I'll tell you about the other characters some other time.

As you can see, my naming sense is pretty haphazard, and is mostly based on what I'm feeling at the time. That's caused me a lot of regret, but I always have so many characters so if I'm honest, it stems from me not wanting to sweat it!

—Hiro Mashima