how nogizaka 3rd generation address each other

[dubori]

click here for a clearer version of the chart

studying nicknames allow us a glimpse into the dynamics of a group. in this essay i will

overall notes

• most of them don't add the suffix ~chan when referring to each other anymore. they have become casual enough to comfortably drop that. also, the more you get to know some people, the more their images just don't warrant a cute ~chan following their names. exhibit 1 and 2: yamashita and yoda.


• yamashita mizuki: yama is the roughest nickname someone who literally makes a living out of being azatoi could get and it's just funny. other azatoi members are referred among their peers as manattan, macchun, or mikukyun but here we have yama, sometimes yamashita, and almost never mizuki. except for hazuki, no one in 3ki refers to yama with her first name even though a bunch of them used to back in the early days. if you ask them to address her with ~chan or as mizuki, a lot of them would probably physically cringe. this gap between the way she's perceived among her closest friends and her public idol persona makes her such an interesting person. like you could never get enough of her insane ass <3


• yoda yuuki: similar to yama, yoda's crazy image means that she is strictly referred by her last name - yoda - without the ~chan . even hazuki, who has a habit of referring most of 3ki by their first names, almost always uses yoda. while yama does get referred as mizuki-chan by some senpais, yoda is just yoda-chan to them. except for, you guess it, nishino nanase . nanase is the only person in nogi i have ever seen regularly refers to yoda as yuuki.


• sakaguchi tamami: in contrast to yama and yoda, it feels unnatural and mean not addressing some people by their first name or cute-sounding nicknames. tamami is usually addressed either with her first name - tamami - or its shortened form, tama . while she was called 'otama' at school, which is an old-sounding nickname, the fact that she is always refered to with her first name in 3ki reflects how 3ki have generally viewed her as their sweet little sister, one even younger than renka or riria.


• ozono momoko: another very sweet and pure person. she's a momoko to everyone, peers, senpais, or kouhais. ask a fan who are the centers of nigemizu and they will answer yodamomo, and not yodaozono or yuukimomo. i find it adorable that whenever yoda refers to herself and momoko in the same sentence, she will refer to them as 'yuuki and momo-chan', which signifies the unique bond that they share as the first senbatsu centers from 3ki.


• mukai hazuki: she's in the same category with tamami and momoko - so sweet and pure you don't have the heart to call them with last names or rough-sounding nicknames. she's either hazuki or hazu and most of 3ki alternates frequently between the two names, maybe because hazu flows easily out of your mouth.


• ito riria, iwamoto renka, and nakamura reno: i group riria, renka, reno together because they all get the first name treatment 100% of the time and they're generally light-hearted, easygoing people. their surnames are popular surnames and calling them with their surnames is like putting a thick wall between you and them so people would generally try to avoid that. of course their personalities do factor in them being addressed by their first names otherwise they will be addressed like yama.


• kubo shiori: she's a special case because most address her by her last name - kubo but some do call her by her first name, shiori. to make matters more complicated, among the ones that call her kubo, some add ~chan and some don't. there're also apparently no clear patterns as to why some of them would add or drop ~chan at times. momoko uniquely calls kubo kubo-sama but the last time they interacted publicly was in 2021 so that nickname could just have been a phase. in fact, in 2021, a lot of 3ki liked to jokingly call her 'kubo-sama' or 'shiori-sama'. kubo has always wanted to be called shi-chan but 3ki, somewhere along the way, somehow has collectively ditched that nickname for her. as a result, the only people that call kubo 'shi-chan' are 4ki's mayu and seira (maybe kaki too).


• umezawa minami: most of 3ki just call her ume. ume is a nickname that just flows so easily out of your mouth that i have to admit sometimes i forget her first name is minami. many 3ki referred to her as 'minami' at first (without the ~chan because it coincided with hoshino's nickname) but when bananaman began to call her ume, most of them followed suit. and somehow it really fits her like the way yama and yoda fit their respective owners. hazuki, momoko, and ayatie still refer to her with her first name though ayatie does alternate between minami and ume.


• sato kaede: we're entering the realm of people with more complicated nicknames. den-chan is such a good nickname and we have momoko to thank for it. a lot of 3ki has dropped the ~chan and just go with den. nevertheless, ayatie and reno (sometimes even renka) still refer to her as kaede as they have been since the early days. momoko, the creator of the popular nickname, switched to denjirou at some point but i couldn't remember when exactly and why she did it.


• yoshida ayanochristie: she took me the longest to finish her chart because the way 3ki refers to her are all over the place. while ayatie is how fans and most nogi members call her, within 3ki, only yama refers to her as such. the majority of them simply uses a shortened form of her first name - aya - with or without the ~chan. momoko, den, and tamami, perhaps because they're in the same friend group, all refer to her as christie. renka and kubo refer to her with her last name - yoshida. this is probably because of ayatie's habit of referring to herself as yoshida when she talks in third person, rather than her getting the last-name treatment because of her image.

s'more little things

• hazuki has the tendency to refer to everyone with their first names. she's the only person in 3ki i've heard ever referring to yoda with her first name. she's also the only one that still actively addresses yama as mizuki. a lot of other 3ki did the same thing at first, then they switched to yamashita, and finally settled at yama. the fact that hazuki still sticks to calling her mizuki obviously speaks to a special relationship between them. remember when yama and hazuki celebrated yama's birthday together last year in hazuki's nogiobi showroom? they're such a lovely pair.


• momoko addresses her closest friends in a different way. she calls renka and tamami rentan and tamatan, gives den-chan a whole new nickname, and refers to ume as minamin. in reciprocation, tamami also calls her momotan.


• riria tends to add ~chan to the girls' names with no distinction. whatever inside her that drives her to use the boku pronoun is probably responsible for this habit as well.


• kubo has this special nickname for riria - riri - that only she uses. i have no idea where that comes from but kubo often alternates between this and the usual riria everyone else uses.

time travelling

• i rewatched a bunch of 3ki contents from the early days (bingo, nogichuu, super spontaneous showrooms) to see how the ways they address each other have evolved over the years.


• unsurprisingly, around 2017, there were a lot of ~chan being thrown around.


• i once thought that 3ki used ayatie at first before switching to aya but turned out they were all calling her by her first name in 2017. somehow along the way yama became the only person that uses ayatie among 3ki.


• one of the thing that surprised me the most after watching the showrooms from 2017 was that 3ki actually did use the nickname shi-chan for kubo, in particular, yama and renka. it has been so long since i've ever heard anyone of them even utter that nickname i didn't even recall it was actually being used for a while.


• talking about yama and renka, 2017 was a funny time because if you tell them to call each other like they did in 2017, they would gargle. what do you mean renka used to call yama mizuki? and yama called renka rentan too??


• not related to the topic at hand but: 3ki showrooms in 2017 are one of the best thing to ever happened because of how casual and unscripted they were. sorry 4ki and 5ki fans you will never experience a bunch of teenagers huddling in front of the camera just talking about whatever and behind them lay the big-ass asahinagu poster on the wall. the showroom where they surprised yama on her 18th birthday always got me good (╥﹏╥). why did nogi llc take unscripted showroom away from us...