Need help picking kanji for deliberately weird Japanese character name (also I can't read kanji)

So, my first visit back to the world building forum in like, 8 years. Yeah, title says it all, I need some help deciding on what kanji to use for one of my android character's Japanese alias. Her actual name is GUILTY (allcaps because I said so), but that doesn't exactly work as a realistic sounding human name (or even a barely realistic one, which is kind of more the feel I'm going for anyway, you'll see what I mean in a sec.) Since she looks half Japanese/European, I figured she'd go with a Japanese alias, and also because you can have a lot of fun with the meanings of Japanese names.

Buuut, while I wanted a name that at least sounds as though someone could use it as a name (my android characters all tend to have names that are based on things like emotions or abstract concepts, this is by design and on purpose, but most of them would be too strange to believably use in human society, hence the need for them to have aliases in most instances), I'm not all that interested in keeping things grounded 100% in reality. I like weird character names that fit their personalities or themes, so for this character, I went with the alias Shion Dai Ou Jou.

If the Do Don Pachi series translation of 'Dai Ou Jou' is to be believed, I am indeed aware that it means 'Peaceful Death.' This is on purpose. Remember what I said about liking bizarre names that fit the character's theme? Yeah, well this one is a deranged nutjob who has the special ability to make people kill themselves via a memetic logic virus that causes suicidal levels of guilt. So she's Shion Peaceful Death, and that's fine by me.

That part isn't the problem. it's the given name that's giving me some difficulty, specifically what kanji it should use to write it. I went with the name Shion purely because I just like the sound of it, but when I did a few searches to find out what it means and what Kanji it's written with, I found out there's like 2 dozen ways to write it and they all have wildly different interpretations. The most basic interpretation for it I know is 'Poem Sound', if my barely rudimentary Japanese is to be believed. There were a few other interpretations I came across, but the more searches I did, the more it became clear that some of these Japanese name meaning sites don't actually have a clue what any of the names mean. So I find that I can't trust the kanji they give for the name Shion because I don't know for sure if it's actually correct or not. I may be deliberately making up a weird name, but I'd still like it to be spelled correctly. (No, google translate is no help at all, as is often the case when you put names into it. Surprising exactly no-one.)

Oh yeah, I can't read kanji either btw. Like, at all. It all looks like alien hieroglyphs to me. "So why do you want to go with kanji then, you insane bastard?" you ask? Because of what I said about being able to have fun with Japanese names by what kanji you use for them.

So, here's the situation. Shion Dai Ou Jou is the character's alias, and I'm aware that the Dai Ou Jou part translates as something extremely weird and I don't care. Because of the insane logic my brain operates under, I'm splitting hairs about what kanji to use for the non-insane 'Shion' part, because I can't read kanji yet insist on using it because reasons. So, what are some thematically fitting interpretations for name Shion, given that it's an alias for a character whose special ability is causing people to really want to kill themselves, and said ability manifests visually very similarly to the 'blooming' phenomenon from Fatal Frame 4. And what are the kanji I'd use to write that?

Yes, I know I'm quite demented and my reasoning appears contradictory and bizarre to outside observers. Ignore that and please just focus on answering my request if you would. I'm not interested in getting into debates about appropriate thematic naming based on other people's opinions on same, I'm just here to figure out how to write my insane killer robot character's purposely bizarre Japanese alias because reasons. Those reasons are my own, so don't concern yourself with them. And anyhow, I'm really just asking you to come up with the non-bizarre part of the name and tell me how to write it.

And yes, the 'Poem Sound' interpretation is too standard and not thematic enough for my liking. If it wasn't, I wouldn't be here.

EDIT: And that's a lot of redlinks, and here's me too lazy to remember how to correct them.

Edited by OmegaKross on Aug 23rd 2020 at 2:45:11 PM

This page could be of help.

The real examples listed there include:

詩音: "Poem sounds"

詩温: "Poem warmth"

紫苑: "Purple garden"

至恩: "Highest gratitude"

潮音: "Tide sounds"

汐恩: "Tide gratitude"

子温: "Child warmth"

This link contains even more kanji that can be assigned to the name Shion.

Edited by Alycus on Aug 25th 2020 at 5:00:31 AM

Ah, sweet. I gave up searching after landing on my 4th 'baby names generator' page so I never found the page in that second link. Thanks.

From the looks of things, it seems like you can mix and match the kanji used for the name, but I don't know for sure? I still have very little idea how writing names with kanji works, since kanji can have different pronunciations depending on how the name is read and the same name as written in kanji can end up being pronounced in a bajillion different ways.

Can any Japanese speakers confirm the accuracy of the kanji on that second link? Me not being able to read it at all, I have an instinctual distrust of things I'm unable to verify myself. Though, the kanji for the 'sound' part of the name seems consistent and looks to be the same one used for some of the wikipedia examples, so I guess it's probably accurate. Need to be sure though, lest I end up like those people who get Chinese tattoos that they think say nice things and end up with 'little pig, big mistake' written on them instead.

I'm specifically looking at the kanji that mean 'bloom sound' (Peaceful Death Blooming Sound is most definitely an acceptably weird name that I'd go with for this character), and since the 'sound' part seems verifiable, I just need the one that looks like a square followed by an X with two horizontal strokes across it verifying. I tried following the link to the wikipedia page for that kanji, but I'm having trouble understanding it since a lot of what's on that page is written in either kanji or what looks like hiragana and my english speaking brain can't make sense of it.

EDIT: So, after doing some reading on wikipedia and some more google searching, I eventually found my way into japandict.com, where after some trial and error and playing about with the radicals search function, I was indeed able to verify the first kanji (little square followed by an upside down 'Y' with two horizontal strokes and a TV antenna on top of it) does indeed mean 'bloom' or 'blossom'. And if I've understood things correctly, is pronounced in onyomi pronunciation as 'shou'. Which when combined with the 'on' kanji would get 'shou'on' which I'm guessing just gets rounded down to 'Shion' when used as a name. Works for me. Said site also provided me the Kanji for Dai Ou Jou without me needing to do any google image searching for the cover of Do Don Pachi Dai Ou Jou.

Would the name also need its hiragana equivalent to clarify its pronunciation, or is there no other way to read 'Dai Ou Jou Shion' using the kanji that makes it up? Then again, I probably don't even need to bother, as I could just have her write it in Romaji instead to clarify the correct pronunciation.

Also, minor query, how do you stop words from redlinking when you run them together? It's annoying and I never did work out how to stop it even when I was a regular on this site.

Edited by OmegaKross on Aug 25th 2020 at 11:07:54 AM