Is Final Fantasy IV’s Barbariccia Named After… a Certain Organ?
Scarmigllione, Cagnazzo, Barbariccia and Rubicante all come from Dante’s Inferno, but have you ever wondered why these specific ones were selected among all the demons in that text to represent the four elements in Final Fantasy IV? I did, and I assumed it was random, but I’ve recently encountered a new theory that has me thinking it’s not.
I won’t say it’s common knowledge, exactly, that FFIV pulls from Dante, but it’s fairly well-known among the type of nerds who play video games and then look up the origins of the things in those video games. I actually explained the Inferno connection in one of my first posts on this site, but here’s the long and short of it: I don’t actually think the names of FFIV’s elemental fiends come directly from The Divine Comedy. Instead, I think someone who helped create this game got ahold of Devils: Their Origin and Their History, a 1904 book by the British historian James Charles Wall that includes the demons from Dante’s poem alongside monsters from folklore from around the world, and I say this because one of the other stories is about St. George slaying a dragon near the Serbian town of Golubac. According to a legend, mosquito-like insects grew from the dragon’s carcass. Although they’re more commonly called Golubatz flies today, Wall refers to them in his text as Golubaeser flies, and this would seem to be the origin of the name of one of the game’s primary antagonists, Golbez.
(BTW, Golbez’s connections to the Serbian legend go deeper than just the name, so if you haven’t read the original piece, all that “mouth of the dragon” stuff is there, and I won’t be getting into it in this “sequel” post.)
I have another reason to suspect that Wall’s book is where Square got the fiends’ names, and I’ll be mentioning it later in this piece, but I think the fact that it features both the Divine Comedy demons and the Golubac legend is proof enough for me. I’m not sure there’s another text in existence that mentions them both and that predates 1991, when FFIV was released.
Just looking at what the demons’ names mean in Italian, there wouldn’t seem to be much of a connection to the FFIV characters. Barbariccia’s name, for example, translates as “curly beard,” and that wouldn’t seem to make sense with the fact that the FFIV character is a sexy, mostly naked woman. Cagnazzo’s name means something like “nasty dog,” but he’s some kind of turtle thing. Scarmlglione’s name means something like “troublemaker” or “disheveled,” and I guess that sort of makes sense, seeing as how he’s undead and a bit of a trickster in that he attacks your party from behind. The only one that really seems to connect is Rubicante, since his name seems close to the Italian word for “ruby,” rubino, and he is indeed a character whose skin is red and who also wears the color red.
Or at least this is what I thought until I was contacted by Bluesky user Brienne, who has a theory for why there is, in fact, a connection — and I think she’s onto something.
Yes, Scarmilgione is the undead fiend, but perhaps the name wasn’t picked for what it means in Italian so much as the fact the first three syllables of his Japanese name, スカルミリョーネ or Sukarumiryōne, are the katana rendering of the English word skull: スカル or sakaru. Either the name was either chosen because his skull is visible or he was designed to have a visible skull to match his name.
It’s harder to see in the original pixel art, but more recent remakes show Scarmiglione’s skull face very clearly.
In the original post, I note that Cagnazzo’s name seems like it might be a pun on the Japanese kai (海, “sea”) but I dismiss it as a coincidence. According to Brienne, it’s not a coincidence, and its similarity to the Japanese word for “sea” is probably why it was selected for the fiend of water. Furthermore, on its own the Japanese word nazo (謎) can mean “mystery,” and if I want to make that work as well, I suppose I could point out how the the game eventually reveals that Cagnazzo has been impersonating the someone, and that fact explains why that character has been acting strangely. The kai part is stronger, I think.
The list of Dante’s Inferno demons as it appears in James Charles Wall’s Devils: Their Origin and Their History.
What’s especially interesting about Wall’s book is that he actually spells Cagnazzo’s name wrong: as Caynazzo rather than Cagnazzo, and if this were the text a Japanese-speaking person were looking at in order to come up with monster names, that misspelling would put it even closer to kai.
Rubicante is still the least mysterious of the three, especially because the English word ruby exists as a loanword in Japanese, ルビ or rubi. But then there’s Barbariccia, the fiend of wind. Initially, Brienne didn’t have an explanation for one. I thought I might, but I hesitated to go right into it because I didn’t want to be that guy on social media. Nonetheless, something did jump out at me while I was writing my piece on the linguistics of Zelda names. There’s a dragon boss in Zelda II — Barba, whose western name seems like a shortening of the original Japanese name, Barubajia (バルバジア) — who actually shows up again in Ocarina of Time, even though you might not realize is the same character because the name gets localized differently, as Volvagia. It reminded me of how in the original English localization of FFIV, Barbariccia’s name was written as Valvalis, presumably because someone looked at her Japanese name, バルバリシア or Barubarishia, and couldn’t make sense of it. I was actually surprised that the Zelda boss started as Barba and then became Volvagia, just because the latter name seemed weirdly close to the English words vulva and vagina both, and that seems like something a localization would want to avoid, especially in a Nintendo product. Anyway, given that Barbariccia/Valvalis is essentially a nude woman, I didn’t want to be gross and say “What if her name means VULVA?” But in a follow-up, Brienne came up with that exact conclusion.
I admit that seems like a bit of stretch, and no, that’s not a pun, but for reference’s sake, here’s how Barbariccia looks in-game.
She’s not fully naked and the organ in question is covered up, but she definitely stands out from the other fiends and also from the other female characters appearing in the game — even the dancing girls.
Now, Japanese has its own words for female genitalia, of course, but if you wanted to render the English word vulva in katakana, you might do it as バルバ, which are the first three characters of Barbariccia’s Japanese name. Today, you would probably be more likely to do it as ヴァルヴァor ヴルヴァ, however. If you will recall the mini Japanese lesson Fatimah taught me for my post on the Castlevania character Sypha Belnades, the sound we English-speakers associate with the letter V is not native to Japanese and does not occur in regular Japanese words. Fairly newly introduced, the character ヴ represents the V sounds in foreign words and names — Vivienne Westood is ヴィヴィアン・ウエストウッド, for example, while Jean-Claude Van Damme is ジャン＝クロード・ヴァン・ダム, and read this post if you want to know what that “equals sign” is doing in there. A native Japanese-speaker who has not mastered the V sound will just pronounce it like B, however, and there are certain foreign words and names that are rendered with the katakana associated with B sounds. For example, the Japanese Wikipedia page on violins writes it as ヴァイオリン but Yamaha’s Japanese website writes it as バイオリン. And that flexibility prompted FFIV’s original localizer to take the Japanese name バルバリシア (Barubarishia) and turn it into Valvalis — which, if Brienne’s theory is correct, would have put the name a lot closer to the vulva, possibly without the localizer realizing.
I sat on this for a few days and tried to think a non-vulva explanation for the character’s name, and the closest I could get was a possible link to the term リボルバー or riborubā, “revolver,” since Barbariccia’s main form of attack is spinning into a tornado. But I don’t think there’s enough of a connection, especially since I’d bet any notion of spinning wouldn’t carry over once the English word gets transliterated into katakana. (In case it’s not clear, revolvers get their name from the spinning mechanism that carries a single bullet in multiple chambers, but I wonder if many English-speakers even think about that connection.) That’s as close as I got. Unless someone can point toward a better etymology, the vulva explanation might be the best one we have, crass as it seems.
Until then, behold, the archfiends of the four elements: The blighted despot Skullface, the drowned king Sea Guy, the autarch of flame Ruddy and the empress of wind… Vulva.
EDIT: HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!
After posting this on Sunday, Project Goemon responded on Bluesky in with an alternate theory that I think merits a mention: that it’s not the similarity to vulva, specifically, but actually to Barbarella. While I’d already written about how the 1968 Jane Fonda movie may have influenced “striptease” scenes in Metroid and Mach Rider, I hadn’t considered how much the title character’s name sounds like Barbariccia’s. The katakana also comes very close, though not as close as that of vulva: バーバレラ or Bābarera. The film has Barbarella wearing all manner of sexy space costumes, none of which quite get at full-on bikini armor, I’m surprised to report. And a search for this style of attire didn’t turn up as much as I expected — and the one I did find is NSFW, as she’s showing full boob despite, so it’s actually even less practical than most bikini armor.
Miscellaneous Notes
Because the little clothing that Barbariccia does wear seems like it may be armor, I suppose it’s possible that the localizer felt Valvalis seemed like a decent approximation of her Japanese name at least in part due to the video game series Valis, which also stars sexy babes wearing not much clothing but also some armor, which is always a fascinating combo.
Valis heroine Yuko Aso wears more than Valvalis does, I’ll admit. (There’s a great episode of Retronauts about the phenomenon of bikini armor, for what it’s worth.) I don’t know where the Valis series got its name from. The name is written in katakana as ヴァリス. The 1981 Philip K. Dick novel Valis uses the same characters, but if there’s a connection, I’m not aware of it.
Final Fantasy V has two female bosses who are basically naked: Melusine, whose name we have an etymology for, and Calofisteri, whose name is still of an unclear origin. In Japanese, her name is カロフィステリ or Karofisuteri. If you can make anything meaningful from that, please tell me.
It never occurred to me until now that both the first Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy IV make the odd decision to have the fiend associated with earth be undead. Final Fantasy explains it a little more, with Lich being the source of tainted ground in the town of Melmond, and the heroes eventually fighting him in a cavern deep underground. There’s not any specific reason that Scarmigllione also had to be undead. In Final Fantasy Dimensions, the member of the four generals associated with earth is Asmodai, who is not undead as far as I remember.
In trying to find out how a Japanese speaker might be most likely to represent the word vulva in katakana, I came across a 1977 Go Nagai manga series that seemed close enough that I wondered if this was perhaps not a commonly used loanword over there. I don’t know if it was ever translated to English, but the Japanese title, Denso-jin Baruber (電送人バルバー), gets translated as either Teleporter Bulbar, Transmission Man Barubar, or Electronic Man Barba. I’ve seen it all three ways.
Of course, it’s a lot funnier if you image that his name is actually Vulva, regardless of what the first part it. I also found that the Darkwing Duck villain Taurus Bulba has a name that when rendered in katakana aslo gets very close.
Earlier, I said that Barbariccia’s name means “curly beard” in Italian, and that would seem to conflict with the fact that the FFIV character going by that name is female. I suppose there is a sense of how that might fit after all, and I probably wouldn’t mention it, but this post has already delved into the realm of the private parts. But beard can be slang for a woman’s pubic hair. There, I said it.