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now I'm gonna talk about names in Transistor.

the woes of having a (main!) character with no canon name. anyway, behind the cut is some rambling courtesy of me, and some things I’ve found in my excavating files.

maybe everybody knows this already, maybe not? IDK, just some things I found interesting I thought I’d share in case I’m not the only one just finding this stuff.

expect spoilers; avoid this if you haven’t played through to the end yet!

first off, I gotta say, I kind of love the creativity in this fandom with coming up with names for the man in the Transistor, even as frustrating as it might make tags or ship names.
for the sake of consistency, I’m just going to use ‘Transistor’ to refer to this character in this post.

as for what’s in the game files…
if you have the Steam copy of Transistor, you can look up these things yourself. be very careful not to accidentally edit any of these files! don’t frick up your game.
go into your Program Files folder, then head into Steam\steamapps\common\Transistor\Content\

if some of these images are too small, right-click and hit 'open in new tab’ or 'view image’

so I’m gonna look at subtitle/sound files first.

as an example, here’s some of the subtitle files during the part when Red is exploring the stage. shown is some of Transistor’s dialogue before, after, and during the fight with Sybil (note that dialogue is not necessarily in chronological order):

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Sybil’s line are in their own file (Sybil.csv); Royce and Grant’s lines are organised like this, too.

the titles (Stage_70, et al) correspond to the appropriate soundfile for that line.
Transistor is never named in any sound files or subtitles; his lines are just titled for the game stage.

the name “Boxer” seems to come from the game scripts.

here’s a bit from the Flashback scene, where Red is still in her full gown:

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so hey, there we are. “Boxer”, as we can see the script here has the triggers for the lines he says when you don’t approach the Transistor immediately.

worth nothing, however, in the script’s event titles…

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….he’s “the Boxer”

now I’m also going to point out something about Red’s name. in her soundfiles/subtitles (there are very few, and at least one is unused), as well as in the scripts, she’s just referred to as “Red”… but her animation files use “Muse” to refer to her.

and also the Process aren’t referred to by any of their in-game names in the scripts or animations:

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personally, I like to think maybe these are 'official’ names for the Process (either their actual designations, or maybe just what Royce titles them), given what we know them as in-game is just what Transistor has decided to call them.

I’m not 100% sure on the names for each of them; those are italicised.

the Camerata are only referred by their first names – Sybil, Royce, Asher, Grant. I haven’t seen any other references to any of them by any other names/titles so far.

all the name oddities are likely just the result of pre-production name changes, as it happens.
possible that Red was not intended to be named, either, and was going to be “[the] Muse” (to go with “the Boxer”); also possible they just hadn’t settled on a name until later and used “Muse” as a placeholder, or that originally her name was even going to be Muse. WHO KNOWS ¯\(°_o)/¯