ORIGINALLY WRITTEN: March 2023
DISCLAIMER: This post may have inaccuracies despite the research done into the subjects at hand. I am not Asian-American, and am simply going off of research I have conducted.
CONTENT WARNINGS: Mentions of Racism, War
Dala is an interesting character, as are all the Think Tanks, because nothing is known about them prior to their transition from a human body to a robotic entity (or there is information, but it’s very little).
That said, I wanted to share my thoughts about who Dala was prior to her “abandonment” of humanity (for a lack of better phrasing).
NOTE: I headcanon Dala as nonbinary/fem-aligned, so the name listed in this post is her chosen one.
It’s made clear that Dala is not her actual name:
After a severe dispute with Klein, Mobius hacked his colleagues’ shells, causing them to forget large portions of their personality and substituting their name with a new one, reinforcing the recursion loop already programmed before. Furthermore, he hacked the databanks of his colleagues, reprogramming their chronometers, geometers and cartography programs, essentially erasing their sense of time and history. In the end, his tampering created mangled, disjointed versions of his former colleagues. Dala, as we come to find out, is a shortened form of Mandala, which means ‘circle’ in Sanskrit, another looping and infinite figure which follows the naming convention of the other members of the Think Tank.
Regarding Dala’s name, this is a sensitive matter and I want to do my best to explore the nuance.
During the Great War (Fallout), racism against Asian-American citizens was rampant. The lore is as follows, specifically focusing on Big MT and not the United States as a whole:
The Big MT Research and Development Center was originally built inside a cave system running underneath a large mountain peak that gave it its name. The goal of the facility was to build the future of mankind and create the technology of tomorrow without restraints, either moral or technical. It welcomed some of the most gifted pre-War scientists, who plumbed the depths of many experimental technological fields. The research conducted within was as groundbreaking as it was unethical, conducted in part on living humans (both American volunteers and Chinese-American detainees). Big MT even included a concentration camp of its very own, safeguarded by lucrative contracts with the US Army, such as the X-42 giant robo-scorpion.
This references real, historical events from the United States:
Japanese internment camps were established during World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt through his Executive Order 9066. From 1942 to 1945, it was the policy of the U.S. government that people of Japanese descent would be interred in isolated camps. Enacted in reaction to Pearl Harbor and the ensuing war, the Japanese internment camps are now considered one of the most atrocious violations of American civil rights in the 20th century.
Even as it stands, war aside, unconscious name bias is an incredibly real thing that marginalized groups face on a daily basis across the world. In a time like that in which Dala exists, this would be especially true.
NOTE: This doesn’t necessarily imply that Dala’s chosen name is erasing aspects of her multi-varied culture! Dala was born in America, and she can be both a person of color and American and identify with both. Many Asian-American parents will either give the child two names (one white, one non-white/ethnic), or give a white first name and an ethnic surname.
That being said, I personally feel that the name Dala would have born with (and most likely kept through her employment as coming out could have been a risk in of itself, if we really want to try and take a Lavender Scare approach to everything) is Lynn Bāo.