In a viral post, a groom is debates using his full legal name, Optimus Prime, at his wedding, against his bride’s objections.
A Reddit poster has gone viral with a thread asking whether it would be appropriate or not to use his full, legal name, at his wedding. That wouldn’t normally be a hard question to answer, but the problem here is that the poster’s full, legal first name is Optimus Prime. The poster’s mother was a big fan of the Transformers and her husband was very indulgent in her interests, so they named their son after the robot leader of the heroic Autobots.
This has led to a major conflict between this now adult man and his bride, leading to the man taking to Reddit and the popular group, “AmItheAsshole?,” where posters share ethical conflicts in their life and ask the community to determine whether their actions were ethically right or wrong or, in this instance, whether the poster would be ethically wrong if they went through with their current plans.
The poster’s parents, while naming him “Optimus Prime” officially, didn’t want him to have too much trouble growing up, so they would always call him by a nickname growing up, and that nickname was the very normal “Tim” (from “OpTIMus”), so that very few people growing up actually new what Tim’s legal name was. Even other members of his own extended family assumed that Tim was short for Timothy.
Tim did not grow up a Transformers fan and so he never used his legal name at all, not during school or work. It would only come up at times when legal names were required (like at the start of a school year, he would have to let a teacher know that he went by “Tim” and not “Optimus Prime”). His close family members know, as do his friends. He gets some gentle ribbing when new Transformers movies come out, but in general, he’s avoided all that much ridicule over the years.
However, for his actual wedding ceremony, when the officiant says, “Do you, X, take Y as your lawfully wedded wife?” he wants the officiant to say “Optimus Prime.” His parents have both since passed away and he feels that this would be a nice way to honor them, while his bride believes that it will be seen by a joke, especially by her side of the family who don’t know about his legal name period.
Currently, the leading answer from the community is that neither he nor his bride is “wrong” here, as they both have compelling reasons behind their positions. A popular suggestion in the comments section has been to do a “How we met” blurb in the program for the wedding and explain his real name there, so people won’t be surprised when it comes up during the ceremony. Even there, though, people understand that it will cause a distraction no matter what, especially since the name wasn’t used on the wedding invitations (the actual wedding is in a few weeks).
Source: Reddit
About The Author
Brian Cronin
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CBR Senior Writer Brian Cronin has been writing professionally about comic books for over a dozen years now at CBR (primarily with his “Comics Should Be Good” series of columns, including Comic Book Legends Revealed).
He has written two books about comics for Penguin-Random House – Was Superman a Spy? And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed and Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellent? And Other Amazing Comic Book Trivia! and one book, 100 Things X-Men Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, from Triumph Books. His writing has been featured at ESPN.com, the Los Angeles Times, About.com, the Huffington Post and Gizmodo.
He features legends about entertainment and sports at his website, Legends Revealed.
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