Names

[octobr]

I find naming characters ~weird things~ completely stupid. The same is mostly true of foreign names unless the characters themselves have some degree of foreign backgrounds (or crazy parents). So a lot of characters I come up with are named things like. Timothy. Or Jonas. Or Steven.

My real secret? Math textbooks. There's always one around and they have this great long list of completely normal names in the front.

If there comes a need for a weird name, though, I'm looking at the parents as characters, not the character being named. Once had a little asian kid named Willoughby cause his parents were completely enamored with the english language and thus named him the most /english sounding thing they could find./

Otherotherotherwise I just scroll through behindthename's lists.

 

[Crazy Linoone]

My real secret? Math textbooks. There's always one around and they have this great long list of completely normal names in the front.

Whoa.

This is actually really useful.

 

[Teh Ebil Snorlax]

Like Darcy (Irish, 'dark')

"Dark" does not do Darcy justice. It comes from "Ó Dorchaidhe"; "descendant of the Dark One". Therefore, clearly, anyone named Darcy is secretly the love child of a Great Old One.

 

[Tailsy]

"Dark" does not do Darcy justice. It comes from "Ó Dorchaidhe"; "descendant of the Dark One". Therefore, clearly, anyone named Darcy is secretly the love child of a Great Old One.

Okay, that is at least ten thousand times more awesome. :D

 

[Flora]

If not, though, they'd come from either a name generator or one of my Pokemon characters.

Except for that weird fantasy thing I'm writing with elves and orcs and mermaids and other stuff.

For them I used medieval names in a particular language; elves have medieval English, orcs have medieval French (except for one but he's got an awkward explanation) and mermaids have medieval Spanish. Those are generally my favorite names :)

 

[Butterfree]

My general rule is I name characters the first thing that pops into my head, which is usually some very mundane, normal name. The few times I've gone to baby name sites, they've only reinforced my internal sense that it just feels right for this character to be named the first thing that popped into my head.

Though this doesn't apply to Pokémon in the QftL universe, whose names (thanks to this world's version of how Pokémon speech works) are all necessarily simply words or a couple of words stuck together. Their names are also nicknames that are a function of both the speaker and the recipient, not just the recipient; each Pokémon invents names at its own convenience for those other Pokémon it feels the need to have a name for, and only groups of mutual friends bother to synchronize what they call one another. This inevitably means that the names depend on the personality of whoever gave the name. In particular, the three main characters of Scyther's Story and The Fall of a Leader call one another "Razor", "Stormblade" and "Shadowdart" because they created those names when they were young and pretty immature, and at that time every Scyther (or, well, Descith, but that's not important) makes up generic names involving sharpness or speed or whatever they think sounds cool. Meanwhile, later on when they're not quite so excitable, they give more meaningful names that connect more interestingly to their feelings about the recipient.