Names

Names are funny things in works of fiction. Even in real life. Because for any name that seems out of the ordinary (whatever any given person thinks of as "ordinary") they sometimes seem silly the first few times around. But after becoming accustomed to said unordinary name, the novelty of it wears off and it seems perfectly normal.

A good (albeit nerdy) example was when I first played Final Fantasy 7 for the playstation back in something like middle school/early high school. The main character's name is Cloud. Cloud! What, are his friends named sky, earth, lightning, and atmosphere? It seemed like a stupid name, though I had to acquiesce that the name was almost certainly created in Japanese first, so maybe the fact that it just happens to be a word in english makes it seem like a funny name for me, but not for the creators. (Similarly, in the anime Dragonball Z, there is a character "Mr. Satan." I presume the creator wasn't thinking in English at the time, and didn't purposefully decicide to name a character after the Devil, though who knows, maybe it was intentional.) Nevertheless, play FF7 for a good 10 hours, or watch DBZ long enough, and these unusual names begin to seem almost normal.

The same can be said of names of almost anything. Races, towns, countries, they can all be named almost anything, and even peculiar names seem familiar after a while. So, as a person who needs to come up with countless names for characters, species, cities, etc, I find it extremely taxing to think up names that are fantasy-ish enough to not be things like "John, Will, Bob" but also not famously rediculous names like "Gr'naskh, Fleidk'huu'ura."

The problem is, almost any name seems silly at first, usually. Character names I think I'm getting the hang of (though I'm so particular about them, it takes me at least an hour to think up a single satisfactory name) but what about towns? Towns are hardly ever named with a random assortment of consonents and vowels, unless named after a person. But even taking some real life example, it just seems silly to name a slew of towns, say, [Person's Name]ville. Nor does it seems adequate to simply name a town after geological features like (real world example) "Little Rock," etc. And that's not even considering some truly bizarre real world town names, like "Celebration" (in Florida) or "Boring" (Oregon) or "Shoulderblade" (Kentuky).

In short, naming an entire nation's worth of small towns, large cities, rivers, roads, ... not to mention characters, is quite a chore. If anyone ever gets around to reading my blog again (all 3 of you who used to do so) please feel free to shout out some helpful suggestions.