#i think their names might be anglicised differently idk tbh

[unhavoc]

An interview with Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, you can read it here

[nonepizzawithleftglitter]

I randomly saw your blog and its Ayala-themed mission statement, and I was greatly amused! I believe his only spoken words in the entire series were "Right here" right? (I could be misremembering) but brother was there from day one!

I suppose they never gave him a canonical given name, though I understand the Ayala (/Aiara) surname is Basque. Got any headcanons??

I'm glad I could amuse you. I actually have slacked off on the Ayala posting for a while, gotta get back to that...

He speaks a handful more words in the series. But only roughly a dozen overall, spread over four episodes. (Tbh I wasn't fully sure if that information was correct, I had to cross check with memory alpha.)

While they never gave him a name in canon, the fandom did that for them.

He is pretty much ubiquitously referred to with the first name "Mike". (Greg/Gregory/Gregor used to be common a while ago too parallel to Mike, but has since largely dropped out of use.)

Mikel/ Mixtel would be the basque form of Michael/ Mike (according to Wikipedia). But I'm not sure if it can be shortened to Mike?

And I do hope we've gotten over anglicising names by the end of the 24th century!

(In my own culture shortening names isn't really a thing anymore? If you meet someone named Mike it's likely that that is their legal name, not some variant of Michael so idk how it works.)

But anyways, it is such a deeply entrenched fandom that has existed for longer than I have been alive that I have never thought about it before you asked!

But now I definitely imagine Mikel 🙈 so thank you.

This also got me thinking: often we see new federation colonies that are largely influenced by specific cultures, such as Chakotay's home colony. (There are probably also those with a dozen different species and several dozen human subcultures.)

But it is completely possible that Ayala could be from a majority or even fully Basque colony.

It's also not totally inconceivable that another Basque man might have ended up with the last name Torres (Portuguese/ Spanish/ Katalan according to Google so not far geographically). Especially by the 24th century.

What I am saying is, what if Ayala and Torres are from the same colony? Specifically Kessik IV, B'Elanna's canon, (almost) completely human home colony.

I also have a (sorely neglected) sideblog (@the-ayala-archives) for every piece of Ayala content I can find to collect it, because tumblr search sucks. Most of it is my own stuff though because there just is not a lot out there.

Also thank you for the ask!