#names and naming

[aeide-thea]

okay, question: are nicknames that shorten someone’s full name to one of its unaccented syllables ever actually a thing outside of badfic, or…?

[rrcraft-and-lore]

You want to up your fantasy naming game and just come up with stuff that SLAPS, goes HARD, and chills?

Read more mythology and study the naming.

Vaikartana - Sanskrit: The Son of whose Rays Cut the Darkness (HARD!)

Sun Wukong (the monkey king): The Monkey Awakened to the Emptiness. (Slaps)

Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli - Mesoamerican: The Lord of the House of Dawn (Hard)

[gayhawkelatehomicide]

Names

Honestly I... Don't know what this is. It possessed me and now it's here. Uhh I know that headcanoning Anders a name other than yanno, Anders, isn't everybody's cup of tea, so fair warning? It's not like I plan to have anybody call him that, I just wanted to think about what this conversation might look like and the name bit me. So here, have a handers that I wrote in like 20 minutes on my phone.

***

Word Count: 1339

Rating: G

Additional Tags: Hawke is an adorable dork with a heart of gold and no one will take this from me, cat bf and dog bf are the best kind of relationship, genuinely could not tell you where this came from, names and naming, the importance of calling a thing by the correct name so as to be able to recognize and understand it, boyfriends being soft about stuff that hurt a long time ago

***

Hawke walks in already complaining. Anders smiles and puts down his quill to stretch his aching hand, feeling a twinge of annoyance in the back of his head at being interrupted. He recognizes it for what it is—not entirely his own reaction, but not entirely that of his passenger—and ignores it. He was going to go to bed soon anyway. By the time Anders gets turned all the way around, Hawke has leaned his staff in the corner and is peeling out of the top layer of his robes.

"You know nobody in this entire city but you calls me by my given name? Seriously, think about it! With most of the citizenry, especially the ones in Hightown, it's 'Champion' all day long. 'Oh Champion, my brother's caravan is late' and 'Champion please, you have to help my mother,' and 'Dear Champion, my cat went up that tree and can't get down. Again.' It's as though they've all forgotten I have a name instead of just a title." He unties the fastenings on the leather cuirass he wears between his outer robe and the sweat-stained under-layer. The poor clasps creak protest at Hawke's enthusiasm.

"And I know at least some of them know it! Fifi de Launcet used to simper at me when we first bought the house and Mother was trying to get me married off respectably. Sure, a few of them probably think it's a compliment or some nonsense, but you'd think at least Lady Elegant would call me Garrett every now and then. If not in the course of business, then maybe when I'm poking around her stall doing something irritating."

He bends at the waist to unlace his boots, presenting Anders with a lovely view of his ass as he struggles with laces that he obviously tied while they were still wet. Hawke has been through four sets of laces for those boots in the past few months because he's too impatient to let them dry before jamming his feet in them and running off to do whatever it is he does when he's out of Anders's direct line of sight.

"Most of our friends don't use my given name either, did you notice? Varric calls me Hawke like it's a title more than Champion, which is *fine*," he manages to get one boot off, mostly by sheer brute strength. The sock comes with it. "Even Aveline doesn't three-name me when I'm misbehaving, just says," and here he drops into a worryingly accurate imitation of Aveline. "Hawke, if I catch you trying to breathe fire in the Lowtown market one more time, I swear-!"

The other boot comes loose with enough force to nearly knock Hawke off his feet. He catches himself with all the grace and poise of a moderately sized druffalo, then grins triumphantly over his shoulder at Anders, holding up the boot. The look on his face is incredibly similar to the look his mabari wears when he drops dead vermin (or, on one memorable occasion, a mangled burglar) at his master's feet. Anders applauds politely.

Hawke kicks the boots into the corner by the fire and starts on his greaves and bracers, still talking. "Hell, even the villains and other assorted bastards whose teeth we kick in regularly call me 'dog lord' or 'mage' or something equally obvious. You'd think at least one of them would've done his research. Evets, maybe, of Evets' Marauders. You remember them, don't you love?"

Anders does. Distinctly. He remembers wrapping Isabela in shield after shield as her quick fingers teased apart rows of traps while Hawke traded bolts of fire and sneering retorts with the blood mage on the other side of the bluff, and Aveline kept her shield between the mages and that terrifying longbowman. He remembers the reek of burnt flesh and armor and the despair in the eyes of the guardsmen, and the way they'd rallied around their captain and Hawke. He remembers the way more of them died, pinned with arrows or rent apart to fuel the blood mage's spells. Anders makes a noncommittal noise, which Hawke takes as an agreement.

"You'd think maybe that guy would've learned my name, right? I mean, he spent what, three years tracking me down? Some kind of criminal he was, I've been in the same place the whole time, but it's not like I care." Hawke sets the last pieces of his armor in a pile on the desk and flings himself diagonally across the bed. His curly black hair fans out around his head—it's getting deliciously long now—and he throws an arm over his eyes. The other one continues gesturing emphatically.

"Shit, even Carver just calls me 'brother' most of the time. The last letter he wrote home barely sounded like he was talking to me at all, just a quick update and one of his sullen little 'try not to get yourself killed too stupidly' things at the end. What is this resistance to using my given name, huh? It doesn't make any sense. I have a good name, I think. Mother made plenty of mistakes, but that wasn't one of them. Why does Kirkwall hate my name?"

Anders is gripped by a strange impulse. Later, he'll pick it apart looking for Justice's influence, but in the moment all he's thinking about is Hawke's running complaint and how the names a person wears can come to define them.

"Valery," he blurts before he can stop himself, then clenches his mouth and eyes shut.

Hawke makes an inquiring noise from the bed. The sound of sheets shifting, presumably as he sits up. "What was that, love?"

Anders grapples with a long-kept promise to himself for a long moment before giving up and sighing. He's said it already. Too late to take it back now. He might as well explain. Besides, Hawke already knows every terrible thing about him. What's a name, compared to that?

"Valery," he repeats. "It's the name my mother gave me. She was from the Anderfels; wanted to name me after her brother. My father didn't like it much, but he always let her have her way. Well, almost always."

The old bitterness threatens to swamp him, so Anders forces a smile onto his face and looks up at Hawke, still on the bed, looking stricken. "I've no clue why the templars didn't make a note of it, but when they took me to the circle they claimed they didn't know my name, just that I was half-Ander. I've been Anders ever since."

Hawke is out of bed and across the room in the space of a few heartbeats. He kneels on the floor at Anders's feet. Takes his hands in his own. "Oh, love. I'm sorry. I didn't think... Do you want-?"

"No, it's fine," Anders shakes his head. "It hasn't been my name for a long time." He squeezes Hawke's fingers, feeling the callouses and old breaks that didn't set right, the faint tremors that tell of using too much force magic without a focus. The way this city weighs on him day after day, expectations pressing, thousands of lives depending on his actions, is always evident in his hands. He always claims they don't bother him, but Anders sees the way he grasps his cup more gingerly on cold mornings than he did years ago, and he knows how quickly a hand massage turns Hawke into a puddle of warm goo. Anders squeezes Hawke's hands, feeling his smile warm into something genuine.

"Valery." He says it so carefully, the same way he's treated every fragile broken-glass part of Anders since the moment they met. The old name sounds so beautiful in his voice, and with his big dark eyes turned up like a sinner in prayer, he looks like a penitent angel. "It's a beautiful name, love. Thank you for trusting me with it."

Anders really can't be blamed for knocking them both to the floor in his rush to kiss Hawke as thoroughly as physically possible.

[yeepof]

I understand that tall men are our POV characters, but surely being like a foot taller than everyone around them would have some occasional consequences

[mintbees]

if i was a popular minecraft youtuber id just tweet "hey guys stop drawing shipping fanart of me and my friends/coworkers, i only fucked one of them and seeing me paired with anyone else is kinda weird and crosses my boundaries" and then i'd turn my phone off

[j0die101]

(April 12th 2024)

No medical confirmation or psychological evaluation necessary. The law will be active by the 1st of November this year.

First names can also be changed while changing gender. One all inclusive package with minimum effort.

[dandylion-s]

Bastille was right. How am I gonna be an optimist about this. Also right about eh eho eho.

[tearosepedall]

EDIT : THIS IS A MEME DO NOT TAKE IT SERIOUSLY (and seriously just don’t be Rude????? Like wtf lol)

[aeide-thea]

so i googled kristin sue lucas and it turns out she's an artist and the name refresh thing was something she actively conceptualized as an art piece:

Refresh in all its various forms, is a meditation on the technologically-mediated body. Lucas' appropriation of the language of everyday experiences of the web highlights a shift in the relationship between the internet and embodied experience. Lucas's 'refresh' signals that the two are no longer simply intertwined, but that the logic and mechanisms of the internet structure the offline world.

which has me a little 🧐 at the way we're all passing around that decontextualized transcript of the hearings as though she were just some wacky lady with a goofy idea?? like obviously the line between 'performance piece' and 'living yr life in a way that's unusual' is a potentially fuzzy one and at some level any maverick is behaving that way on purpose, and wacky ladies with goofy ideas also deserve serious respect for the vision and courage of their self-actualization, don't get me wrong! but i guess i just do think it does artists a disservice to act as though their art is just, like, an inevitable uncurated expression of their personal emotions and impulses, rather than a deliberate creative work??

[mias-back-from-the-dead]

tbh i think the funniest phenomena that's been happening in the last couple years is "youtuber, having gone too deep into the research hole, has been made an investigative journalist against their will"

[housederiva]

My housemate's cat came into my room while my dictation was on...

[aeide-thea]

NB: Kristin Lucas is a Cooper Union–educated artist, who staged the above 'courtroom intervention' as a deliberate performance that 'plumbs the precariousness of identity, both bodily and psychic, in the Internet age' (source).

in 2007, a lady named Kristin Sue Lucas filed to legally change her name from “Kristin Sue Lucas” to “Kristin Sue Lucas”. She appeared in front of a judge in california to petition her case. this is the transcript of her court hearing

[annabelle--cane]

vampirism poses the question "what if there was a fundamental, horrible, unending well of want in your soul that, if truly satisfied, would lead to great pain for all those you hold closest and, in turn, their absolute and total revilement of you?" and naturally as a person with no problems I don't relate to this in any way at all.