#tagsareweird imtrying names story googletranslate

[thebaneofevil]

Names?

What’s going on y’all! I’ve had a sort of weird time trying to go through my normal naming conventions and remembered about some of my V1.0 characters and names. I want to focus on a couple right now, but I’ll open the topic up later.

So, with these characters, I was still young and dumb at the time of their creation. I’ll focus on my first character for now: the hero, Energio. Now, how does one pronounce that? I like to pronounce it as “ehner-zhi-oh”. Does it mean anything? Where did it come from? Energio was one of my initial hero characters to be created. I had this idea that having 3 hero characters was cool, so I tried adapting 2 new characters (alongside Orbis) to encompass a “power” type and “speed” type. My speed type character went through many iterations, so that might be a whole post in and of itself, honestly. But my power type has had only 2 major changes.

Again, this was the “power” type character. So, I envisioned him immediately with an axe of sorts. But I also wanted the character to be a little more unique than just “big axe man go swingy swingy”. This created a really dumb ass weapon that was half axe, half katana. Yep, I created a ninja man who had an axe. It’s terrible to think about, but if you look at my old school concepts, you’d see where I was heading with it. I won’t explain too much right now, because that process involves something I want to explain later on, but you’ll most likely see it.

Names! Right. Again, stupid kid, so naming was hard for me. I wanted it to be symbolic, so the easiest thing for me to do was to go straight to google translate and see if there as something in there that I could use. I translated the word “power”, if I’m remembering correctly, to several different languages. Nothing stood out, until I hit upon “energia”. I don’t remember what language this was (I should probably look it up at some point, it might be fun to go through that) but i knew I had struck gold. Because my character was a male, I felt that naming him “Energia” would be a little confusing. This was around the time I was watching Clannad, which if you guys don’t know, has 2 characters, Tomoyo and Tomoya. One of my foreign friends watched it as I did and she would frequently get confused by the names, Tomoyo was a girl and Tomoya was a guy. Weird, right?

Anywho, I decided to change the “a” to an “o” just so people like my friend wouldn’t get confused by strange names. So, that’s one of my characters. Energio was concepted and named with a different language. Fun stuff, yeah? Looking at my second character here, it’s a lot easier to see where I was coming from with this name. This character is a villain who has fire abilities. I easily looked up different ways to say fire in different languages (I had definitely upgraded my way of naming by this point). I happened upon the french term flanbeaux. Does anyone know what a flambeaux is? It’s a torch! Like, specifically, a burning torch, ya know, a stick with fire on the end of it.

The fun thing about v1.0 Flambeaux (I have actually changed his name and design since then, but I’ll just refer to him as such for now) was he had this weapon that allowed him to use different elemental abilities. His concept was purely to counter Orbis with pure overwhelming ability. I’ve toned it down since, but at the time, even though his main power was fire, I knew that Flambeaux was a temporary name. It did stay for far longer than it should have, but that’s the legacy, so it were. 

And now, I open up this topic. I have since changed the way I name characters, trying to be less symbolic. Only because I feel like it’s kind of overdone now? If that makes sense? Anyway, how do you name characters? Do you just look up random character generators, or just start sounding out a word and whatever sounds nice you go with? I’d be interested to know, because I’ve recently found that borrowing a unique name from a show or game, maybe changing it up a little bit, and using it in leu of any weirdo name I might have created.