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it's february, so i'm popping in again to say hi and do my monthly blog post! the topic i wanted to ramble about this month was oc names and naming conventions and all that stuff, so here we go: to preface this, i also am working on changing the name of this site and a few other things. i am very indecisive, and that includes how i feel about names as well. i never really had an online handle i went by for most of my years on the internet. i used to change handles every few months, and i also had a phase where i changed my irl name several times as well (not legally of course, just for my friends to call me).
names are a very difficult thing. to me, they possess a lot of power, and the way they sound means more to me than anything else. i know a lot of names have meaning, but i tend to consider that secondarily. however, what i think sounds good is not always what other people thinks sounds good.
this site started out as 'aomuroguna', which at the time was also my handle on several other platforms. it was my first actual handle where i tried to sync it up across different websites and applications. i didn't really think much about it: i've liked a specific vocaloid song, the sorcerer's apprentice by kururingo, for quite some time and a little reference to the song seemed like a fun kind of username. i liked the way "aomuroguna" sounded too as a word, it felt very mystical.
but sometimes when i focus too much on sound and meaning, i forget about context. aomuroguna was fun for me to say, but kinda confusing for anyone who would meet me. not to mention, most of my close friends did not call me aomuroguna or aomu (i imagine it's awkward to pronounce for most) and either referred to me with my irl name or a nickname that just kinda ended up sticking, 'buoy'.
it's kinda crazy because buoy ended up just being a name that everyone liked calling me. at some point i realised i also like the way it sounds and the feeling it gives, so i began to consider changing my handles across platforms once more. it felt kinda daunting and i procrastinated on it for quite some time, but here we are! working to change it all to start march, my birthday month, as strong as possible! anyways, with that out of the way. i always struggled to name my ocs and elements within my oc world. a lot of franchises i like tend to use names that are callbacks to mythology or foreign languages. i wanted to go with this at first, but there felt like many issues in the way.
first of all, there wasn't really a culture i wanted to take names from in particular. sometimes there are just names i like, and they come from all over the place. the second thing was i had kinda gimped myself from the start. i've had some incarnation of my ocs as far back as when i was 7 years old, and some of the names i gave to my ocs just stuck very strongly. it felt like a mess to rename the ones that didn't line up with the vibe i wanted. i've only renamed one of my ocs ever, and it was ren. embarrassing fact that i refuse to utter aloud and will only put in writing here for those insane enough to read these rambles: ren's name used to be katherine thasor. i chose that name because as a child, i had played a piano piece named 'katherine' and it stuck with me very strongly for some reason. it sounded like a very pretty name to me, and i grew up in a very non white community, so i didn't know it was that common of a name.
ren's character has changed a lot over time. eventually i started referring to her as 'rin' for short, and that evolved into the ren we know today when i gave her the biggest redesign she's had of late: fun fact, she used to have brown hair, along with halvatt! but i decided against that and revamped both of them.
i made the decision to change her name to ren for several reasons. as stated previously, i was redesigning her and wanted to turn over a new life. but throughout all her changes, she went from being one type of character, very elegant and mature, to the silly airheaded pink girl we know today. 'katherine' felt too formal and convoluted for someone like that. i was going to go with 'rin' initially, but wanted to cut ties with the name katherine as well. so i changed it up a bit, maybe out of my own embarrassment, to make it less painful for me to look at. that's how ren's name was born!
most of my ocs have names that are based off the sound and names i had heard as a child that i really liked/felt drawn to. some of them, though, have nonsensical names, such as halvatt.
there is no meaning or origin to the name halvatt really. it was honestly a placeholder name for the longest time, because i couldn't figure out what i wanted to name him. most names did not seem to give the feeling i wanted, so i just made one up and told myself it was temporary. but it really stuck. i ended up liking that a lot. and that single decision, to use a placeholder name for an oc, started me on this long spiral of just making up my own names based on sound.
i think having references to the mythology of the real world is cool and it's a quick way to make something sound cool and official. however, since i'm not really creating for an audience and moreso for myself, i just wanted to have terms that i was comfortable with more than anything else, understanding be damned.
in the long run, this probably saved me a lot of headaches. instead of having to do heavy research whenever i wanted to expand my lore, scouring for an appropriate name to describe what i was thinking up, i could just name it whatever i wanted. that feeling is incredibly liberating and resulted in some names i can never really let go, with how integral they've become to my own internal thoughts of my world.
i'm not really sure how to use phonetics and actual pronunciation markers, and i definitely will end up learning how to do it for the future section on my canon lore (so people can figure out how to pronounce the stuff i'm making up lol) but for the time being, here's a quick messy guide on how my main ocs' names are pronounced, along with a few common terms i use, for those who are curious!
ren thasor: ren "THAH-sore"
halvatt sali: "hahl-VAHT suh-LEE"
aidan fasura: aidan "FUH-soo-rah"
layla kainafe: layla "kai-NA-feh"
allen hevaxej: "heh-VAH-shehj"
eleanor lottbrung: eleanor "LOW-t-br-ong"
dmitri obaflr: dmitri "uh-ba-FLER"
edvard iorskaf: edvard "YOR-scuff"
penelope riebanrig: penelope "ree-EH-bahn-reeg"
actaera: "ack-TAY-rah"
kheji: "keh-jii" (i don't know how to express the sound other than the 'j' is pronounced very similar to the french pronoun for "i", "je", in all of the terms for this universe)
rehjolvnatys: "reh-JOLL-vuh-nah-TEES"
and that's all from me for now! the work stuff went downhill and i'll be sticking around with my old job, but hopefully it won't be as stressful for me now that i've been here for a bit longer. things are starting to become more routine, and i'm sure i will learn how to adapt even further as time goes on.
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