Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => EVE OOC Summit => Topic started by: Katrina Oniseki on 12 Jan 2013, 15:40
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While I'm sure there are other name threads out here, I wanted to start one that isn't merely about why someone chose the name they did... but more about what the name means to you and your character. I also didn't want to necro a thread.
I'll start first.
I wanted to create a name for my character that was distinctly Caldari in nature, while still being pronounceable to most people I'd be interacting with. So, it needed to be simple, yet flavored and inspired.
Choosing to make a first name that is reflected in the real world (for easy use by those who've just met me), I started searching Finnish sources. I wanted a name that was powerful in its delivery, with a hard knocking consonant, as if the first letter of it hits you like a punch. The real world meaning of the name "Katrina" as 'pure' didn't really come into play, but it does slightly fit. Pureblood Caldari, and all.
For the out of character aspects, I knew I wanted a name that was easily shortened, and did not shorten into a word that I'd be uncomfortable with. Since most name shortenings tend to range between three to five letters, depending on the name... I aimed for three. Katrina fit this secondary requirement well, as it shortened to "Kat", naturally... and I like cats. The decision was easy, and I stuck with it.
For the last name, I started looking at Caldari system names after realizing that the Caldari name their systems after megacorp leaders. So, actual names were reflected in the systems. Sobaseki was the initial example I learned of, and I knew I wanted her to come from the planet Onitseru... so it rather became a portmanteau of the two names. ONI-tseru and soba-SEKI. Oniseki.
As I've grown more involved with the RP community, I think the name Kat has become something of a meme even. It's come to represent any number of odd or silly cat like things. It can be thrown into various words, and tends to... at least for me... deliver a sort of endearing quality to whatever the topic is, even if it is the most mundane or even repulsive for some cases. For example, my habit of rolling around OOC window using emotes... has given rise to the term "rollkat".
For myself, I am very pleased with the choices I've made with regards to naming. Not only has Katrina become a recognizable name, one not easily forgotten or messed up, but Oniseki lends itself well to any number of uses, such as the founding of a corporation... "Oniseki Holdings".
So how about your character names? What meanings hide behind your names? What meaning went into it, and what meanings have blossomed through the metagame?
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Istvaan: If you don't know the origin of this, you need to read more 40k lore.
Shogaatsu: Nothing of significance, just a word I made up. I later learned it's pretty close to some Japanese holiday.
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I like the ae letter combination a lot, I'm not sure why, but I think its neat. So Saede kind of came out of that. I didn't actually realize how tricky it would be to pronounce, people seem to switch between pronouncing it Saayd and pronouncing it Sadie. (the first one is the correct one btw, but I don't mind being Sadie OOC)
Riordan...I think I read it somewhere in a book at some point and liked the sound of it, so I used it. I don't actually remember where I got it from.
A lot less in depth then other people's names, though I like it.
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Istvaan: If you don't know the origin of this, you need to read more 40k lore.
Funny; my first association was Uncle Istvan (http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/details.aspx?name=Uncle%20Istvan). Istvaan does strike me as quite avuncular. He's the rich, crazy uncle who occasionally crashes birthdays, weddings and funerals while riotously drunk, bearing gifts. (The gifts are cocaine and tales of horrible betrayal.)
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The name Rin has Japanese origins, I think meaning "cold." But that isn't exactly why I chose and like the name. I use to role play on another RP venue with a bunch of other people in the past, one of them being girl named Cerin. She was of American Japanese descent, and always preferred to shorten her name to Rin. We were pretty good friends, RPed a lot with each other's characters, and due to our homes being within driving distance, she was one of the only two people I met online whom I actually met IRL. However, due to her RL getting busy, she stopped being online as much, and then dropped off the net almost completely. We didn't have a way of keeping in touch, either, as emails were not exchanged back then. I miss her sometimes ... :( Either way, the name "Rin" reminds me of that long lost friend.
The last name Kaelestria is actually a play on a latin word "Caelestis", meaning along the lines of heavenly, celestial, and dweller in heaven. I thought it fit enough for a spaceship pilot.
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Istvaan: If you don't know the origin of this, you need to read more 40k lore.
Funny; my first association was Uncle Istvan (http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/details.aspx?name=Uncle%20Istvan). Istvaan does strike me as quite avuncular. He's the rich, crazy uncle who occasionally crashes birthdays, weddings and funerals while riotously drunk, bearing gifts. (The gifts are cocaine and tales of horrible betrayal.)
Every time I address Istvaan directly on the IGS, I always call him Uncle Istvaan. It seems appropriate.
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Veikitamo Gesakaarin: I liked the short form Veik as a nickname/handle but decided to extend into a more Caldari name by adding -itamo as some sort of suffix. Gesakaarin comes from a piece of short fiction regarding a familial schism during the Caldari secession in which the other half took the name Gessenier. It also had proper double vowels.
Hevaima Gesakaarin: Hevaima was a name I made up on the spot because I needed one for a minor background Caldari character in older private RP. As I fleshed him out I decided to insert him into the family soap opera of the Gesakaarin.
Also, I'm told Gesakaarin is unpronounceable both IC and OOC. Not my fault people trip over the double vowels.
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Didn't we had such thread allready ?
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Pieter is Pieter - I decided to embrace the Finnish part of the Caldari language rather than the Japanese part, and since Piet looks about as Japanese as supermarket sushi, that was an easy choice.
Tuulinen required more research. It's basically the word for Winds in Finnish, which I thought was nice and Caldari.
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The name means very little for me and my character. As said in the other thread about it, the choice was mostly done around aesthetical purposes where I wanted a simple last name, and an androgynous first name. The suffix -ara I added after Lyn came after when I decided to create a background of small nobility behind to create a contrast between the name she chose to shorten and her original more feminine name.
Otherwise it appears that Lyn means lake in welsh and pretty in old english (and something like thunder in I don't remember which norse language roots). Lake might sound ironic considering her oceanic homeworld ? vOv
The main issue is that I had very little idea of the lore or what I wanted to do when I started playing, which caused a lot of significant issues after, and still does. But at least I have never been unhappy with the name.
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Oliver 'Ollie' Rundle. Common, non-descript, forgettable. Everything you want from an alias or clean-slate identity.
A question for Gesakaarin - is the 'G' hard, soft ... or silent? :D
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I think there has been a thread like this before but, no matter.
When I signed up I decided on a Minmatar character because my friends were in that part of space. I asked one what Matari names were like and was told "a blend of Scandinavian and African." So I went and took a look here (http://tekeli.li/onomastikon/ (http://tekeli.li/onomastikon/)).
Arnulf should be fairly obvious. Ogunkoya is a Nigerian name. Then when I learned a bit more about the background I realized I had mixed Brutor and Sebiestor elements, hence him being a child of a mixed marriage.
That led to me thinking more about his parents, what had happened to and between them and how that would have affected his outlook and motivations.
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Didn't we had such thread allready ?
While I'm sure there are other name threads out here, I wanted to start one that isn't merely about why someone chose the name they did... but more about what the name means to you and your character. I also didn't want to necro a thread.
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Well, simply, Ava Starfire has been my character's name in every RPG I have ever played, which is why I picked it for EVE. Since I began RP, I made a few changes to this, and her actual name is Avlynka Tarkya. Avlynka means "Child of (or born in) Midwinter" in her Clan's dialect (I simply tried to make something that sounded "neat" and could be logically shortened to Ava) and Tarkya is her mother's name, as Sebiestor trace heritage through matrilineal lines. Tarkya is a perversion of "Tarja" which is a Finnish name i think. The other name associated with her, "Surionen", simply means "Leatherworker" in their language, and is not a name which Ava always uses - I imagine Minmatar naming traditions to be pretty complex. Her name then, in her language, literally means "Child of Tarkya, born in midwinter, to a family of leatherworkers". Whew!
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Before Vieve, I didn't roleplay in EVE. Even though I read every piece of EVE-related fiction and perused IGS on a regular basis, I had no intentions of roleplaying in EVE. None. Zero.
After about a year of this, I got bored and/or drunk enough to decide that I would RP. I figured that no one in any playgroup would appreciate (or trust) a noob coming in with a fully realized background, so I deliberately designed a blank slate and decided to flesh her out via improv with other players. Vieve's background and game progression has very much been a camel1.
Since she was a blank slate, I wanted her to have a Gallentean name as plain as "Jane Smith" is in English. She became Jen(nifer) Weaver, or (Gene)Viรจve Tisserand.
Celeste Fauconnier's name was taken from a character I played in a weekend-long Amber DRPG one-shot run by some friends of mine. The game was set in the universe around Corwin's Pattern, which the GM decided was a Three Musketeers-esque version of Revolutionary France. That Celeste was a meek, mild-mannered, impeccably competent secretary to a flamboyant Countess by day, and a ruthless do-gooding assassin by night. Any of those character traits which may have rubbed off on the EVE version of Celeste are wholly coincidental.
In game (thanks to Stitcher's inadvertent assistance -- meaning he ICly asked her where her name came from, so I made it up on the fly), Celeste got her first name because of the meteor shower (or possible ship wreckage burning up in the atmosphere) over her home city on the night she was born. One of the meteors was large enough to crash into a barn on her family's estate and set it on fire, a fire that ultimately destroyed the barn and did considerable damage to other buildings because a) everyone was at the hospital and b) the ground maintenance drones had never been configured to deal with fires. Celeste's being told this story as a young child terrified her into a precocious interest in drone maintenance and configuration and public safety.
1Which is a horse built by committee, for those of you who don't know the old joke.
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Once upon the time, prior to joining the RP community there were two Dex Nede(r)land. One Civire and one Gallente. It is actually a nickname and a reference to my actual last name!
Dex was lucky to not get thrown out with the Gallente expats and those Caldari who looked too Gallente for the likes of the CPD's goons.
Dex's family was firmly mixed prior to the outbreak of the Gallente-Caldari War; his great-great-great-grandfather was a mixed blood serving in a Caldari mercenary corp when the GCW broke out. Great x 4 - grandfather was Dex Nede(r)land and also mixed blood. 4 generations the two halves of the Nede(r)land clan named two different children for their great x 4 grandfather (who apparently did something, now I need to figure out what). Dex's family's record since the exodus has been one of service to the State, each generation serving LDPS and CN.
Koroe Tankyuusha ... I need to think more about it.
Istvaan: If you don't know the origin of this, you need to read more 40k lore.
:twisted:
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A question for Gesakaarin - is the 'G' hard, soft ... or silent? :D
Hard.
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I have no troubles with double vowels. :evil:
As far as Desiderya goes - the character was created when I first started playing EVE, without any thoughts about RP. When I returned to the game I was already so twisted that MMORPGs without RPing were no fun for me anymore, so I figured I'd give it a try. And since it was a try I didn't want to start fresh SP wise. In hindsight, I'd chose differently today. But then Des wouldn't exist.
The last name was given in an attempt to get closer to PF. I'm still contemplating (DeadRow/Hikari reminds me of this every time) giving her a second name that's more caldari - a meh situation all around, since it'd be kind of a retcon.
PS: Anyone shortening the name to 'desi' will be subject to my personal OOC wrath. It might be a foreign thing, but it sounds awful to my ears.
PPS: What's in a name? - Letters.
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A pure coincidence ? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9sir%C3%A9e_Clary) :P
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Tiberious is actually a superman villain, hth.
But no, actually, I just wanted something roman-esque sounding, with alliteration.
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Don't google the name, Lyn, for your own safety.
Also yes, that's just a coincidence. Now, for my own shame, that's borrowed from a character from a mediocre novel around a german fantasy rpg. :ugh:
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Simon specifically chose his name, and it doesn't really sound like his real name. I've written a few things set on Intaki Prime that use his nom de capsule, mostly to lessen any confusion and also because I don't want people to know his real name. More importantly, perhaps, neither does he. He's made a conscious decision to bury it.
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James is simply a family name, near enough to my own that I like. Syagrius was the last Roman Procurator in Gaul. His defeat by King Clovis I is considered by most Historians the end of Roman rule outside of the Italian Peninsula.