NAMES

on picking a name

names[1]

Names are hard to pick. There is so much bound up in a name.

When deciding on a name for a character it's important to have a good idea of their personality before picking a name generally. Often times in stories a person will know the name before they know anything else about a character, and since names are used and reused in so many different contexts beyond their literal meanings it makes a name almost an architype signifier all in itself.

I come from the land of anime where the name is often less important than other traits, like hair and eye color but even then names are significant.

I'm struggling with picking names for these characters I have created. I know that at any point if I decide I like a better name in the future I can change it, no big deal. A simple regex command is all it would take.

But.

The name will affect my own interpretation of the character and quickly cement those characters to fit better with my own conception of that name. This may not be desirable. I would prefer to just use some unbiased token to identify them. But that's not really feasible. Names are important in writing because saying. "She said to her that the woman took her thing" is impossible to parse. You need names. Context can not derive the meaning.

An option I just considered is to give each character unique pronouns and use them nearly exclusively. This is not terribly unreasonable. Actually I kind of like it. Pronouns as they exist in most language are kind of boring. Like it makes sense to have a first and second person pronoun, and a catch all third person pronoun, too. But having gendered third person pronouns is kinda trash. Why not have pronouns for hair color, or pronouns for type of shoe. That could work. Ya. Nods.

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on picking a name

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