The "What's a good name for this?" thread

EDIT: Two days too late I noticed that the post I made should be in the "What Should I Name My Work?" thread, as it was asking for a title suggestion. I'll be moving it there and I apologize for not knowing about that particular thread until now.

edited 22nd Sep '16 1:11:35 PM by Stegomasaurus

So in the thing I'm currently writing, the main character's main power is a thing I'm currently calling a 'Vitaar' (Vee-tar). It's essentially a tattoo on his right forearm that has two functions: First, he can store weapons in it and summon them at will, so long as his right arm is still attached and generally unobstructed, and it's second ability is 'Instinctive battle knowledge'. In layman's terms, he can pick up any conventional weapon and know how to use it, even if he's never used it before in his life.

I wanted to hear possible alternate names for the Vitaar, I don't it to have a title per se, something more along the lines of a single word name that sounds kinda Nordic.

Oružar, which looks cool and is Croatian for "armourer."

What would be the name of a organism and entity used to generate a substance known as Gel?

Depends on what Gel does, and what the organism looks like / how it generates it. Possibly Gel-Blooded Horny Toad.

edited 30th Sep '16 2:51:34 PM by pablo360

Gel is a substance that accelerates and advances evolution, causes mutations and grants you superpowers. The organism resembles a worm-like creature.

edited 30th Sep '16 3:40:47 PM by Huthman

As a biology grad student, I am crying a little bit inside at the "advances evolution" bit. And the very name Gel could use a change, but that is besides the point.

For the animal, how about transmutozoa? Regular people could call it "muto" or something.

edited 30th Sep '16 4:09:46 PM by EternaMemoria

I really want to say "Shai-Hulud".

Gelworm or Slimeworm, simple and apt description.

edited 30th Sep '16 8:51:00 PM by WillDeRegio

what would be a good By the Power of Grayskull! phrase for someone who wants to harness the power of their nature spirit? (note: the closet i got i "by the name of { spirit's name}, let ancient power flow and by the power of { spirit's name}, metamorphosis/ metamorphosize)

edited 13th Oct '16 1:02:08 PM by ewolf2015

Hm, I'm not good at that sort of thing, but how about "In the name of the {sa}, let the ancient power flow through me. Transform!"

even better "In the name of {sa}, let the ancient power flow through me. metamorphosize!".....meh.

Those are all too long . It has to sound like both an invocation and a battlecry. How about:

"[Spirit's name], grant me thy wings/claws/might/blessing/whatever!"

Lemme explain, it has something to do with the person turning into powerful nature warrior basically but that's also good.

So perhaps to modify a bit EternaMemoria's (great) idea, "[Spirit name], grant me your power!".

I'm looking for a name to give to an event that serves as an in-universe justification for a crossover — namely, a cosmic cataclysm in which several universes (let's say, for example, Star Wars, Sailor Moon, and Warhammer 40,000... among a hundred or so other works/franchises) "collided" with one another, causing a much more violent version of the Big Crunch that merged all involved worlds into a singular one, which reverted to the primordial pre-Big Bang state in order to resolve all the clashing natural and not-so-natural laws of reality that were inherited from the predecessor universes in a safe manner (that is, safe for the new universe's own integrity; the alternative outcome is horribly breaking reality into a nightmarishly nonsensical and inconsistent pandemonium), and then underwent its own Big Bang to give rise to the setting of the crossover.

edited 15th Oct '16 7:31:21 PM by MarqFJA

I think you are looking at a partial merge, there. Or interference, if we want to go for quantum mechanics terminology. A Big Crunch would obliterate the universes.

edited 16th Oct '16 12:46:12 AM by SeptimusHeap

Well, technically they were obliterated, in the sense that everything — matter, energy, soul-stuff, etc. — got reduced to the most primordial/fundamental state possible on all levels, such that all you had was a "mass" of undifferentiated "chaos" (in so far as any of the terms could be even applied, since neither time nor space exist in any meaningful way) in which all those fundaments of reality and unreality clashed until they finally established an actual pecking order / rules of interaction / combined into whole new different fundaments, which paved the way for a new Big Bang to start everything anew.

... Besides, why are we trying to abide so strictly to real-life quantum mechanics?

And why a partial merge / interference? There are no longer separate universes, only a single Merged Reality that combines facets from the ones that merged to create it.

edited 16th Oct '16 3:17:40 AM by MarqFJA

Presumably this is a name for you as the Narrator to refer to it by, as the characters themselves would have no knowledge of it? Unless there's a seer sort of character who has innate knowledge of what happened?

Never mind, that's story stuff and not relevant to this thread. Events that big seem to just end up being called 'The Event' or 'The Occurrence' etc., but if you want something more original maybe 'The Fusing', 'The Merging', 'The Combine' (although Half Life sort of has that one), or even 'The Crossover' if you want to be a bit meta.

Anything that can apply to describing the event with the metaphor of multiple rivers meeting together simultaneously, creating a violent maelstrom that destroys practically anything that the source rivers carried (mighty logs or helpless leaves, doesn't matter), and from said maelstrom a single stream goes out? I've been thinking of it as "The Convergence" for the time being, since the rivers converge to a single "point", but it lacks any implications of the event's cataclysmic nature.

edited 18th Oct '16 3:10:41 AM by MarqFJA

It could be named after Shiva, who is supposed to be the "creator, destroyer and regenerator", to quote from The Other Wiki. "The Shiva Convergence"? Although that does kind of imply that Shiva was involved in the whole thing, and I'm guessing you're not writing in that direction.

I want to suggest something related to The Wall Will Fall but I can't think of anything >_<

That sort of phenomena doesn't really happen as far as I know—a river tends to end when it meets another rather than both combining. But perhaps you could go with something like Blending, since to a lot of people that kind of evokes things being a bit shredded up? But it still doesn't quite sound... serious.

I've a question of my own along that very line, actually. At the moment in the backstory of my story I have an event referred to as "The Dark Census". Now, there's a kind of bathos that I like there. A lot of the story itself is founded on the inherent oddity of combining fantastical elements with the mundane—it's about a government organization that manages Magical persons and creatures and ensures they remain hidden.

However, in-universe The Dark Census is not considered a funny event. It was the time at which the government became aware of the existence of magic and poured all of its resources into identifying how many citizens were magical people or creatures. When it did, it pulled all of those citizens and slapped them with a bunch of additional regulations—such as the inability to enter cities if they're visibly non-human in any way.

Essentially, it was a tragic period in history that set off several decades of government-sanctioned oppression for a pretty sizable amount of people and is generally considered to be one of the major attacks on Magical Citizens. So I kind of feel like it shouldn't have a funny name.

What do you all think of these names for the Big Good and the Big Bad of Volume VII? Esheia, the goddess of dreams, and Mhithl’ithoth, the nightmare demon lord