Meaningful names in your fiction.

In the same story, a character is named "René", which means "reborn".

This is relevant because while he dies in 1940, his identical twin brother steals his identity in 1944 because he's gotten into serious trouble (and at least tries to keep up the facade for as many years as possible). So it could be said that René metaphorically comes back from the dead.

Edited by Nukeli on May 9th 2024 at 4:25:35 PM

One of the main superheroes is a (freshwater) Apparently Human Merfolk woman who used science to give herself the ability to also breathe on land to explore the surface, and her xenophobic home lake exiled her when she refused to recant her research.

I've thought that Tadpole isn't just her resistance codename, but her actual name in whatever language her species uses. Tadpoles being aquatic animals who develop ability to breathe on (and move to) land.

Edited by Nukeli on May 9th 2024 at 4:25:48 PM

So, I'm working on a Hamlet AU fic where there's a bunch of OCs in it. Most of them have names taken straight from Classical Mythology, although there's a couple outliners. Yes, I'm aware that most of them don't sound Danish in the slighest but most canon Hamlet characters' names aren't Danish either

• Clytie: Named after the Oceanid who was deeply in love with the sun god, Helios. After Helios left her for another girl, Clytie snitched on the girl's father about the affair out of jealousy, who then got the girl executed. This resulted in Helios not wanting to do anything with her, but Clytie still longed for him, staring at the sun for nine days straight before turning into heliotropes (sunflowers in more modern retellings of her myth). In the fic, Clytie is dating a lady named Solana and loves her very much. She's rather overprotective of her girlfriend.
• Solana: Her name means sunshine in Spanish and she's a Spanish noblewoman. She's the GF of Clytie, whose namesake was in love with a sun god. Solana herself has a sun motif as well.
• Leucothoe: Named after the princess who's another lover of Helios. He's the girl that he left Clytie for. In the fic, Leuocthoe develops a Precocious Crush on Solana. There's also an aspect from an alternative version of the myth that's implemented to tie Clytie and Leuocthoe but it's rather spoilery. Although don't expect a Love Triangle between Clytie, Solana, and Leucothoe as A) I'm not fond of that trope and B) Leucothoe is twelve while Solana is eighteen, so yeah I'm not shipping them for legal reasons.
• Orchamus: Named after the mythological Leuocthoe's dad. He's a Persian king who decided to bury his daughter alive for losing her virginity while still unmarried after Clytie told him about the affair Helios had with her. In the fic, he's a guy of Danish-Persian descent who overthrew Hamlet Jr. during a rebellion and became the new King of Denmark. He made an alliance with Persia (what Iran was called back in the time period the fic is set in) as a way to connect with his Persian heritage. Fic!Leuocthoe is also his daughter.
• Eurynome: Named after the mythological Orchamus' wife. This Eurynome is also the wife of the fic's Orchamus and the mother of the fic's Leuocthoe, although in her case, she's her step-mom.
• Holger: This character was given the Danish name of Ogier the Dane, who was known as Holger Danske by the Danes, and is one of Charlemagne's Paladins. Felt like a fitting name for the Crown Prince of Denmark. This does make him the odd one out of his family as the only one not named after a Greek mythological figure. Also one of the few OCs in the fic with actual Danish names lmao.
• Tiberius: Named after the Roman Emperor who was a general and became a tyrannical recluse in his old age. Since Fic!Tiberius is one of the main antagonists in the fic, I figured I'll give him a similar naming scheme to Claudius from the original play (he was named after a Roman Emperor as well).
• Daphne: Named after the nymph that the sun god, Apollo, fell in love with and chased her before she transformed herself into a tree. In the fic, Daphne is an amnesic woman who happens to look identical to Clytie and a Con Man takes advantage of that by roping her in an Anastasia-inspired plot where she pretends to be Clytie herself so the Con Man can earn a hefty rewards for turning "Clytie" in for a resistance group that wants to overthrow Orchamus. I thought it would be fitting that someone named after a sun god-loving nymph impersonates someone else who's also named after a sun-god loving nymph (bonus points for that in some modern retellings of Clytie's myth, Helios is replaced by Apollo).

And as a bonus, here are the names I picked with no deeper meaning:

• Edwin: The Con Man in question. The only other character that has an actual Danish name and basically has one of the most normal sounding names in the cast. I intentionally went with a regular Danish name since I figured I have to at least have one in a story set in Denmark. After I came up with the name, I did consider naming him after a Greek mythological figure but the figure I was thinking up would spoiler a twist about him, so I decided not to do so alongside what I said about needing at least one normal Danish name in the cast.
• Bakhtiar: A Persian merchant who helps out Horatio find his runaway goddaughter. Wanted to give him a Persian name since he's Persian and all.

Edited by Cutegirl920fire on Feb 4th 2024 at 10:14:59 AM

I have been using placeholder names for a... kind of Battle Harem story but it's not like most of them, going by an Alphabetical Theme Naming based on the order their sorta counterparts/inspirations in my older Gravity Falls Crack Fic were encountered in. (Basically the latter group was a Quirky Miniboss Squad of elemental .GIFfany copies. So like, the first three of the QMS had a plant theme, an electric theme, and a water theme; the main heroes in the original work with the plant, electric, and water themes are given the placeholder names Alexia, Bethany, and Cassandra. The former might just be her final name though, but the latter two are absolutely placeholders. They're also not encountered in the same order as their loose inspirations.)

Anyway, one of them I settled on giving the "placeholder" name Iris, but after looking the name up, it's surprisingly fitting in multiple ways and I'm tempted to just make that or something similar-sounding her actual name, even if just naming her Iris outright won't match up with the naming plans I have. (Aerith and Bob is at heavy play here with Humans and this bright green "deep forest" race having more "real world" names on average — aformentioned "Alexia" being one of the latter — with members of the other races usually having fantasy names; "Iris" is from one of the other races.) The Greek goddess Iris represents rainbows, and there is a huge color coding-theme with an emphasis on eventually building a group of people from each of the color coded areas; Iris herself, like most characters, is only associated with one color (a specific blueish green), but she's planned to be really important to the gang and would play a vital role in keeping them together and stable against the Big Bad. So like, "keeping the rainbow together" in a sense. The Greek goddess is also a messanger of the gods, with Iris-the-character having Super-Speed (it's a common power in the setting but Iris' is significantly faster even by their standards) and generally using that to relay messages to others. She's uh, also partly inspired by Sans in that regard. The word "iris" also refers to a part of the eye, the colored part at that, and perception is a recurring theme of the story, with Iris in particular being very observant and analytical. It also refers to a genus of flower, and plants are another recurring motif here (technically every single main lead has "plant powers," it's just that they also tap in to fantasy plants that do things like shoot fire or move earth, and there's a small handful of powers that aren't tied to plants, so by proxy they have "typical" Elemental Powers mixed in too). Iris flowers to my knowledge can be toxic yet also be used to make medicine; Iris the character is a Poisonous Person and expert chemist who can reverse engineer various chemicals and "potions" (and is planned to even reverse this People Puppets-inducing agent imposed on the main group by the Big Bad so that they can temporarily control her from a long distance). Her whole schtick is that she seems to be an Extreme Doormat and mostly a comical character despite being hyped up as a genius in the early chapters, but she turns out to be one of the greatest fighters in the entire setting, she just needs a strong push to really get out there. I think having a name that ties in to a lot of the motifs may be a nice early clue-in that there's more to her than she seems. Oh yeah, and while this is based on the "order of their .GIFfany-mook inspiration" thing, she may have a Numerological Motif with nine (stronger than most of the other characters with other numbers), and of course "I" is the ninth letter.

And finally iris flowers are purple-ish, and... Iris the character used to be magenta, but I decided to swap her color and element theme with a different one for a couple of reasons. The silliest but also probably biggest being that Pikmin 4 changed the color of poison from purple-ish to teal-ish and I sorta wanted to have my Color-Coded Elements systems use the Pikmin series as a base. Another reason though is that the primary, secondary, and tertiary-colored characters are generally the "main" ones, so I thought that switching Iris from being secondary-colored to quaternary-colored may help not make it glaringly obvious that she's more important than she seems, and gives off the impression of being "more of a background member of the group." (Ideally, there wouldn't be any "background members" at all, at least not for the beginning, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it'll go.)

The actual main lead of this story I was thinking of using "Zoap" unless it sounds too silly or there's something bad to it I missed, literally a letter off from "soap," and he's a Nice Guy with a strong moral compass that one might say is "squeaky clean." The story originally had a heavy bath/sauna/cleaning motif (the gang originally all worked at this bath house that they turned to their superhero base) but I cut this after deciding it wouldn't fit in with the main plot. I want to give him the surname Bloodblade as an Ironic Name — it deliberately sounds groan-inducingly edgy (and there is some history behind it) but he is anything but, him being a kind-hearted pacifist who almost annoys the rest of the group with his morals. Unintentional at first, his full name is also foreshadowing — remove a letter and add a space, and you have "zap blood blade," which can be used to describe a planned major event late in the story.