character nomenclature (Z & Cinder’s Blog Challenge)

This fortnight’s topic from Z & Cinder’s Blog Challenge is a perennial favorite of the altoholic:

Making a new character in WoW can be one of the most fun things to do; you get to pick a new appearance and maybe a new class and there’s the anticipation of going to see all the low leveling zones again.. but first you have to name your new toon.
How do you come up with character names?
Is there a particular naming convention you follow? Do you like your toon name to reflect on their class fantasy? Does their name set their personality for you? And most of all… do you ever get stuck just staring at that pick your name box???

My primary rule of naming my characters is that I name them as if they were real people.
Occasionally, I choose names that are deliberately punny, but the puns are relatively subtle.

My naming convention — all of my characters’ names begin with “K” and the names of characters who belong to the “one of each Class” set must also end with “a” — arose somewhat spontaneously. If I’m remembering the way things happened mostly correctly (and not as a tall tale), by coincidence, the names I chose for my first three or four characters all began with “K”, and it was after I noticed that I’d done that serendipitously that I decided to continue doing it deliberately.

I wrote about how I name my characters during the first year of this blog’s existence. The origins of most of my characters’ names are explained in that previous post, so I won’t go over them again in this one. The inspirations for those names came from the gamut of sources — and sometimes I did get stuck staring at the name box and hitting the “randomize” button until it generated something I thought I could change around a bit and live with.

A few of my characters’ names have shifted since they were originally created due to server transfers — Kjersti became Kjerstin, Karelia became Karaelia, Kiraleia the Blood Elf Paladin became Kyraleia the Dwarf Paladin.

When I changed the identity of my Human Mage to be an Alliance surrogate for my Blood Elf Mage (who sometimes wishes that she were still a High Elf), I gave her a new name that is essentially identical to my Blood Elf Mage’s name, just with a couple of the vowels shifted to “y”s: Kaelinda/Kaylynda.

I’ve created several new characters since I wrote that post nearly seven years ago, so I’ll tell you about how I came up with those characters’ names.

My Orc Shaman’s name was “Keshona”; when I created my Orc Mage and decided that the Mage was the Shaman’s mother, I named the mage “Kenosha”, a rearrangement of the consonants in the other name (and also a town in Wisconsin).

My Pandaren Mage is “Kaoling” because I wanted to name her “kaolin”, the word for the specific type of clay used to make Chinese porcelain, but that name was already taken.

I don’t remember exactly how I came up with “Khrissalys” for my Dwarf Mage, other than that I began with the “Kris” syllable and iterated the rest of the name until I was happy with the result, a combination of “Kris” and “Alice”. I like the way it sounds like “chrysalis”, too.

I renamed my Goblin Mage from “Kazuliza” to “Kermione” (a name I originally used for a Goblin Shaman) because I just couldn’t resist how perfect the portmanteau of “Kermit” and “Hermione” is for a Goblin Mage.

I still wanted to use “z” in a name, so then I ended up with “Kazithra”, a slightly sinister sounding name for a Grimtotem Shadow Priest. This character was originally a separate alt, but now exists as an alter-ego of my primary Priest.

At the same time that I created a secondary Tauren Priest alt, I also created a secondary Tauren Paladin alt. I named this character “Kishalla”; the “shall” syllable is inspired by the character Shallan in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive. I later recycled the “Kishalla” name for, ironically, an Affliction/Demonology alter-ego for my Warlock.

Kamalia’s parents’ names, “Kehontah” and “Kawneiha”, come from playing with syllables and trying to come up with something that fit the Native American pastiche tone of Tauren culture.

My secondary Shaman, commonly known as “mini-Kam”, is formally “Kamalita” — literally “little Kamalia”.

The Underpowered Death Knight’s name started out as “Kaumalea”, which is deliberately, but obscurely, punny: “kau” is like “cow”, and “mal” is the Latin for “bad/evil”, thus, “bad cow”. Later, I changed the final syllable to “leia” because I wanted a Tauren with that ending syllable. When I draw the Underpowered Death Knight, I coil the long braids hairstyle that she uses in-game up into Princess Leia’s iconic cinnamon buns.

My Monk, Katewatha, got her name because I wanted to have a Tauren whose name shortened to “Kate” and because I wanted to use the letter “w” in another Tauren name. Searching for syllables that sounded okay together, the second half of her name ended up being the same as the name of BTH’s male Tauren Warrior who was my Druid’s leveling companion through level 80 (then BTH decided he didn’t enjoy Warriors and abandoned that alt).

My secondary Monk began her life as “Koralyra” (“coral” as a rearrangement of “carol”, plus “lyra”), a name I had previously invented for a short-lived Dwarf alt and liked enough to use again. Late in Warlords, I changed her name to “Kaobeka”, an anagram of “Akabeko” of Red Cow Rise. I’d actually already been using the name “Kaobeka” for a secondary Warrior alt, but I decided to delete that alt when the news of how specs would work in Legion came out. Besides, I thought that it was more fitting to name a Monk after Akabeko the Druid than a Warrior. When I recently decided to start using that secondary Warrior’s appearance as an alter-ego for Kregga, I retconned her name to “Kaobeqa” so as not to be an exact name-duplicate of Kaobeka the Monk (also, I wanted to use “q” in a name).

My most recent new character, the Demon Hunter, was originally going to reuse the “Koralyra” name. That didn’t quite feel right for her when I put it into the name box, though, so I shifted “lyra” to the “laira” that was the ending of my long-ago Blood Elf Death Knight’s name. Then it seemed better to shift “Kora” to “Kira”, the beginning of my long-ago Blood Elf Paladin’s name. “Kiralaira” felt much better for her both because it flows in a more Sin’dorei sort of way and because it recalls my two earlier characters.

Looking over the names I’ve chosen, they tend to reflect more on the racial identity of my characters than on their class identity. If I’m naming my characters as real people that makes sense — their racial identity has been part of them since they were born and their parents named them, whereas their class identity came to them later in their life.

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