Names?

What’s going on y’all! I’ve had a sort of weird time trying to go through my normal naming conventions and remembered about some of my V1.0 characters and names. I want to focus on a couple right now, but I’ll open the topic up later.

So, with these characters, I was still young and dumb at the time of their creation. I’ll focus on my first character for now: the hero, Energio. Now, how does one pronounce that? I like to pronounce it as “ehner-zhi-oh”. Does it mean anything? Where did it come from? Energio was one of my initial hero characters to be created. I had this idea that having 3 hero characters was cool, so I tried adapting 2 new characters (alongside Orbis) to encompass a “power” type and “speed” type. My speed type character went through many iterations, so that might be a whole post in and of itself, honestly. But my power type has had only 2 major changes.

Again, this was the “power” type character. So, I envisioned him immediately with an axe of sorts. But I also wanted the character to be a little more unique than just “big axe man go swingy swingy”. This created a really dumb ass weapon that was half axe, half katana. Yep, I created a ninja man who had an axe. It’s terrible to think about, but if you look at my old school concepts, you’d see where I was heading with it. I won’t explain too much right now, because that process involves something I want to explain later on, but you’ll most likely see it.

Names! Right. Again, stupid kid, so naming was hard for me. I wanted it to be symbolic, so the easiest thing for me to do was to go straight to google translate and see if there as something in there that I could use. I translated the word “power”, if I’m remembering correctly, to several different languages. Nothing stood out, until I hit upon “energia”. I don’t remember what language this was (I should probably look it up at some point, it might be fun to go through that) but i knew I had struck gold. Because my character was a male, I felt that naming him “Energia” would be a little confusing. This was around the time I was watching Clannad, which if you guys don’t know, has 2 characters, Tomoyo and Tomoya. One of my foreign friends watched it as I did and she would frequently get confused by the names, Tomoyo was a girl and Tomoya was a guy. Weird, right?

Anywho, I decided to change the “a” to an “o” just so people like my friend wouldn’t get confused by strange names. So, that’s one of my characters. Energio was concepted and named with a different language. Fun stuff, yeah? Looking at my second character here, it’s a lot easier to see where I was coming from with this name. This character is a villain who has fire abilities. I easily looked up different ways to say fire in different languages (I had definitely upgraded my way of naming by this point). I happened upon the french term flanbeaux. Does anyone know what a flambeaux is? It’s a torch! Like, specifically, a burning torch, ya know, a stick with fire on the end of it.

The fun thing about v1.0 Flambeaux (I have actually changed his name and design since then, but I’ll just refer to him as such for now) was he had this weapon that allowed him to use different elemental abilities. His concept was purely to counter Orbis with pure overwhelming ability. I’ve toned it down since, but at the time, even though his main power was fire, I knew that Flambeaux was a temporary name. It did stay for far longer than it should have, but that’s the legacy, so it were. 

And now, I open up this topic. I have since changed the way I name characters, trying to be less symbolic. Only because I feel like it’s kind of overdone now? If that makes sense? Anyway, how do you name characters? Do you just look up random character generators, or just start sounding out a word and whatever sounds nice you go with? I’d be interested to know, because I’ve recently found that borrowing a unique name from a show or game, maybe changing it up a little bit, and using it in leu of any weirdo name I might have created. 

How did this begin?

Hey y’all!

So, where did this story begin? How did it come to mind? It was quite a long time ago now, and that sounds weird to read back to myself, but stay with me here, it’s kinda funky how it started.

As a child, as I’m sure many of you did yourselves, while in a car or bus (I guess it’s probably easier to just say any moving vehicle with a window I could look out of) I would imagine a person running along the vehicle, doing some parkour-styled movements on the random thing around me. I’m not sure about most people, but I didn’t really have a specific person in mind when imagining it. I just sort of imagined one of those art model statue thingys doing the movements.

This was how it was for a small while. That is, until I grew up a little bit, and started enjoying the occasional television show. Being the small, edgy human that I was, I watched this little saturday cartoon thing called Fox Box. I didn’t have cable growing up, so this was the best I got other than PBS Kids. It had so many “cool” shows on it, that I just couldn’t help but fall in love. Unfortunately, as I’ve grown up a bit, I can’t really remember many of them, but 2 big ones have stayed with me. They were a couple of anime called Ultimate Muscle and Shaman King.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “But Banie, how on earth does this get to your story?” and I’m just at the tip of the iceberg, my friend, just hold on. With these new forms of stimulants fresh in my brain, I had new concepts to give to my parkour enthusiast modelling statue. So, Yoh Asakura and his stand-like ghost friend Amidamaru became my new guy. He would do his thing, jumping from tree to lamp post to mailbox with no worries. It was around that time that I also got into Dragonball Z. As cringey as it is to admit it, Dragonball kind of took up more of my life than I care to admit. I didn’t have internet, so when I was given a new tv show, I kinda had only that.

With Goku now taking the mantle of “new parkour dude guy”, I felt like I was getting somewhere. I had a character who could do it all: fly, power up, fight something. My trips around in a vehicle would be the most entertaining thing! God that sounds awful...

Anywho, yeah, I began making Goku fight his villains and such. Frieza, Cell, Buu, it was great. Until it wasn’t. I got kind of bored with Goku being my guy and I kinda just did the same thing, over and over. When Goku finally beat Buu, he’d just go back to Frieza, doing the same thing, time and time again. Eventually, as I began listening to the radio more on the trips, these characters would start to sing, and act like they were in a band. I also did this with Sonic characters and lemme tell ya, I hate looking back at that time of my life.

It finally took me using my brain to finally come up with something interesting. I imagined a character with the ability to take material from anything it touched and create a giant mecha styled golem thingy that would sort of wrap itself around the character and run along like that. Causing all kinds of chaos and stuff like that. It became fun again. What would this character make next? Well, this was where it really started to get interesting. With the inception of this character, I sort of threw together a few different elements of character concepts I liked at the time: trench coat (because of course there was a trench coat, I was an edgy kid after all), bo staff (as weird as it sounds, Donatello was my favorite ninja turtle), and sunglasses (cuz sunglasses are freakin cool, and you’re a coward if you think otherwise).

Awesome, I know what this character kind of looks like, but now for a name? What would this character be named? I already figured it was male, but I didn’t want to call it like Jonathon, or Frederick. Something boring like that felt... well, boring (sorry if your name is Jonathon or Frederick, I swear, you’re probably not boring :D). With nothing else to really go on, I did that thing that most kids probably do, and started making noises. I finally came up with Orbis, and that just stuck ever since. For a while, I would develop Orbis through his parkour adventures, giving him so many upgrades. I felt like it was too much, and kind of sudden to develop this character to be such a god among men (I mean, I gave him like 30 different weapons), I decided to actually give him some work. I settled on giving him the power of gravity. I imagined it kind of like Goku using ki energy, but black. As I developed him later, the gravity evolved into more of what we know about gravity today, but yes, there is still the ki-like energy blasts and balls and the like.

Eventually, I needed a villain for Orbis to fight to test out his new abilities. It was another Dragonball reference that gave me Krusher. Now, I looked at Frieza as a main influence for this villain. A sort of alien-fish hybrid that used water and glass attacks. I’m not sure where the glass came from, but I was probably like “Woah, imagine if he could also spit out glass! Aw man, that’d be cool”. Fuckin travesty that kid was, I swear. Anywho, Orbis had a villain, and that was freaking awesome. 2 characters that could duke it out that had loads of potential. But, I couldn’t just stop there. I created 3 more villains, then realized that Orbis was probably lonely. I created concepts for 5 good guys to fight alongside him and soon, The Bane of Evil was created. A group of super powered individuals in a justice league-like ensemble helping protect the world. I ended up changing these characters quite a bit over the years, but the overall story has pretty much stayed the same.

I want to say for about 5 or so years, these characters were the forefront of my vehicle ride parkour ride entertainment. Until I also got tired of looking at those guys. Cuz again, they would all just reset after fighting the last enemy. I decided to create a story, ending it with the final villain and our heroes finally achieving peace. It was great. A beginning, an end, all the great things a story should have. I was in high school at the time of that and it was freaking great. I felt like i was actually doing something worthwhile while learning about rocks and poetry and equations and stuff. I had it all... except for a good ending.

All I had was everything kind of tying up, but there were several loose ends that weren’t fully explained. For some strange reason, I decided to create 5 more characters, basically an entirely new setting, and a whole new story set after the ending of this first one. I developed those characters and holy cow was I in over my head. I did some drawings, but am I by no means an artist, and just, maybe I’ll upload those at some point, because it’s laughable how proud I was of them. I’m getting sidetracked, but yeah, that’s how it started. Just a little parkour man and probably 15 characters and 2 stories later, here I am. I’ll say about a year and some change ago I finally started getting an actual timeline with a coherent and fun story going.

I guess me putting this out there is to say that every great story has a backstory to it, and you can get inspiration from anywhere. So, if you’re young and want to create something like that, then just do it. The adventure was fun and doing research was something I didn’t think I’d enjoy as much as I did. Feel free to share your ideas as well! You never know where an idea can come from.