You know that’s only the case because I’m not involved (yet)
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I’m sure the 7 kenneths I know irl will be elated to know that their name counts as fantastical lmao
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Her new name is after unakite, which fits the mineral name theme of Brodian characters (her name-she-assassinated, Larimar, is also a mineral)
Anyhoo I did the funniest thing with my Mario Bros cavs in the hack that may be my Mad God
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Kay and Nable
…Anyways, I don’t think there’s one single “correct” way to name characters in a Fire Emblem fan project, or in any piece of narrative fiction for example. There are a lot of factors to consider, such as how you want the work as a whole and each character therein to be perceived, how fussed you are about lining up parts of your fictional world with our real one and in what ways, etc.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I actually don’t think official Fire Emblem is particularly consistent about maintaining etymological connections between the names of characters from a given part of the game’s world. I suppose it has done that more recently, with games like Fates and Engage, and has employed such an approach occasionally in prior games, but for the most part, name origin themes seem to be game- or setting-wide rather than based on individual nations or cultures within a given setting. So, I don’t think it’s an issue if fan projects aren’t too fussed about adhering to this sort of thing.
Personally, I feel that, if you’re working with a fictional setting, what’s most important is that the character names all feel like they “belong” in the same story, if that makes sense. I realize this isn’t terribly helpful, considering both how vague it is and how subjective it is what does and does not “count” as names “feeling like they belong in the same story”, but, I guess, for example, Edelgard von Hresvelg, Cloud Strife, and Haruhi Fujioka all sound like they’re from different stories, going just by their names. That said, what you as the writer set a precedent for is also a significant factor. One really different and out-of-place name is going to feel a lot weirder than the exact same name in a story where the names are just all over the place in general. Whether that’s a good or bad approach is, again, contingent on what you want for your project.
If I may pivot to something completely petty, it does kind of irk me when fan things use names official FE games had already used as of the fan thing’s creation (to be fair, it irks me at least as much when official FE reuses names), even if I do understand why that happens. There are so many Fire Emblem characters at this point that not everybody is going to both be aware of all the names that have already been used and deem it something worth caring about, considering how long the list of names it would take off the table is. Plus, to be fair once again, if official FE reuses names sometimes, what’s so wrong about fans doing it?
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i think more people should just come up with an unhinged naming scheme while on lunch break that snowballs into changing their entire setting
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Names are a phenomenal way of making the world feel more alive and can also be used as a narrative device. Parrhesia already commented in the thread about Drums of War, but i just wanted to add that i think it’s probably the best FE project, mainline or hack, when it comes to making the character names feel fitting and culturally recognisable, so huge props for that.
Regarding the narrative device thing. If you have a world where the names or even naming conventions feel culturally recognisable and distinct, you can use that quite well in the story.
Let’s say your characters stumble across a mercenary group with several important characters in them. Your characters and most of the Mercenaries have Germanic style names common to this land and can instantly be recognised as natives. Meanwhile however you have another character with a more Slavic sounding name in the group too. Without giving you anything more than the name, this already lets the player draw conclusions in regards to the Slavic characters origin. They might be a foreigner to this land. What brings them here? How are they connected to the other characters? Maybe the slavic inspired country in this setting is known for their ferocity in combat, and he just adopted a slavic name to sound more dangerous. Maybe he was adopted by a slavic family. The limitations are endless really.
A couple of years ago i read a historically inspired novel on Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a German noble from what is now Estonia but used to be the Russian Empire. The novel covered his exploits fighting for the White Russian Tsarist forces against the Red Bolshevists in the Russian Civil war.
Over the course of the novel, a certain enemy general’s name often came up, General Blücher. Sternberg and his forces often made up theories how someone with a German name ended up fighting for the communists. After all most Germans in Russia were fighting for the Tsar. Some thought he was captured and offered a way out by joining them. Others called him a traitor. Yet others said he was sent by the Germans to bring down the Tsar, and so on.
In the end it turned out that this General Blücher wasn’t even German. If i recall correctly he was a Ukrainian with no actual connection to Germany who just happened to have a German sounding name which may also have been misspelled.
My point here is this character, who you never even met, nor know anything about really, was used pretty well as a storytelling device, just because of his name, and the things associated with it, alone.
It doesn’t even have to be wholly unique names either. After all several different cultures have their own version of the same name. Here’s an excerpt from BehindTheName on the name Thomas for example. As you can see, despite it being a pretty simple and common name, it has so many different versions and spellings depending on the culture and language.
So to conclude: Please add more culturally recognisable names to your projects. I really enjoy seeing them and think they add to your worldbuilding.
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For names that are actually meaningful, my three Pegasus sisters archetype (One of them is a cav but who cares) have the names Dzelarhons, Iktomi, and Haokah, who are all figures in Native American Mythology. Another character is named Custodire, which is just “protector” in Latin.
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Um uhh…hm. Well the province/kingdom of Taleezia mainly uses Greco-Roman names whereas the land of Vrothia uses Biblical Hebrew names for the most part, but I do break my own rules.
Not to say the kingdoms themselves are similar to those nations, but it’s all for fun really. I have a few characters who break the mold because they’re old OCs I want to include, but it’s the exception that makes the rule, right?
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Recycling old OC names even if it doesn’t fit the name. I do that so often.
Kingdom of Ghosts has characters from two time periods: older characters from the past have Greek or Scottish names, while characters from the present have English names. But only primarily; there’s plenty of exceptions, and some names used have origins from multiple countries. Some names are just ones I randomly thought of. But overall, there is a slightly noticeable pattern among the names. It’s even more noticeable in the location names.
Treasure Hunters uses whatever names i can scrounge up from previous unfinished stories of mine, but it can mostly be excused because the planet it takes place on is very connected, as opposed to the lonely continent of Eudaimonia in KoG. But in hindsight, it is questionable at times with some of its worldbuilding choices.
Yeah this is an interesting topic. I suppose in my case I just tried to give characters from the same country names of similar origin.
It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but I generally tried to follow smth as such:
Ambrose: Uses Anglicised names (Randall, Thomas, Patrick, etc.)
Dacia: Germanic names (Alaric, Gereon, Franziska, etc.)
Pontus: Italian names (Cesare, Angelo, Adriano, etc.)
Valeria: Slavic names (Vladimir, Radoslav, Anastas, etc.)
Also I’ve noticed the weird “lets randomly put Japanese names in the hack” trend as well. The Last Promise (my beloved) was particularly guilty of this, Tamiko, Shuuda, Itsuke, etc.
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