Bradel Brainstorming – What's in a Name (Pony Edition) · 5:14pm Jan 17th, 2014
I've been bombarding you good folks with a bunch of signal boosts lately, but none of those blogs on writing I know some of you really look forward to. Today, I'm going to take a bit of a break from story work and slip back into the blogger role. This isn't going to be a very deep writing post, but it's about something that's been on my mind lately: coming up with character names, and in particular, pony names.
First, let's talk a bit about the general case. Anyone who's ever written anything can probably tell you that picking names for your characters can be a real pain in the butt. Names are powerful things, and they hint at characterization for us, even when they shouldn't. I don't think that should come as a big surprise, really—there's a reasonable amount of psychological evidence that your name impacts your career, where you live, and your performance in school. By the way, no, I'm not Andrew Gelman—we're both statisticians, but it's just a happy accident that I was able to find all of those links through his blog.
So there are some good reasons why Inigo Montoya sounds like a more convincing swashbuckler name than Guybrush Threepwood, or why Esther and Emily conjure up such different images for most people. For my part, I've never found a particularly good strategy for picking names for characters outside of ponyfic. What I usually do is consider some standard sounds and any names I can think of that begin with those sounds. If I'm writing a character in a particular culture, I may change my search space for sounds for names, but the algorithm's about the same: try on a few different sounds, see if any of them feel like they match the image I have in my head for a character, rinse, repeat.
Pony names, though—coming up with names for original characters and/or background characters—can be a lot tougher.
There aren't many conventions to work with in name-building. Do members of the same family share a common surname? Yes and no. The Apple family all share a theme in their names, but don't appear to have a collective surname. On the other hand, the Cakes seem to have a nice, solid surname to work with. Filthy Rich is related to Stinkin' Rich, but he's also related to Diamond Tiara, which just confuses matters.
So, Working Theory #1: Surnames in My Little Pony function like generational titles (Sr, Jr, III) do for Anglophones. They're optional but by no means necessary, and nobody really cares whether or not you have one.
A further complication is that pony names obviously tie into what a pony does and who they are a lot more than human names do. The Cakes are bakers. The Riches are entrepeneurs. Rainbow Dash makes rainbows by dashing about. Fluttershy is shy and likes things that flutter (though I think quite obviously the name there arose because it's aurally so close to butterfly). They also seem to tie into ponies' cutie marks, which probably influenced my own headcanon about how cutie marks work.
So, Working Theory #2: Pony names should generally have some direct connection to a pony's identity, whether through occupation or personality. This is because names and cutie marks have a synergistic effect in identity reinforcement, and ponies are liable to mature into individuals who can in some way explain their names and cutie marks through their behaviors.
But even this theory doesn't hold up well in all cases. Twilight Sparkle's name doesn't make a whole lot of sense in show canon (which is probably why so many authors have gone to lengths to tie her to Celestia and Luna with day-references), and her cutie mark had no practical meaning that I can think of until the appearance of the Tree of Harmony.
All of this still isn't a huge amount of help for actually creating pony names, though. Ponies don't get names like Steven or Wilifred. Bookplayer had a particularly brilliant idea for generating pony names a while back: check out paint swatches at your local hardware store. This really is a great idea; for whatever reason, the mechanism by which paint companies pick color names seems to match the mechanism by which pony names are chosen at a very high rate. Bookplayer lists 95 names in that blog, but it's a snap to get online and search out paint colors yourself, which I've done in the past when I needed to find some OC names.
Another way to go, though, and one I've been employing in "Three Nights", is to work within a themed list of words and essentially try to generate puns. Yes, yes, I know—most of the world hates puns. But if you're following me and reading this blog post, there's a pretty good chance you're also following Skywriter and/or Ghost of Heraclitus, and I suspect that means you've probably developed at least a little tolerance for them.
Actually, I've been sending around periodic name suggestions to the two of them, when I stumble across a really awful pun that I've got no intention of using. My favorite so far is a crystal pony rock star, a big-name drummer who lives the high life and makes bucketloads of money. He's named Gneiss Jet, and he plays for the band Spinel Tap.
Please don't unfollow me.
ETA: If you found the topic of names at all interesting, I strongly encourage you to check out the comments on this blog as well. I'm not the only one with headcanon on this, and there are some really clever ideas hanging out down there that I'll be adopting myself, going forward.
Dear lord
. Those are the best crystal pony names I've ever read
.
A friend of mine just named one of his named background ponies Dr. Suture... Dr. Karma Suture. (They call him the Doctor of Love...
)
That one caused physical pain. Actual physical pain. My god. That truly was pun-ishing.
As for names, I sort of have a vague headcanon on that that underlies my stories but isn't that important. Basically, ponies get names from three prominent traditions: Earth Pony traditional, Unicorn traditional/Noble, and Classical/Pegasus traditional.
Earth Pony traditional naming is when all members of a family share either a theme or a surname. Closest real world analogue is how Chinese families often have a generational character. Having a name in this wise indicated but does not guarantee common origin. An example from my own work is the Salads. Leafy Salad, after all, doesn't have lettuce farming as his special talent.
Unicorn traditional naming (which is used by the nobility, too) uses a name based on the cutie mark one gets. That means that one's foalhood name is different than the one you get once you get your mark. Dotted's middle name, actually, 'Hieronymus,' is what his parents called him before he got his mark (Well they called him 'Mus' or 'Mussy' but don't call him that or you will die). In the same way Spinning Top was 'Sunblossom' beforehand. Don't call her that either. This name indicates that you are upper-crusty or that your family really hews to old naming traditions.
Classical naming is based on what sounds good, basically, and is the oldest tradition. It's vaguely related to pegasus ponies, too, but not strongly. Classical names don't follow a pattern but frequently include names from mythology, the ones some ponies get as middle names. Such exotic sounding things like: Diane, Miriam, and Joe.
Incidentally I used this obscure little theory to put a hint in my stories. Leafy Salad's beloved wife, Dr. Inky Quill-Salad's name tells an interesting tale. She took the 'Salad' part to fit with the naming scheme of Leafy's family which--given the name--is not noble[1]. Her name, on the other hand, was Inky Quill which is given based on the noble tradition[2]. And, indeed, her family is fiercely proud of their faintly upper-crusty origins and they had great plans to get their daughter married off to someone of higher social standing still. Then Dotted went and introduced Leafy and Inky. Her parents actually tried to put pressure on her to break the relationship off, but she had none of it, and they eventually married. Now they aren't monsters, they can't actually hate the father of their grandchildren, but they can hate Dotted Line. And they do. A lot. Hence "A Canterlot Carol."
Why, yes, I am addicted to backstory, however did you guess?
[1] Salads, rather obviously, are farmers. There's an earth pony and a pegasus pony branch.
[2] In childhood she was Velvet, in case you are wondering.
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I'm torn between admiration and frothing rage.
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I think you know who to blame.
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Oh I always blame him. For everything.
It was terrible when you first sent it to me and it still is!
Also good pony name fodder: short aphorisms with double meanings.
There's always the possibility that we simply aren't hearing all the surnames. I've called white pony "Rarity Belle" on the assumption that Sweetie Belle's first name is Sweetie, with Belle as a surname. Same goes for orange pony, on the assumption that "Apple clan" is indicative of more than just a sense of family, and she became Applejack Apple. We know Pinkie's grandmother as "Granny Pie" and no, I haven't watched last week's episode yet. I go with Sparkle as Twilight's family name, which give her parents the names Night Light (Sparkle) and Twilight Velvet (Sparkle), made even more interesting when I ship her with Rainbow Dash. End result: lampshaded when Rainbow and Twilight decide which surname to keep, if any, when Rainbow has reservations about becoming Rainbow Sparkle. Side note: Prior to marriage she was Rainbow Aeryn Dash in a nod to Farscape. No, I never delved into Fluttershy's family.
The Cakes might have convenient surnames, or one of them (patrilineal or matrilineal, we can't tell) might have taken the Cake surname from the other upon marriage. There's also the issue of nicknames: Carrot Top's first name isn't Carrot and her surname isn't Top; it's a nickname. Her real name is Golden Harvest, a name we only find in print.
I tried to lampshade the entire mess, again with TwiDash:
And of course,
I'mma have to disagree with you there. The colours generally associated with the time period 'twilight' does match Twilight's colour scheme, and the 'Sparkle' could easily refer to an early attempt at magic. Although, if you take Ghost of Heraclitus' unicorn method, 'Twilight' again refers to her colouration, but 'Sparkle' refers to the 'sparks' of magic she has on her butt, and her parents were too lazy to change her name entirely, so they just stuck the new addition on the end. As to why her cutie mark is star shaped? Well, what other shape would a spark be?
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*Yoink!* _My_ headcanon now!
I've always sort of had the idea in the back of my head tha earth ponies will use theme naming/surnames, and Pegasus just go with whatever, but unicorns use magic to determine what name will best fit their foal.
And/or, names are passed from parent to child--Stinking Rich and Filthy Rich are both stallions, while Diamon Tiara probably got a name from her mother, like Twilight Velvet and Twilight Sparkle.
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I just want to mention that all y'all are wonderful, and I'm going to be incorporating some of these ideas into my own headcanon / process, because they're excellent. Unfortunately, I'm stuck teaching for most of the next four hours, so I'm not going to really be able to write any more cogent comments until after that.
Yeah, pony nomenclature is kind of a crapshoot. Twilight Sparkle, the daughter of Twilight Velvet, has a matrilineally derived family name before her personal name. She appears to be the only example of that in the show, though it depends on the name of Applejack's mother. And then there are Igneous Rock and Cloudy Quartz, who have three daughters who all answer to "Miss Pie."
My theory is this: ponies are given a name at birth that often incorporates an element of a parent's name, usually the one of the same gender. When ponies earn their cutie marks, they have the option of changing their names to ones more thematically appropriate. Not all choose to do so.
Why is this the case? I blame Discord. Back in the day, anything could change. Identity was as malleable as clay to the draconequus. Ponies were grateful when their names stayed the same from day to day, no matter what they were. Trying to preserve family lines was an exercise in futility and a waste of energy in a world where up was sideways, backwards was whipped cream, and plaid armchairs were about to eat your face.
Using paint swatches to name ponies is just so brilliant.
I hit a similar wall when I went to name Nocturne guards, and decided to use the most in-appropriate names possible, reasoning that the Nocturne name their own from the names of all of the ponies who were loyal to Princess Luna when she became Nightmare Moon, and that would lead eventually to Pumpernickel, and his little brother Rye, a guard named Dandelion, and a retired guard named Slipstream. And now a new little foal named Stargazer.
I like to think that the ponies have a clan/house structure that is not normally used in conversation, so Twilight Sparkle is of House Twinkle, Green Grass is from the House Chrysanthemum, and his father caries the title of Baron Chrysanthemum, while all the kids can only use Lord or Lady in their titles. Which leads to lines like this from Tutor:
“No problem. Can I use Twilight’s title?” The little dragon bowed to the unicorn. “Announcing Lady Twilight Sparkle, the Element of Magic!”
“Actually that would be Freifrau Twilight Sparkle von Twinkle, Bearer of the Element of Magic, Mistress of the Silver Diadem and Defender of the Realm,” said Green Grass absently as he read through his letter. “Titles go in descending order of importance. I looked her up in Twerp’s Peerage.”