Thoughts on names in EG

First all, let me say that work on Chapter 7 of A Tale of Two Suns is proceeding very well, despite my earlier.... setbacks. sigh.

I've gotten a lot of the background data I lost back in my file as well as the old story text, and as of right now I'm working on the last scene, and then I need to go over the rest of the scenes and polish them some more. I hope to have it out in the next few days.

But while I'm working, I thought I'd take a little break to talk about a little something that I was pondering when I was writing my story in the first place: Names in the Equestria Girls universe, specifically, people and place names.

From the main cast and even background characters, we can get the idea that the punny names of MLP characters are maintained by their human counterparts, i.e. the humans here don't seem to have normal human names.

Exceptions could be be made, of course, for non-pony characters that have normal human names like Gilda or Matilda, etc, or even a pony whose name sounds human but is part of a larger pun. An example would be Nat-Tally from the comics, a one-time appearing accountant mare in Ponyville.

But here's something I wondered about. What about names with pony-specific puns? Names with pony terms like hoof or mane and the like? Most puns are fine, but does it make sense for the humans to have the pony-specific puns in their names too?

How do you, as a writer, choose to deal with that? Do you keep these names the same in the human world, or do you change them because the counterpart IS human?

Admittedly "Cinch" is a pony-pun (part of a saddle), but cinch has another definition that fit the character too, so it can be taken as a non-pony pun too if you want.

And on top of that, what about place names? Do you keep the puns there, or use their real world equivalents? Is it France or Prance? Detroit or Detrot? Baltimore or Baltimare? I've seen both in various fanfics, and if you're writing in the EG universe, it IS something you need to decide from the outset. A little detail, but one that needs to be consistent.

My own choices were to keep the pony-specific name puns for characters. At first I thought not to, but I couldn't come up with an alternative for one (though I did think of it later....), so I just decided to leave them be. And as for the locations, I chose to use real world equivalents.

Personally I think the Equestrian names wouldn't make as much sense in a world of humans. Yes, there's Canterlot, but that could be an exception because of the portal, that the portal caused some sort of larger interest in horse iconography or something like that. The stage in RR was saddle shaped after all.

Anyway, these are just my passing thoughts as I take a break from writing. Feel free to tell me what you do when writing EG stories.