One of the beautiful things about Scrivener is that it has a bunch of built-in tools to make some of the “creative” elements of writing just a touch easier. For example, it has a “Name Generator”, complete with a set of regional names if you want something which fits a particular … theme. Like want a Japanese name? Sure – it’ll pop out 20. Catalan? Or course, anything for you.
However, one of the quirks of writing fantasy is a lot of the character names are very … on-point, so just having something semi-randomly giving you a list of perfectly normal sounding names isn’t necessarily what will help.
[Yes, this is related to Part 2 of “The Emperor’s Tale” — which I am still working on. I promise!!!]
To toss out a couple of semi-relevant examples, please consider “Conan the Barbarian” and “He-Man (and the Masters of the Universe)”? In the Conan movie (the “real” one with Schwarzenegger), James Earl Jones played the Bad Guy™ “Thulsa Doom”. I mean … COME ON! You don’t even need to hear any more to know “Yep, he’s the bad guy in this.”
And then, in “He-Man”, the primary Bad Guy ™ was “Skeletor”. (Yeah, I know he had a “real” name, but everyone knows / knew him as Skeletor.) Again – you don’t need a literature degree to realize “Yep, he’s the bad guy.”
Emperor’s Tale
How does this relate? Well, I’ve already established the first of my new characters, from Part 1 – Emperor Brarol Trogawa. [I’ll admit I used a non-Scrivener name generator and plucked pieces from separate suggestions for this one.] He’s not just the Bad Guy™, but he’s the Evil Space Emperor Bad Guy™ – the vastly improved version.
Part 2 of the story will involve another trip to the Pub, and Trogawa will have a chance to share a drink and stories with another Bad Guy™ … this one of the Evil Magician sub-category. [Again – the whole point of all of the Pub Tales is that they’re based around common / well-known archetypes and tropes, but done in a … ahem … non-copyright-infringing manner. But, if you were to think in terms of the source versions … you might be inclined towards, say … Palpatine and Sauron … just to pluck some names out at random.]
Get to the Point, Already!
I loved the idea of a Thulsa Doom-ish sort of name, but, of course, with different packaging on the label. So I started with the typical thought process of going through synonyms, right? Well, at least synonyms for the “Doom” part.
Let’s see … dread … despair … gloom …
None of those feel quite right, and “Dread” (or, um, “Dredd”) has already been taken by a particular Judge. Well, when in doubt, go for a foreign language version, right?
And, when it comes to ominous-sounding names, nothing beats German. Fear / Dread, auf Deutsch, is “Furcht”.
Oooh … “Furcht” … I like that. it’s a good one. But it needs more, right? What about “suffering”. That’s “Leiden”.
Nice! Those are both good. But, I don’t want to just go with something like Furcht-Leiden. After all, hyphenation in a last name implies marriage and both sides contributed part at some point … and this would mean that a “Mr. Fear” decided to marry a “Miss Suffering” and while potentially hilarious, that’s a little too weird even for me.
German (Language) Allows Word-Combining
One of the “interesting” things about the German language is that you can fairly easily combine separate words into one word. So it’s not a big deal to do “Furcht” + “Leiden” and you get, obviously, “Furchtleiden”.
I like the name. It gives a good sense of being ominous, and, yes, I am planning on writing in a Baron (or something) Furchtleiden.
But, just out of curiosity, I wanted to see if that had a different meaning when it was one word. I’ll … let the result speak for itself.
Yep… The new character will be <Title> Anxiety-Disorder.
sigh
