Ishgardian miqo'te tribe?

I'm currently in the process of putting together a composite rp character of a rather normal Sunseeker Miqo'te from Thanalan and a rather normal Ishgardian Wildwood Elezen, and have decided to go the route of a miqo'te from Ishgard.

The problem I'm having is that...if a miqo'te has never lived life in a tribe, and never knew who their father was, would it be likely or not that they'd possess a tribe moniker? A traditional surname? I'd like to avoid a name that is unfitting, but I'm not sure what to do with this type of situation.

I think the answer to that would be they would have been named whatever their foster family names them. It's also pretty clear that some will even change their name (Loohn Gah, the U tribe miqo'te huntress who was adopted by the Brotherhood of Ash, changed her name to a more amal'jaa-sounding one for instance by dropping the tribal letter from her first name and giving herself a new second name). So it's fitting to use whatever naming traditions are fine with the area they're living in (this is kind of similar to my own character's backstory, as her parents were exiles from their tribe and ended up settling in Ala Mhigo, where they decided to cut ties to their pasts by changing their names to ones more fitting to their new home; naming their newborn daughter accordingly). 'When in Garlemald, do as the Garleans do' and all that.

(It was what I came up with to explain why Enkidoh does not have a 'proper' Sunseeker name - the mundane meta explanation is that I originally named her back in 1.0 where the naming traditions for each race had not been worked out - there were plenty of clearly Moonkeeper appearence miqo'te npcs with Sunseeker tribal letters in 1.0 for instance, F'lhaminn's original appearence in 1.0 with fangs and rounded eyes being a particularly glaring example - so I just went with what I knew, and came up with the above idea once the naming traditions had been released for ARR's launch).

So go ahead with using a non Sunseeker name: remember, your character is yours so you can name them whatever you wish, and the lore is not so immutable that there couldn't potentially be a way of explaining it if anyone asked. ;)

We already have an example of this in-game--Krile Baldesion. Lalafell naming conventions don't fit with this, but she took on her Hyur grandfather's surname. I think some optional dialogue even points it out.

Are you starting with a name and trying to get lore to fit it, or working out the rules so you can decide on a name?

Assuming you're working rules-first... the answer is going to be down to individual circumstances.

Has she grown up knowing her birth mother, or was she orphaned/abandoned and adopted as a baby?

If adopted, is she (or her parents when they named her) wanting to use a standard-format Seeker name as much as possible?

If her mother is known and named her, does she have a traditional Seeker name? If so then the tribe-letter should be passed down (it's the functional equivalent of a family name).

If she isn't just going to take her adopted(?) family's surname as her own, and instead follow the Seeker-style "father's given name as daughter's surname" format, she could instead use her mother's name (no tribe-letter) or adoptive father's name.

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Originally Posted by Astrid_Stormborn

We already have an example of this in-game--Krile Baldesion. Lalafell naming conventions don't fit with this, but she took on her Hyur grandfather's surname. I think some optional dialogue even points it out.

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in jp its kururu tho isnt it?

There isn't an Ishgardian miqo'te 'tribe' that I know of, but if adopted by ishgardians the easiest thing to do would be have the child adopted at a young age and either have a full ishgardian name, or an ishgardian surname from the adopted family. It's fine to have characters whose names go against tradition, characters are individuals afterall not just collections of traditions and customs.

An older miqo'te that abandoned tribal life could also fit as well. Choosing to take up a new name as a symbol of abandoning the clan. Or just having been raised by Miqo'te that had left the tribe and adapted to city life etc.

It's fine to break convention, just nice to have a reason for it and there's plenty of ways you could explain it by the circumstances of their upbringing or simply a deliberate choice to break from tradition.

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Originally Posted by Lihtleita

in jp its kururu tho isnt it?

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Even then, a traditional lalafel name would be something like 'Kururu Ruru' iirc. 'Baldesion' doesn't fit a lalafel at all. It's a hyur name, as Astrid pointed out. They talked about the surname primarily.

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Originally Posted by Yuyuka3

Even then, a traditional lalafel name would be something like 'Kururu Ruru' iirc. 'Baldesion' doesn't fit a lalafel at all. It's a hyur name, as Astrid pointed out. They talked about the surname primarily.

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Kururu Kuru would be the correct name structure for female Plainsfolk.

I think it's a different situation to a Miqo'te taking up a nonstandard name - and for that matter, for 'Krile' and 'Kururu'.

Lalafell don't have family names. Each person's "surname" is individual and forms a pair with their forename, one way or another. Female names for both clans just repeat the forename syllables (only the pattern is a little different) so there's nothing special about the surname Kuru. Anyone who is familiar with Lalafell name patterns can guess her surname as soon as she introduces herself as Kururu.

But then of course she's adopted by someone from a culture whose surname is a family name, so it seems an easy choice to take up that name and use it instead of the 'meaningless' Lalafell one. So she has a normal Lalafell forename and adopted family surname.

The English translation is a bit messier because she becomes "Krile" to maintain a reference to a pre-existing character from FFV, which unfortunately means it's no longer a Lalafell name. The lorebook handwaves this as "a Hyuran spelling [of] her forename".



Back to the issue of Sunseeker names, it's different because each part of their name is meaningful, but in a different format. So "translating" it into a different cultural format needs more consideration.

Most of the races follow the format of [individual name] [family/tribe name], or occasionally [individual name] [father's name].

Female Sunseeker names fit in all three with [tribe]'[individual name] [father's name].

So as I said in my last post, the decisions about how to rearrange the name (or alternately how to follow that name structure in unusual circumstances) are going to depend on the individual situation:

- the character's past
- her mother's past (and name)
- her adopted family if she hasn't grown up living with her mother
- why they aren't in a tribe
- whether her mother was previously in a tribe, and why she left
- why she doesn't know her father's name, and wasn't given it at birth
- whether she has another father-figure


If the OP gets back to us with that sort of information, we can try to work it out from there.

I'd go for a moon keeper Miqo'te myself, considering the proximity of North Shroud and Coerthas, it would make the situation more believable. Otherwise you'd have to explain how a Sun Seeker ended up in Ishgard

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Originally Posted by NessaWyvern

I'd go for a moon keeper Miqo'te myself, considering the proximity of North Shroud and Coerthas, it would make the situation more believable. Otherwise you'd have to explain how a Sun Seeker ended up in Ishgard

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Do people actually play moon cats?