I always feel like sharing information like this about my characters is super personal, but here it goes! I’m a bit of an alt-oholic, so I have more than one character that has a unique name with background to it. I’ll go more in depth for my main, but also include snippets for alts if anyone happens to be interested in reading them.
I’m a bit of a nerd, and I put a lot of thought into naming my characters. It’s something I could literally spend hours on doing... like messing with the character creator to get their physical appearance just right lol.
None of my character names fall into FFXIV naming conventions—they have all existed (to an extent) well before I started this game.
Hyomin Park
This character was made in about 2011 alongside 3 of my friends who started a series of stories as a collaboration. This series of stories was quite long, and went on for at least a year before our group of friends fragmented and fell apart.
Contrary to what any 2nd generation Kpop fans may think, she was not named after the Hyomin in the group T-ARA—her name was just a very eerie coincidence, as I didn’t listen to the group at the time and had no idea of that Hyomin’s existence (I get this comment a lot when I run into fellow Kpop fans in FFXIV, though it’s been some time since I last heard someone ask if she was named after her).
I spent a lot of time deciding what name I wanted to use for my character, as well as deciding what her Hanja characters would mean. I ultimately decided on using “Hyomin”, which was an amalgamation of two of my favorite singers’ (at that time) names.
“Hyo” — I used the character 孝, which means “filial piety”. I chose this because my character was very loyal to those that she loved, and I wanted a character to reflect loyalty (that also had the reading of “Hyo”).
“Min” — I used the character 敏, which means “clever”, but also “humble”, “well-mannered”, and “hardworking”, all of which I also considered important aspects of her character.
“Park” — I chose the surname “Park” simply because I sat down with a list of Korean surnames and strung them together until I found one that flowed well with “Hyomin”. Not because I found any important meaning in the surname itself (I reserved all of that energy for deciding the Hanja of her given name lol).
I also made a character for Hyomin’s younger brother, Hyojin—I just haven’t played him much outside of messing with /gpose. Unfortunately, I can’t find the document where I wrote down his Hanja or their meanings, so I won’t include them here.
Arianna Firestarter
My alt that I play on the most. She is from a story I started writing back in... 2006? 2007? A very long time ago lol.
Her name has changed a bit from the original I used, because the story changed, but I always liked the name “Arianna” and wanted to use it for a character. So I gave it to her. “Firestarter” is not from the BLM proc, but from her tendency to be a little bit of a pyromaniac—it’s also not her real last name, but from a nickname other characters gave her “Miss Firestarter”.
Gloria Anderson
I suppose since this character is a Hyur Midlander, her name is actually a bit lore friendly. But she is from a story that I actually re-wrote a year ago. I based her off of a character named “Gloria” from a musical I heard about once, as well as her lover, (who was named “Daniel”).
Because the ending of the musical was very sad, and because I wanted to give them a happier ending, I wrote a small blurb using them a long time ago (also in 2011/2012), and then expanded it into a much larger story a year ago (2018). The story itself has nothing to do with the musical other than the two main characters share the first names of the main characters from the musical—I did incorporate lyrics of the love theme into their story, though.
I started to use them in another rewrite of an story I wrote from ~2011 that was a fan fiction. Since I’ve moved on from that genre, and because I wanted to rewrite it with original characters, I used Gloria and Daniel as placeholders for two of the characters in there—who are also lovers, and who have a happier ending compared to the Gloria and Daniel in the musical. Their surnames are different from the Gloria and Daniel in the story I wrote last year, as well as different physical characteristics and personalities.
Aura Luxe
My oldest character, dating back to early 2005/late 2006. I haven’t played her much in FFXIV—I merely made her in the character creator for funnsies and /gpose (though I do plan to level her one day—I’m going to move characters around so she’s on Cactuar with my other alts whenever there are free transfers, I think... I made her on a different server to check housing ideas and markets lol.
The name “Aura” was chosen literally from me picking the name out of a dictionary. I’m not kidding—I was like 14/15, and I thought the name sounded really nice. It rolled off the tongue, and I could appreciate that. I didn’t give her a surname until I began to rewrite the (originally very poorly written) story about two years ago.
I based her surname “Luxe” off of the Latin word “lux”, which means “light”. It also coincides with her home country (named “Lumen”), where she is of the ruling family.
For some reason, I really dislike using real-world places in my stories. I much prefer to invent my own places with place names and stuff. Probably because I’m really bad with geography and forget major names of real cities and stuff lol.
Hmm. This was already super condensed, and I still got a bit carried away...
Oops. :c
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