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you ever have a truly dumb idea like "what if the name this character has always gone by isn't their name at all but actually their initials"
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and you can't shake it to the point that you fill it out
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but the character's name is iris so you have to think of two other names that start with i that are not iris
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this all happened because i realized the surname i gave her twenty years ago is too english and thought "oh the new one doesn't have to start with an s still...but what if"
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anyway what if i just name this character immanuel regina igraine saunier but still call her iris
papermint tiger
Isabella
papermint tiger
oh those are good too
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the worst thing about having ocs from over twenty years ago that you haven't tried putting in a story in at least ten years is every now and then you dust them off and just start tweaking shit
Rᴇᴅ
Yeah, I've done that. I got one which I got so annoyed about because whenever I tried to talk about them/their story I had a couple of guys on plurk go, "Sunk cost fallacy?"
Rᴇᴅ
Without fail.
papermint tiger
what the fuck?
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damn
Rᴇᴅ
Yeah, they're no longer on my timeline for a reason.
Rᴇᴅ
Because sometimes, coming up with an acronym for Iris isn't sunk cost fallacy sometimes it's just having neat ideas to explore.
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yeah that's pretty much an immediate reason to give someone the boot
papermint tiger
i don't know how to even address that other than wondering if they would consider cherishing a favorite canon character as 'sunk cost fallacy'
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but yeah i don't know if i'm going to commit to this because it's kind of dumb, but also a kind of dumb i find irresistible
papermint tiger
how to say you don't write stories without saying you don't write stories
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either way saunier's probably gonna stick as a surname
papermint tiger
if it helps my brother has two middle names for slightly stupid reasons so there are IRL people who have four names
Rᴇᴅ
There's also, as something to consider, the opposite approach.
papermint tiger
(the reasons are his first name was too short and my parents wanted all of us to have the same number of syllables in our full names)
Rᴇᴅ
Someone else on plurk went by a set of initials that had an embarrassing fandom origin and I lovingly gave them a different thing that could be short for and retconned the origins of their name for them.
Rᴇᴅ
Depending on the sort of person Iris is, you could just have them be given a fake name Iris is short for.
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i do think, if i go with the initials, one benefit is having so many names does leave some options as iris gets older and comes into their own a bit more
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esp being one of the younger characters in this story (with post-ending ideas i've thought about playing around with and sometimes think i'd be more interested in doing instead except that they'd be basically incomprehensible without the first story as bakground)
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sometimes certains themes and hooks just look more attractive even though the foundation is literally missing
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somewhat related but the original setting for this story was "hey you know how sometimes fantasy settings have the ancient advanced civilization? what if it was ours, or like what was left of ours after a few hundred years of advancement"
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but i ditched that recently because i had a different idea that let me play around more with the mythmaking of the setting, aka the part of wordlbuilding i'm most into
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and while one of the appealing things about that second story was it originally looked a lot simpler, as i figured out the plot of it, it gets more into those myths and spirals out a bit, making it less simple, more incomprehensible without the foundation, and also more appealing
ToothyGrin
I do love that idea of our world now being the ancient advanced one that's long gone, but yeah having played with that idea myself it's hard to stick to. Anyway I hope you do stick to Iris being a very silly acronym because I love that
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i think what spoiled it a little is i kept defantasizing things because it meant other fantasy races needed some kind of scientific origin, like elves coming from genetic experiments etc
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mythological origins are so much more fun