More on Balthazar's Name
Feb. 19th, 2021 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingSo I thought more about Balthazar’s name.
I know it’s a bit shitty to ask for my friend’s advice and then ignore it, but “Vikram” doesn’t sound right to me. I’m going to trust my gut instinct and go with Ananth instead. It means “endless,” which is appropriate to the character, and I think I’m more comfortable with the character being named something that someone in our generation would actually be named. Also, I kept thinking that I didn’t want the character to be ashamed of his name, or trying to hide it for some reason. He just went with “Balthazar” due to plot-related reasons, and it ended up sticking, but that’s not how he sees himself.
As for his last name, if he’s going to be “Ananth,” his family is almost definitely Hindu, which means that his surname probably can’t be “Singh.” I think I’m going to go with Viswanathan, after Meera Viswanathan, a scholar of Japanese literature whose work on the trope of the demonic woman almost single-handedly inspired me to go into the field. I know a handful of Viswanathans from New Jersey who are roughly my age, so I think it checks out in terms of whose family immigrated where during what decade.
So Ananth Viswanathan, then.
I mean, probably. I’ll check with a few people to make sure this name makes sense, but it sounds right to me. (And there are no famous people or fictional characters with this name, so that’s good too.)
I feel like, on one hand, this doesn’t really matter, because Balthazar is uniquely himself and not, like, a collection of cultural generalizations. He’s just (very) loosely based on someone I used to be friends with in high school, and that’s really the only way his cultural identity enters into his character. On the other hand, this sort of does matter. I get unreasonably annoyed when people come up with Japanese and Israeli names that couldn’t possibly exist, usually to the extent that I will put something down and never pick it up again, and in any case it’s better to be careful and considerate than to just make shit up.
Anyway, “Balthazar” comes from Chrono Trigger. Belthasar is the sage from the Kingdom of Zeal who built a whole bunch of cool stuff (including the final dungeon and your time travel plane) but then slowly lost his mind after he was cast into the distant postapocalyptic future when the Mammon Machine was activated. Aside from two very old stories that are best forgotten, I never really got into Chrono Trigger fandom, but I still think about that game all the time.
I know it’s a bit shitty to ask for my friend’s advice and then ignore it, but “Vikram” doesn’t sound right to me. I’m going to trust my gut instinct and go with Ananth instead. It means “endless,” which is appropriate to the character, and I think I’m more comfortable with the character being named something that someone in our generation would actually be named. Also, I kept thinking that I didn’t want the character to be ashamed of his name, or trying to hide it for some reason. He just went with “Balthazar” due to plot-related reasons, and it ended up sticking, but that’s not how he sees himself.
As for his last name, if he’s going to be “Ananth,” his family is almost definitely Hindu, which means that his surname probably can’t be “Singh.” I think I’m going to go with Viswanathan, after Meera Viswanathan, a scholar of Japanese literature whose work on the trope of the demonic woman almost single-handedly inspired me to go into the field. I know a handful of Viswanathans from New Jersey who are roughly my age, so I think it checks out in terms of whose family immigrated where during what decade.
So Ananth Viswanathan, then.
I mean, probably. I’ll check with a few people to make sure this name makes sense, but it sounds right to me. (And there are no famous people or fictional characters with this name, so that’s good too.)
I feel like, on one hand, this doesn’t really matter, because Balthazar is uniquely himself and not, like, a collection of cultural generalizations. He’s just (very) loosely based on someone I used to be friends with in high school, and that’s really the only way his cultural identity enters into his character. On the other hand, this sort of does matter. I get unreasonably annoyed when people come up with Japanese and Israeli names that couldn’t possibly exist, usually to the extent that I will put something down and never pick it up again, and in any case it’s better to be careful and considerate than to just make shit up.
Anyway, “Balthazar” comes from Chrono Trigger. Belthasar is the sage from the Kingdom of Zeal who built a whole bunch of cool stuff (including the final dungeon and your time travel plane) but then slowly lost his mind after he was cast into the distant postapocalyptic future when the Mammon Machine was activated. Aside from two very old stories that are best forgotten, I never really got into Chrono Trigger fandom, but I still think about that game all the time.
