While I wait for all my survey responses to be in, let's focus on a more basic aspect of a character. Naming!
Naming characters is one of my favorite parts of the creation process. Its like properly giving them an identity. You can especially have a lot of fun when it comes to name meanings, or similar words the names sound like. Speaking of similar sounding words, I want my protagonist’s name to match with some sort of cat related word. Cat, kitty, feline, words like that.
My reason for wanting to do this is to emphasize her identity and connection problems. Even her name matches with a cat’s, showing how distant she feels from humanity as a whole due to her condition. The world may see her as “lesser” than human because of how she is. A surface level assumption, just like how the sound of her name is something surface level. After looking at many baby naming websites, I came up with a small list of names matching my idea.
Cat - Katherine, Kathy, Kat, Katy
Kitty - Katie, Kylie
Feline - Felicia, Felina
Just cat themed? - Calico??, Nala, Savannah
While these names are all cat enough, I want to make sure that the name I choose has a good meaning too. Some of these names are a bit too on the nose. Kat and Katy are far to similar to the word, and the name Felina literally means “cat-like.” I want the meaning of the name I choose to be completely unrelated to cats, as. Though my character struggles with feeling less human, she is a person though and through, and her condition shouldn’t lower her humanity.
The names I liked the sound of most were Katie, Kylie, and Felicia, so I decided to look up the meanings of those.
Katie - Pure
Kylie - Boomerang, beautiful, graceful
Felicia - Lucky, fortunate, happy
The name Kylie quickly stood out to me because of one of its meanings being “boomerang.” Symbolically, boomerangs can mean one of two things. Resilience and endurance is one of them, because thrown, a boomerangs will come back, like how a person can bounce back from a hardship. Another meaning is for something to backfire, like a plan backfiring on its creator, causing a harmful result. If applying this to my character, the name could symbolize how her brain constantly wants to backfire on itself, with the traits that make her herself often causing distress. But even with this, she can still persist and come to terms with herself, eventually learning to endure. Kylie it is!
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