ESO_player123 wrote: »

GeneralGrundmann wrote: »

Evil McBadface is an awesome name for a really ugly and nefarious orc necromancer!

To the character creator ad once!

Still a better name choice for such character than Zumog Phoom (whom we meet in Nothern Elsweyr).

Yeah, that one was "special". Concerning the cringe-factor, this name came close to "Baby Fark McGee-zax" for me.

Syldras wrote: »

virtus753 wrote: »

This is a long-established device in fictional works called “significant/signifying/speaking names,” where onomastics intentionally reflect an identifying characteristic. (Apparently those terms weren’t enough, or at least not Greek enough, and it’s now also called charactonym by Merriam-Webster, though the OED doesn’t recognize that term.)

When I studied philology (which included literature history, linguistics, including historical linguistics, and rhetoric), I came across the term "aptronym" for that. I didn't study in an English-language country, though (I'm not even a native English speaker), so perhaps there are differences when it comes to the names of certain figures of speech (that's what it's called here anyway) in different languages.

virtus753 wrote: »

It’s interesting to me that this can be felt to be cringey and uncreative in some contexts but deeply meaningful in others. I’ve never seen Aslan called out, for example. Felix (as in the cartoon cat) is a pun thousands of years old. Pangloss, Golightly, Milquetoast. Harry Potter is full of them.

I found Aslan for a lion a bit silly (Which does not diminish the quality of the overall narration, mind you; also it wasn't super obvious for most people, I guess, since most people don't know any Turkish?), and in Harry Potter it''s even worse (though not as bad as all those pseudo-Latin spells which I've already found, how the kids nowadays call it, "cringe", even when I was a teen myself). Felix? A pun, indeed. With Pangloss, do you mean the character from Candide? He was meant to be a caricature, a parody on the philosopher Leibniz. I can't say anything about the others, as I simply don't know their stories and the context they appear in.

But have you noticed a thing about your list? These characters who use such names are mostly from children's media, cartoons/comics, or used for parody characters. Is ESO a children's game or a cartoon, or are the characters here supposed to be parodies?

Yeah, I can see how the names do have different value when one recognizes their meaning ahead of time. That’s why Aslan may work for many readers (even adults), while naming him Leo might have inspired less awe and more laughs or groans. Pangloss (all tongue) from Candide is certainly a parody, but not all are. Some just match the name to the nature as part of constructing identity without intending parody (that is, humor specifically designed to mock or ridicule by imitation).

I just threw out a few examples, but they’re not exhaustive. It’s also a longstanding convention in myth and epic literature in many cultures, which is something Tolkien was drawing on when he wrote his works (plural). When Autolycus (the wolf himself, a trickster archetype) was chosen as the name of the master thief in Xena, that fit in well with the campy nature of the show, but the name comes from the mythical thief who was appropriately the maternal grandfather of Odysseus, the man whose nature as a veritable sneakball is called out in his very first descriptor in his epic. And while myths and epics may be appealing to children, and do contain some parodic elements, they were not seen as only parodic or childish by adults, who actively used them to define their own identities and relate to each other not just religiously but socially and politically and artistically, etc. And yes, sometimes simply for fun by including winking nods for their audience to find. That’s how I would characterize most of these, even if some are additionally meant as parody and/or for children. Not all winking nods fit into those boxes, though, and I think many in TES/ESO don’t.

To go back to Torbjorn: Skyrim is not aimed at children (GameStop literally would not sell you the game in the U.S. if you were under 17—I got carded when I bought it), nor is the meaning of his name (which would, like Autolycus, escape most of an audience of children, who would also not be as likely as adult players to use their resources to look it up). You can also look at Wankeen for an example of another onomastic pun in ESO most definitely not intended or suitable for children. (The devs confirmed this reference was intended to sound like what it sounds like.) But speaking names as a trope I think frequently fall under humor more generally, especially when the meaning lands (whether that’s before or after). That’s why onomastic puns have been a frequent feature of advertising for millennia: humor hinges on the unexpected, and that’s memorable. And maybe that’s ultimately why some find these names cringe while others find them clever—we don’t all agree on whether a given attempt at humor lands. That’s probably due to a combination of our own individual senses of humor along with whether we found the twist foreseeable or not. If you see in Cambio something too on-the-nose (certainly a legitimate opinion), perhaps someone else finds humor in the allusion (also a legitimate opinion). Perhaps that’s the case for all of these.

Thank you for the food for thought either way.

Lugaldu wrote: »

ESO_player123 wrote: »

GeneralGrundmann wrote: »

Evil McBadface is an awesome name for a really ugly and nefarious orc necromancer!

To the character creator ad once!

Still a better name choice for such character than Zumog Phoom (whom we meet in Nothern Elsweyr).

Since I just met him yesterday again, now I want to know what is it about that name Zumog Phoom? As a non-English speaker, it does not look any strange for me on the first view.

Even though I'm an American (as in US), English was not my first language either. To me the name sounds silly to the point I could not take him seriously in the Northen Elsweyr questline.