Character Creation Inspiration - Ball of Nothing (Part 3)
I will be covering the inspiration for names for the Half Moon Villagers today! Just a small trivia, I get a lot of inspiration when I'm in the toilet, in a pool or in bed just about to keel over from exhaustion most of the time so feel free to guess how I got the inspiration for the Half Moon Villagers. There are a total of 38+1 villagers in Half Moon Village so I might not cover them all. It will be a very long blog post so please take breaks in between reading if you have to.
If you have any blog topics you'd like to see me cover, do let me know! If I can do it, I will schedule it accordingly.
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In case you did not know, this is my Ball of Nothing's entire Character Profile list. It's available for viewing for anyone with a link, so click it! Also, Ball of Nothing's Wiki still needs readers to maintain so feel free to contribute! Also, this should already be obvious but if you don't want spoilers, please don't continue reading past this point.
#1 Chieftess
When I first designed Half Moon Village's chieftess, I wanted her to be of a strong character with weaker stereotypes. The rabbit beastman design came first before the name. As the village's concept is a place for misfits to gather, I wanted someone to lead them in the way a rebel would. Hence, after much research about historic queens, Queen Zenobia fits the description. I adopted the name after researching about her. She's not a very famous queen but she's a worthy one.
#2 Founder
As I designed Half Moon Village, I also thought about how it came to be a place for rebel and designed the backstory in mind. Grandma Moppo was the only survivor of her village's massacre. Her lineage is unique to the story of her village and its name was only developed later. As a love child between fae and dwarf, this character has to be the one to suffer the most from living in a village completely different from the one in her memories where she grew up from.
Her character requires the fortitude to move forward despite the shackles of the past. The resolve to forget everything and start life anew with her new chosen family is what inspired the name Moppo. In Chinese legend, on the Naihe Bridge of reincarnation, there is an old lady called Meng Po who gives everyone soup to drink to forget everything about their present lives so they can have a fresh start after reincarnation. Moppo comes from Meng Po :)
#3 Cockatrice Descendants
Funnily enough, the inspiration for the cockatrice family in Half Moon Village comes from two different sources. I'll start with Amaraline whom I designed the fortune-telling ability. Her name comes from a flower - Amaryllis. The flower's meaning means 'to sparkle' but there's actually a gory tale about it. The flower has many versatile meanings and the purple variation is about spirituality so I thought it was a good reference to the name.
The names Lowis and Clowis come from a similar source - Louis. As they are both head warriors at different points in the story, I wanted names that gave them warrior vibes. However, it was too troublesome to call one Louis and the other Louis junior. It's more confusing to name them Louis and Lewis. I know that because I teach many students and this is a very popular name apart from Jayden and Kayden.
The only logical solution? I simply made a variation of Louis. Also, Louis came from Clovis. (I have a student actually called Clovis as well.)
#4 Mother & Son
As one of the two full-blooded human in Half Moon Village, I named the mother Karris after the image of unconditional love. Karis (originally spelled with 1 'r') has a beautiful meaning that was what I needed in my character. However, I changed the spelling to double 'r's because I liked it better.
When the baby vampire-human was born, I wanted him to be the opposite of Ruth whose name meant compassion for someone else's misery. Although Ruth suffered a lot from miasma poisoning and his strong clan died out, baby Seff was different. He had a weak human mother to protect and I wanted him to be raised strong (he eventually was but was also raised spoiled).
#5 Village Guardian
I think one of my favourite characters in Half Moon Village has to be this lovely zashikiwarashi (household ghost) Zoe. She was not an original occupant of the village but thanks to the love that the village was built on, she came to materialise as a by-product of that love. However, after the village was ruined, it was Zoe who helped Grandma Moppo rebuild it. As Half Moon Village grew, so did Zoe's happiness. Her name is her existence.
#6 The Children
There's no real reason for the names of the children. Apart from how I wanted Rima to be a kind of child who was wiser than her age and clearly Asian, there was no reason why it was what it became. Jacqueline is a mermaid who could run and I know of a classmate with the same name who ran like the wind so that was how it came about. Leon is a werecat type of beast. It's only natural there's "Leo" in the name, right? It's definitely accidental that Leon is also the name of my previous director when I was working in finance. Their personalities are completely different so it was purely accidental.
#7 The Traitor
Honestly, I already planned for the invasion of Half Moon Village as an arc when I wrote it. Hence, I already knew there was going to be a traitor among their kind. Douglas was the name because it sounded most like 'douchebag".
#8 Big Foot
If you recall that yeti-like creature who was good at gardening in Half Moon Village, there was actually a backstory for him that I wanted to write but thanks to Webnovel and the disappointing reality that caused me to end the story way too early, Chowkah's backstory was never actually written.
Chowkah is Hokkien which means "Smelly Foot" in literal translation. Chowkah wasn't like all his snowy abominable snowmen friends. He left the mountain of white slushies for greener pastures literally because he was a spring lover than a winter lover. His unusual love for life led him to several unpleasant encounters with other species who saw him as nothing more than a monster. His introduction to the Half Moon Village family was actually thanks to Cleo the dryad.
Trivia: Chowkah was named Smelly Foot because he constantly smelled like fertiliser made from, you guessed it, animal poop.
#9 Dragon Warriors
I play Dragon Nest occasionally like once every few years. In the storyline, there is a character called Geriant and another called Velskud. Gerald & Vrald were referenced from those game characters. My only lament is that I made Vrald a lot dumber and more fun than the cool, emo and mysterious hottie Velskud.
Honestly, Velskud is more my type than Vrald although I like Vrald's name a lot better. I wonder if this is thanks to Zero's influence that I have so many dumb but fun characters in my book.
#10 Gemini Mages
If you recall, these twin magicians were chimaeras from the arc of visiting the United Nation of the Undead. Yxaan and Xvyal were summoned by Sylvia the witch and there was a whole U.N.U. arc in later seasons. I wanted these names to be vague to pronounce because they were meant to represent barcodes and serial numbers like experiment code names. It's not a real name but I have borrowed Xvyal as my Old School Runescape character's username HAHAHA
#11 Assassin Seamstress
Gosh, I love this one! I saved the best for the last and my favourite character from Half Moon Village has to be this bitch. Mitchnew is like Yor from SPYxSPY except, I made her before the anime came out. She's probably a tad more badass and way smarter. This is the alpha lady that everybody wants and needs. She's my role model.
The name Mitchnew comes from two words - "Bitch" + "Newbie". There is no mention in the story about her actual name before she settled down in Half Moon Village but this name is what she chose after deciding on a new life after retiring. She chose to become a seamstress as it has always been a hobby she enjoyed. She probably picked the hobby up from suturing people's flesh together in emergency operations to remove arrows or something.
In any case, Mitchnew came in with that boss levelled name and owned the whole game. What do you think? I had a lot of ideas for her backstory but didn't get to it because Ball of Nothing could not take off properly and writing it was only making me more depressed. In any case, there's no regret in this.
Conclusion...
If you liked this, do remember to check out all my other books! I might be writing FL now but I still have not given up on Godfather World. I just need to wrap the FL and BL works before investing the rest of my life into Godfather World until it ends. I'll talk about the other random names in the next blog <3