How Larísa became Larísa

At least I was sensible enough not to pick one of the main characters from Lord of the Rings. But apart from that, I was pretty much clueless when I made up my character name. It was a jump into an unknown world and I had no idea about name conventions in the MMO world, what to do and not to do.

I wasn’t just clueless, I was also exhausted after making all of those choices of hair, skin, face, not to speak of essentials as class and race. Wasn’t there any end to the decision making process? When was I supposed to start actually playing the game?

I remember clearly how I fumbled, trying to come up with some kind of concept. I wanted something that felt like a name, but still not a name that you see people wearing in your everyday life. It should work in a fantasy inspired environment. The more timeless, the better.

Greek inspiration
My first source of inspiration was Greek Mythology. Yeah, it’s hardly original, but I guess I thought that the youngsters in the game probably hadn’t heard about it. Little did I know. Even the most tiny, insignificant deity had already been discovered and used. I continued to the Egyptian equivalence, but the result was the same. Name not available.

Desperately I picked up an atlas, hoping to get some inspiration from there. For some reason it was Greece again that pulled my attention. I didn’t want to name my character after some spot that everyone knew of, like Crete or Rhodos. And then my eyes fell on a town I’d never heard of called Larisa. By now I had more or less given up on finding a name so I typed it pretty much absentmindedly. And to my astonishment, a pink pigtailed little gnome girl was born.

If I’d known what I know today I would have put the Atlas aside and concentrated on playing round with letters and syllables until I found something completely unique, not referring to anything. Picking names from maps isn’t a great idea. Even though Larisa isn’t well known outside of Greece, it certainly is known to the Greeks. Especially on my former server Kul Tiras, where there was a significant population of Greek players, I had to deal with numerous whispers from enthusiastic Greek players who were happy to see a fellow landsman around. Always in Greek. For a while I considered to make a macro, autoresponding: “Yes, I know that Larisa is a town in Greek, but no, I’m not Greek, I don’t speak Greek, I’m from Sweden, and I just picked the name from a map without any good reason to do so. It was a mistake, I’m sorry about it and I promise I’ll never do it again.”

The strange character
Time has passed and the Greeks seem to have disappeared, or maybe there aren’t that many of them at my current server. People leave me alone nowadays.

Larisa has become an integrated part of my character that I can’t imagine naming her something else. And it’s got some advantages. For instance it’s fairly easy to pronounce and call out on vent. I’ve never ever considered a name change – and especially not after establishing myself as a blogger with the same name as my main.

A year ago, when I switched server, I could have done it for free, if I had wanted to. It turned out that there already was a low level horde character on Stormrage, carrying my name. This came as a complete surprise to me, I hadn’t thought about the possibility.

What to do, what to do? It was in the middle of the night and I just wanted to finish the transferring process as quick as possible. I didn’t want to quit Larisa and I still lacked imagination. So I changed the normal “i” character to one with an accent over it. It wasn’t a great solution, since it effectively prevents people from posting to me and adding me to their friends list – they don’t know how to do this accent and since all keyboards are different I can’t help them. But I just couldn’t come up with anything better. And that was the story about how Larisa turned into Larísa.

Other names
Now Larísa isn’t my only character. I’ve got a bunch of alts, of which I play two. So how did I name those? Did I have another go at the atlas? Actually I did at first! When I created my rogue I started to randomly look around in it once again. I had learned my lesson to avoid WoW populated countries. But what about Indonesia? Maybe I could get some inspiration from some unknown island?

After some looking around I finally gave up the idea. I looked at the blank paper I had in front of me. Without thinking much I wrote down the name I already had: Larisa. Then I started to play around with the letters, moving them, seeing how many ways you could combine them. Many, it turned out. The self-imposed restriction helped me to become more creative. And that’s the origin of the name of my rogue alt: Arisal (to be pronounced Air-e (as in eat)-SAL). The other week I started a new side project, a wanna-be-druid. I repeated the procedure and so Arasil was born.

Larisa, Arisal and Arasil. I like the fact that the names are somewhat connected to each other. It gives a hint to guildies who’s hiding behind an alt name, even if they don’t bother to look at my note.

My names aren’t the most beautiful, original and brilliant ever seen. But they’re not something I suffer from either. They don’t come from a TV series. They’re not trying to be funny. They’re names, not words with a distinct meaning. They’re pretty easy to remember and there aren’t a ton of variations on “Larísa” around on the server. Even though they’re not perfect fantasy names, like something an author could come up with, I think they can pass – at least they don’t destroy the immersion experience for other players.

All in all – they’re good enough for me. And that’s the end of the story about my character names. Thanks to Darraxus for passing the meme to me!