The Surname Debacle

DISCLAIMER/ASIDE:

(It took waaaay too long to get the post done, after I wrote most on my phone in a quick burst. But it's superbruise procedure recovery week, so maaaaaaybe planning a colored illustration, then writing an entire followup post inside the initial post was a mistake? Anyway, read deep for why I made this particular sketch! If you care at all about the “salvaging 15yo Chrispy’s bad ideas” aspect of the Momentum busywork, this text may be worth actually reading!)

INTRODUCTION STUFF:

Because of *gestures at everything* trauma atop my *gestures at his personal life* trauma, my brain is blasted and I really can't pay attention to TV or movies anymore. Yes, health preventing work also means I can't find any means of enjoyment and time killing in all the empty waking hours! I'm THOROUGHLY disabled! So I love when sports tournaments happen, because I can put games on for background noise ALL DAY in the early rounds, and not have another anxiety attack over how I've rewatched safe shows so much I can't even think of them anymore!

This time it was women's basketball. It's far better than men's, cuz I know enough to get angry when certain men's teams win, but I can just be a flat advocate for women's sports without ever looking up to see who exactly is playing. (You look up at times when the announcer raises their voice, to catch key action, and let it fade into white noise otherwise!) White noising didn't work this time, cuz a name caught my brain... 

ACTUAL CONTENT BEGINS:

"That's close to the placeholder surname I have for Aaron... the name I've been scared to write down and share because I'm certain I'd spell it badly, or it'd require a vowel with squiggles on it... and I don't actually know how those things are pronounced, cuz I get my knowledge from reading. I CAN GET A VALID SPELLING OF THAT NAME!"

So how does Aaron Ronsiek sound for a full name? (The placeholder name in my head was something pronounced like "Run-seeg" -  super close!) I'll get to the debacle part of how I got to this amorphous surname, and why I didn't wanna share it until a solution was in place, in a bit. First let's celebrate the part where everything was coming up Milhouse...

TRANSLATION GOOFINESS:

With a spelling, I could now look up what the translation of the name meant, to ensure it wasn't a trap! Well, I don't think I got any of that, but what I *did* find was some site that seemed to be astrology-based (with the names having lucky numbers and whatnot) that gave a summary of Ronsiek. I know it's surely incorrect, and an actual translation will turn out to be, like, a Slavic term that means "worst racist ever" or something... but why do people like astrology??? Cuz it tells them what they want to hear!!! And the summary of Ronsiek was PERFECT for Aaron! 

A QUICK AARON BIO: A flashy scholar, “Professor Aaron” loves sharing via enthusiastic presentation. He has obsessively devoted his adulthood to this quest, as he’s basically custom-made to be the leader (interpreter class), with all the cute dorkiness and drawbacks that profile earns. And that obsessiveness, and desire to get the maximum outcome, can make Aaron hard to deal with. This is particularly in play for his relationship with the other team leader, Phoebe... and expands to the whole team when Rhenna, his too-alike partner, shows up.

(I cut out the astrology note that said Ronseiks are unfaithful in love. Even if you wanna scold Aaron for delaying closeness to Nate because he's leaning on his partnership with Rhenna, among other potential destructive actions, the context of cheating was "he wants new and exciting experiences in love" and that is the *opposite* reason for his bad boyfriending! But, hey, it’s astrology. You ignore what doesn't work, and marvel at vague lines that resonate due to you applying your own context to them!)

(Note on using THAT translation: Google automatically "corrects" searches to look for anything BUT the components of Ronsiek, and when it does search for the actual letters, it just gets results of sites that auto-generate pages about whatever you searched for, with all "definition/origin/etc." info blank, so the best I got was "siek" can translate to "sick" sometimes, which I'll take! Hehe. Perfectly fitting for this marvelous mess of Baby Chrispy being a sad hack.)

WHAT’S UP WITH U?

Now, the placeholder in my head had a U instead of O in the surname, because it'd create a Ron-Ron situation otherwise. Which is actually dang adorable, and I may keep it that way. If I panic, or choose the legacy pronunciation, it's easy enough to justify. Like, maybe someone chipped an ID card, or wrote too loosely, generations back when traveling to a new land, the O lost its top, and that's what ended up in the census upon arrival. Or translation shenanigans happened in the morphing into today's common tongue. It's a story theme, with Aaron as the translator, that the ancient language used on the disc is context-based and flexible, so a full understanding only arrives in the moment when you see all needed information aligned. You can make an educated guess, and generally be quite close, but still easily end up wrong in one little-but-important way. So, yeah, not gonna sweat the U if I revert to it.

And there's another adorable angle! Aaron is (primarily) a historical linguist - studying language shifts over time - following in his professor mother’s footsteps.  It is wholly plausible she did the research when she married Aaron's dad, found the letter switch way back, and named her son Aaron to bring the “ron” back to the family. It's valid and fits story and theme! Seriously, how did this work out so well???

ON TO THE DEBACLE!

So who wants the story behind Aaron's surname debacle? Everyone? Good!

In early drafts, knowing Aaron and Rhenna had to do a lot of not-so-legal dealing to find the clues needed to piece together the upcoming quest’s framework, I had an idea that folks dealing in the black market side of archeology would use fake surnames, for plausible deniability in any receipts uncovered by investigators.

Why? Because I had screwed up, given Rhenna what I thought was just another fantasy-sounding name, but it turned out 15yo me was just very, very innocent: Her initial last name was… Shiraz. When I learned it was WINE, instead of ditching it, it became her dark web name. Which, sure, it could work.

But young me was a debacle machine! I would botch her naming further, switching her “real” surname to Cherico - before deciding it felt too Italian, when Rhenna’s more of British ancestry. Remember: Her whole deal is she’s PALE! In the redhead-who-came-out-even-whiter way! (Remember: they were all human right up until this “Momentum is a show in Precocuous” busywork idea emerged.) So I tried to make the name sound more British-y: Cherrycoat!

Took me over a DECADE to figure out I had just given my redhead/red fox, that was full-silvered by magic, the most ironically-accurate-to-the-point-of-parody name. But, F it, it’s a cute surname, and I’m FORCING myself to lean into the showier side of fantasy, since my natural inclination is to run from it.

Back to Aaron, who now had to have a fake name wanked into existence due to my Rhenna fumbles! (Very fitting considering their relationship, with Aaron the Good Cop, and Rhenna a vicious tornado wrecking what’s near.) What I landed on as his dealer document fake name was… Runesong! It was such a 15yo fantasy name that I didn’t use it sincerely by 16. It stayed around, however, becoming a joke that I enjoyed: The goal of these names is to keep you plausibly below the radar. Aaron learned the process from his dad, whose fake name was the gentle Cooperpot. But Aaron is a flashy guy who has his indigo vest and bold branding - so he got flashy in fake name too! And THAT is why I made the sketch above: Aaron, in his full “I am obviously this guy folks in the scene will recognize, while pretending I’m incognito with a fake name that has the same LOOK AT ME flash!” mold. *shrug*

I didn’t have an alternative surname for Aaron I liked (and I tried a LOT) so I mushed it into some Scandinavian-looking* spelling, and left it as a placeholder that hovered around because Momentum spent the next 25 years mostly mothballed. (*Original Aaron was made by me taking my own strengths and weakness, then enhancing/inverting them, but the more he went on, the more his own character he became, and his ethnicity shifted to Indian during various adaptations of the Momentum character group, and that further made me not wanna write the surname down, so I could leave it open to tweak to Indian form, and I was gonna research instead of faking it and being offensive. That’s the reason I never dropped the surname talk in Patreon. Yeah, right call.)

I did absolutely everything wrong with Aaron and Rhenna’s naming, and just kept going rather than admit defeat. Will Aaron Ronsiek/Runsiek stick with Rhenna Cherrycoat, or will shame finally win and stop me? Who cares? Momentum’s not a real story, so it doesn’t matter!

FOLLOWUP: EVERYONE’S NAMES!

Aside from that whole "if I'm too sick to make a comic, I'm too sick to do anything" issue delaying my Momentum bios for an absurd amount of time, the characters (especially the supporting roles) are in flux, since I'm now looking at them with mature eyes, and trying to find a way to make them more viable - while also Precocizing them. Aside from forms, names shifted as well. So here I go with a breakdown of Momentite names (that I haven't already covered), roughly ordered from debacle to bacle:

NO CONFIRMED SURNAMES:

Kimban - The issue with him is that his proposed surnames kept bumping with the sounds of other character names, and Kimban's human ancestry is hodgepodge enough I never made up my mind enough to START picking a surname. When he gets one, the primary goal is that it adds some sound variety in relation to everyone else. No idea yet.

Tijo - He's a victim of how I’ve been a weirdo about quirky naming getting taken waaaaay too far. And Nate is the chosen one to retain the "Chrispy has issues" name mess, so what can Tijo be? Quick-ish summary: Tijo has a learning disability, or is neuroatypical - I intentionally kept it vague, cuz I'm not ready to nail it down, and there are multiple issues with the poor guy - and he was easy prey for a criminal group that exploited his physical gifts and "gave him structure" in a very, very negative way that Tijo couldn't really understand. In early times, that included dehumanizing names. He was "Lancer" due to a lazy attempt to give his group weapon-y nicknames, even though his skill was more archery - because, again, it was a way to break him down and dehumanize him. Once free of that group, I had him take on Tijo as a reaction to the rude callsign deal. It's also a nickname, but tied to his actual name of Alejandro Tiberon [last name never set], after it got thrown in a blender.

I have now excised almost all of that convoluted mess, and just let him be Tijo. He still needs a surname. Noe, only disaster comes when you tie ethnicity too much to anthro characters, but I might as well look for an Argentine surname to fit the rest of him in his maned wolf form. The same astrology BS sites that I used for Aaron say the name "Tijo" implies someone who wants to be of service - again, FRUSTRATINGLY dead-on - and "Arias" means "skill" - and being in a place where he now wants to use his skills to help instead of hurt is very much him. But I'm not stopping at the first viable use in an alphabetical list! What else would work... *reads* Actually, any other good match is too common a name? Tijo Molina - mill - for life grinding him down? Tijo Herrera - ironworks - about how his service had been through his weapons before? Tijo Ojeda - for some leaves imagery that makes the "Ron Ron" issue above look like nothing? Crud, maybe it was that easy, after all the debacleness. "Tijo Arias" can be the placeholder.

CHRISPY GOT WEIRD:

Natalia Sara Annelith Vonnegan-Kindler Markwood - See? Nate gets the name theatrics! Born Natalia Sara Annelith, she was orphaned in one of the first attacks of what would become the Epic Fantasy War That Messed Everyone Up, before folks fully knew what was happening. It was Putin-style magic-altered plague that wiped out folks based on fitness, leaving the elderly and young behind as burdens! (Evil’s assumption that having orphans was a liability, because it was assumed no one wanted them and they'd grow up broken, is what led to the town child program - "these are OUR kids, and we are obligated to raise them properly, with care and training, as a community!" - that raised Meret.) The doctor that adopted Nate had a hypenated surname, so she got those too! Remember the nature of the plague? This meant dad was old enough to not be a target, and Nate was a baby. While Nate was still a minor, he passed away, and she was then adopted by Cello Markwood, who founded/ran the herbalist school that Nate spent her whole live in. (Not a coincidence docs who saw that awful plague withdrew and created a program for medicine based on magic-resonant plants, which could counter, say, a magic-based plague.) I am willing to have the Markwood be just a paperwork thing, and not actually used. But, if she marries Aaron, she probably won't take on Ronsiek, cuz at that point she's famous enough to have a brand. And the brand is based on her healing powers, so tying it to the Markwood School would be best? Hmm. Maybe she keeps Markwood after all.

Meret Kaida - Kaida means "little dragon" and that's Meret summed up nicely. Now, it's *probably* her middle name, cuz she was orphaned, and the woman dropping her off wouldn't leave a big clue to follow. If she didn't use Kaida, Meret would get a clunky town child program name, such as [First name chosen by someone in the program] Breckonridgechild Springborn, showing where she's based and which of the seasonal children's days she uses as her birthday. (Her season can change depending on how far along in year 16 I want her to be. Spring makes her among the last born before the war ends, as a contrast to Nate being one of the first war orphans.)

Nasha Raj - A simple bit from my silly naming deal, where the nicest guy has a name that gets mispronounced "rage." It was always Nasha's FIRST name that snagged me. I'm glad I finally have that settled. I reserve the right to change my mind, cuz Momentum isn't real and it's all scratch paper, but I'm happy for now.

STANDARD FANTASY FARE:

Phoebe D. Alexandros - This is a basic one. She was born Phoebe Alexandra Dionne, and switched her names around when she joined the army, cuz the Dionnes were organizers for evil at that point, and she needed to distance from them.

Jerrod Elishem - You know very little about Jerrod, cuz I have done little to draw or develop his character so far, but you sure as heck know his surname. Elishem weapons as the best, and so coveted/expensive the only ones who can afford them would never get near a battle. Jerrod, without the magic needed to make weapons, was used to demonstrate how the enchantments on the weapons work. When he got too big and burly, defeating the "it adjust so even a child can wield it!" bit, he went traveling with a pile of uncustomized demo weapons, eventually found Phoebe in the Freedomlands, and THAT is how an Elishem weapon *finally* got used in battle. It made Phoebe a minor hero, when she used it strike down a high-tier baddy, at the end of a battle that probably was the cue that kicked off the whole Momentum quest. Elishem is important!

There! Surname debacles for everyone! It was a wild path from a quick Twitter thread to here, but I got the ideas out of my brain. They’re YOUR problem now!