molioanimatra replied to your post: okay so i’m. writing this new character for my…
I think it’d work, and if you don’t feel 100% comfortable with making it a separate given name, there’s no reason at all and OC couldn’t take up a nickname or name they liked regardless of any “proper” given name. (also I feel you re: lack of ANY Asian cultures/proxies in DA; it is f r u s t r a t i n g )
aa thank you! honestly the separate given name is kind of similar to what i’ve noticed a lot of ppl do (specifically east asian ppl but that’s just my personal experience) when living outside their home country in an english-speaking country like the US, canada, britain etc. which is adopt an english name in addition to their given name - most of the girls i knew were comfortable using either, the english one was just to avoid having to teach ppl how to pronounce japanese/chinese/korean names (and subsequently having to hear ppl butcher them over and over)
i’m also playing with the idea of making it a definite public vs. private deal where only ppl close to you use your actual birth name? in which case court announcements might get complicated but most likely would end up being title, public name(s), family name, noble surname whereas private introductions among ppl of the same cultural background would be more along the lines of family name private name public name maaaybe?
and gOD i hate doing direct correlation bc that’s boring and really why can’t we have nonwhite cultures that aren’t taken directly from real world cultures but like. pls. ethnic groups similar to those in asia and africa and south america and everywhere that’s not fucking western europe absolutely exist in thedas and i wish that was explored more, especially in the rp community
Honestly DA doesn’t really do a great job from moving away from western Europe at all (probably because they basically flipped the goddamn map and tweaked it just a bit to get Thedas) which is so frustrating (at least to me) to try and add differently-influenced cultures and OCs into it and try to stick to what we know of the world. It’s a big hurdle I’m coming up against with an OC I’d love to make a DA verse for but??? ugh.
Anyway, to go off of private vs public names, with how many Nevarrans–especially royal Nevarrans–seem to have, I think that’s entirely plausible. And, also, tangential, but ancient Romans had this exact thing–a Family name, a Public name, and a Personal/Private name that only family and close friends would use. So I feel that it’s absolutely fitting that Nevarrans would have such a convention with all their names, etc. Heck, I can even see Tevinter having a similar convention with their pseudo-Roman influence.
oof yeah exactly - i’m trying not to rewrite too much of the canon lore about nevarra bc i know that annoys ppl who play canon characters but also..... come on......
thanks for the feedback! i do like the idea of it being a not super uncommon deal, and honestly there’s no way nevarra and tevinter don’t have a whole bunch of shared cultural practices - the working backstory for this particular oc involves her family being from the northeast corner of nevarra, where it meets tevinter and the anderfels, so it would make sense as a practice that originated with a specific ethnic group then spread into different regions as the political landscape changed, etc. maybe it’s more widespread in tevinter than in nevarra, or maybe there’s an entire subsociety in the anderfels using this or similar naming conventions but nobody knows because this particular group doesn’t travel much
gOD i love anthropology; i just wish the da writers had too
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