Other people are way, WAY better at this than me, but-
To anyone who writes future fic involving two characters having (biological) children, how exactly do you come up with the names for said original child characters? Is it completely at random or theme-based?
I told you, I’m not good at this, so it’s usually the latter for me. A good example of this is my writing about Fire Emblem: Three Houses, a story with more than a few possible intercultural relationships/marriages.
Every now and again, I get a freebie like with Rhealeth. Who exactly is Rhea in Greek mythology? Exactly. I write their (eldest) daughter being named Hestia, since they’re literally the mother and father of the Olympians. It also works into my preference for writing M!Byleth and his fear of harming his children bordering on obsession because war and Cronus. Unfortunately for the old Witcher and Leonie for that matter, this would translate into young Byleth’s first instinct with his first training blade put in his hands being to hit Jeralt in the crotch.
Some are still easier than others: Like how I wrote Annette and Felix’s sons as named Glenn and Dimitri. Or Lorenz and Marianne’s children having German given names after their father. And since Seteth is kind of...a special case and Manuela (Spanish) is pretty obvious, so that one was a no-brainer too.
Others are kind of me being “clever,” like how I wrote Bernadetta’s (North Italian/Veronese) eldest son as being named Marius, so it doesn’t really matter that her man is a Dane with a mane of flowing red hair. With that in mind, it’s almost as much of a freebie as Edelgard’s son being named Rhaego!
The rest I have no fucking clue about honestly. Even the ones like Sylvain (Occitan or something?) and Ingrid (Norman maybe?) who you’d expect not to have an insurmountable cultural gap between them or those with a lot of historical contact between the IRL cultures like Petra (Scottish/Hebridian) and Ashe (French) or Hilda (Bavarian/south German) and Caspar (proto-Hungarian?). The one possible exception to these above examples I’d considered was Cyril and Lysithea- she’s a Greek mythological reference, so that can go any number of ways too. I’d considered them having a son named Cyrus, since Almyra is literally Persia/ancient Iran, but I honestly thought it would be kind of lazy on my part. It would flow one hell of a lot better in-universe than Xerxes would, that’s for sure.
Other times and other series are easier sometimes: I do seem to have a thing for eccentric-to-slightly-developmentally-disabled swordsmen naming their daughters for their late mothers.