Hi hello huge fan Fern is a blorbo(and has a better name than fucking FRANCIS)
woaaaaah a wild fern fan!! hi hello thank you...! if you wanna know more about him my inbox is always open!!!
also same! we took one look at francis's default name and then looked at fresia and decided he needed a sexier name effective immediately and then it kinda spiralled from there HALSDKJGSDF
we chose a plant name because fresia's name appeared to be derived from the flower freesia, so we just looked for something that also started with F and sounded nice. as an added bonus, the jp name the character designer kwen/rev gave to him was hanata (a pun on tokihanatareshi hoopa = hoopa unbound), and hana means flower. ferns mean sincerity/honesty and charm/allure, of which he has none of the former and a whole lot of the latter. (by the way, freesias mean friendship, trust, and innocence!)
i only added in the lore of fern being named after a plant like his mother because of aros really recently (i made it up literally while i was writing this), but about a year ago i chose to give fern's mom a plant name as well! i did some research and found a winter-blooming flower that grows in the snow and also is native to hawaii, which alola is based on, so... fern's mom, viola, is named after the violet. violets mean sincerity, modesty, "a little happiness"... which seemed to fit the qualities i wanted aros to see in her!
umm sorry i ended up loredumping but. yeah please ask me about fern i want to talk about him so bad