Thanks to Z and Cinder’s Blog Challenge, I have content! If only I would have done this back when the challenge first came out, like weeks ago. My bad!

The challenge was thus:

“How do you come up with character names?”

My answer is simple – I tend to let others come up with names.

No, I don’t have an army of monkies mashing away on typewriters to crank out names for my WoW toons. Not that that wouldn’t be cool because it would. It would also be filthy, what with the flinging of poop that monkeys tend to do when they’re not working in the typing pool.

My first few toons had the typical Warcraft names. Actually, they had typical Everquest names since I was trying to copy the characters I had over there. But after awhile, I got sick of rolling my face across the keyboard and calling it a name. I wanted to be clever. So I did what many do – I went to my favorite things outside the game and tried using those names.

I had three typical go-to’s when it came to finding names. It was either comic books, mixed martial arts, or fantasy novels. I quickly discovered that the fantasy novel thing was a dead end, because either all the good names were already being used, or they were outright disallowed.  Bummer.

Mixed martial arts was an interesting source for me. Here are a bunch of men and women, like Terminators, bent on distraction …. but in a sportsman-like way. Marketing is big with these particular athletes since they don’t really make the cash you would think a person should get for beating someone unconscious / twisting their limbs in unnatural directions. They have to be somewhat marketable for sponsorship and so on. Ergo, nicknames!

Naturally some of these names are going to be pretty creative. Some of them, like Nick “Fainting Goat” Thompson (now just “The Goat”), clearly comes from a mind that has taken one too many doses of blunt force trauma. But some of them, especially ones in another language, make for good WoW names. I had a goblin named Napao, which is Portuguese for “Big Nose”. Got that from a human wrecking machine from Brazil, Gabriel Gonzaga.

Not that I’m calling him a goblin. Not to his face, anyway. Not even to his picture.

But generally, my best source material has usually comic books. Of course, good luck getting any of those in-game. Like Fantasy Novel characters, they are already taken (most likely due to a creative use of obscure icons or an interesting spelling) or they’re just not allowed (because facing a Marvel lawyer is a RL boss that nobody wants to tank). I’ve gotten around this by combining those names with the Rokk- prefix, giving me Rokkthor for my Alliance main Death Knight, Rokkhulk (my Draenei Warrior), and so on.

I’ve tried to keep a theme going, but like most things in my brain, wires get crossed. There is a method to my madness, but more often than not there is more madness then method.

Of course, lately, there’s been Scaredevil. He seems to have grown into my Horde main. His name comes not from looking like a scary devil, but looking kinda like a purple version of Deadpool. And since that name was one of the names in the Deadpool movie that didn’t make the cut  (along with Mr. Neverdie), I was tickled that I got to use it. And how ironic, my two main characters are both named after superheroes. And they’re both a hero class. Funny how things work out sometimes.

There’s method to my madness after all.