So, still working on this MDZS fanfic I've been working on since, like, late spring. 😅 (At this point, I think it would take a miracle for me to finish it before NaNo, so I guess it'll be what I'm working on in November, too...)
In the process of working on this, I've been forced to come up with names for additional characters, because while the original novel has a lot of characters, there aren't all that many from within any given clan, particularly not outside the main family of any given clan. (All the more so considering that more than half of the novel takes place more than a decade later than this fanfic does!) I've gone through a lot of different methods in trying to name them: for a cousin of Lan Wangji, I decided to look at the names in The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System and try to find him a good name by picking and choosing from names there. (I probably need to rename him, though; I didn't end up liking any of the meanings of the characters' names for a member of the Lan Clan's main family, so I ended up naming him after Shen Qingqiu's sword, but the more I look at that as a character name, the more I feel like it's somehow off.) For a few later additions to the cast, I looked at the names of all the playable characters available in one of the Dynasty Warriors games, and picked given names from there, but that was still pretty limiting. To give a courtesy name to a character who only had a family name in the novel (the head of the Ouyang Clan in the novel's present), I picked a character trait of his, came up with a few ways to spin it positively and ran those through Google Translate until it gave me a result that felt like it could work as a name. (In my defense, since then Seven Seas Danmei has added descriptions for some more novels they've licensed, and one of them has a character with the same given name, so at least I stumbled onto an actual name.)
Finally, in looking at the reference works on AO3, I found a link to a name generator that was highly recommended, and which always provides the meanings of the names to go with them. So far I've felt maybe its list of names isn't quite as voluminous as I'd like (I feel like I keep getting the same names often) but it's definitely the best option I've come across so far.
And today I found myself wanting to name a minor Jin Clan asshole who was going to show up a few times, so that I wouldn't have to just keep calling him things like "that guy who did that thing and pissed everyone off." (Okay, so I would neve have used quite that phrasing, but you get the idea.) I only had to hit the "Generate names" button once or twice before this screen came up.
Not only is there a perfect sarcastic name (ie one with a meaning completely antithetical to this guy's character), but it had actually generated with the Jin family name attached!
Obviously, a sign that I was meant to use it. 😆
(The fact that right above it is Xue Yang backwards is also kinda wild, but somewhat irrelevant. 😅 (Xue Yang, so far, has not appeared in this fic, though he's been talked about on several occasions. He'll be showing up in the not too distant future, though, which is always a challenge, because it's hard for me to get a good handle on his behavior and speech. Though I was really proud of one of his interactions with Jin Zixuan in "A Hidden Road."))
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