Sisters' names

[igenlode]

One of Lancard's sisters has finally acquired a name and a bit of character (he talks about her briefly).

Unfortunately she has already been through three different names and is onto her fourth :-(

I originally conceived her as "Honore", but discovered to my dismay that while the name "Honoré" has a long history (as I know from Honoré de Vireville in D.K.Broster) there is no female version. So I tweaked it to "Enora", which, un-French though it sounds, is apparently the nearest girl's name that exists. (It's Breton, but maybe Lancard's family do have Breton origins or his mother just liked the name, like Mme Thénardier)

But then I discovered that, like the various 'Celtic' baby names in England (Kevin, Liam, Sean, Sinead, Siobhain) it has only been adopted into general use in France very recently, i.e. late twentieth century. So calling an unmarried middle-class female in a Paris suburb "Enora" in the 1880s would be akin to having Courtney, Raven or Sienna turn up in a "Pirates of the Caribbean" fan-fiction :-(

I changed it to the name Clémence, which seemed sufficiently non-stereotypical and had the right class and character overtones for a school-teacher. In fact it fitted a little too well... it dawned on me later that I'd already used it for the name of Raoul's elder sister in Christmas as it ought not to be! Almost certainly not a coincidence, I'm afraid, as I'd recently been re-reading that.

And the irony is that this is the second time this has happened; I'd previously managed to reuse the name 'Laure' for one of Raoul's sisters. I think I'm probably going to have to try to draw up a list of all the OC names I've already 'used up' in order to try to avoid this sort of subconscious reduplication. My next selection for Mlle Lancard was a choice between the 'masculine' names Gilberte and Alberte, and I went for Gilberte by a whisker... what I hadn't realised until I looked up the context for Clémence just now was that the other sister in that story was called Albertine!

Drawing up a complete list of OC names across forty-odd stories is just a completely daunting task, but perhaps I should at least try to make out a tally of Raoul's various sisters and aunts -- and sisters-in-law: Eustacie and Sabine, so far... :-(
[Edit: https://igenlode.dreamwidth.org/157357.html]


A handy link of baptismal names in order of popularity (only goes back to 1900, unfortunately, whereas these characters would have been born around 1860): http://www.behindthename.com/top/lists/france/1900

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

I know how you feel. I detest naming characters. Looking for a name that fits is a long and arduous process, and there's nothing worse than deciding on a name only to find you can't use it after all.

Behind the Name's popularity rankings do make it slightly easier and help you avoid anachronisms, though.

[igenlode]

I don't normally have trouble with anachronisms, which is why this was embarrassing. (It's a direct consequence of getting a name via Internet sites rather than personal knowledge in the first place.)

And I don't normally put a vast amount of effort into naming characters, which is one reason why I'm starting to get problems with overlap... One thing to remember with names is that in real life they reflect the tastes and aspirations of the parents, not the character of the child (which is completely unknown at the time when the name is being chosen). At least Christian names do; surnames you just get stuck with.

(That said, in this story I have ended up worrying about names a good deal, partly because I've got such a vastly greater number of OCs than I'd intended; I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to locate recognisably Norwegian and yet not stereotypical names for the captain of the ship that pulls Raoul out of the water and the couple who take in Christine, for instance. And then there was the whole Lancard/Roncard/Lagarde/Laporte business...)

[betweensunandmoon]

I wound up with the name Brooke because my father wanted a one-syllable name and my mother wanted a name with symbolic value. :P

Listing all of your OCs' names sounds like a good idea, so you don't accidentally repeat yourself. I personally try not to have more than two OCs whose names start with the same letter, though of course that's not possible in every story.

[igenlode]

Ironically 'Brooke' is a perfect example of the sort of name not to give a historical OC :-p

It's a surname being used for a girl, a nature/weather name, and an anachronistic one: if I came across a "Brooke" in a PotC fan-fic, Mary-Sue alarms would instantly start ringing.

(Lieutenant Ralph Brooke, on the other hand, would be quite a plausible OC :-D)

[betweensunandmoon]

Funny you should say that. :P

This is the only fanfic with my name in it I've seen so far, which surprises me, since the creators of such OCs tend to favor nature-themed names. (Though this particular Sue being Jack Sparrow's wife makes me mildly uncomfortable, because my brother's name is Jack!)

Have you ever seen any fanfiction OCs who shared your real name?

[igenlode]

I think the main problem with this fic (it's a bit hard to be certain what is content and what is editorial comment, since the latter isn't marked out in any way), apart from the obvious inexperience of the author and her desire to write sexual content but inability to make it sound anything other than repellent, is the Curse of the Spell-checker. Just because it doesn't trigger a spell-checker alert doesn't mean that it is actually the right word....

I'm afraid I'm not terribly impressed by the excuse 'but she was only thirteen when she wrote it!', because I have extant work of my own that I wrote at the age of eleven which is rather more competent in terms of vocabulary, sentence structure and punctuation, not to mention spelling. Although it helped that I wasn't sex-obsessed and that I was trying to channel a teenager's voice rather than write an adult character -- my angst-ridden "Titanic" story might have been a fairer comparison. (With hindsight, that one really is a bit juvenile, but then I was excusably juvenile; we just weren't expected to do our literary development in the view of the whole world :-( )

I quite liked the way that 'Brooke' speaks lower-class English rather than being an immaculate Aria or Amethyst Mary-Sue, which makes her more plausible as a pirate's wife, although I suspect the reason for it is that the author thinks Jack's accent is sexy.
The idea that Barbossa would drop his Hs in a written note, however, is a little odd :-p
(If he were so illiterate to have written the whole thing out phonetically in an attempt at transcription without being able to spell, it would make sense -- ay jak. sins yu tuk sumfink ov miyn... But there's no way he is going to insert in careful apostrophes to show that he is dropping letters that he knows ought to be present.)

I was caught by surprise, as well as Jack, when Brooke "cried herself to sleep" then suddenly grabbed his arm as he tried to escape -- shades of 'Carrie' :-D

"knowing he couldn’t get anywhere tonight" implies that Jack was actually being quite honest when he assured his wife he would be right back and tht he wasn't going to do anything stupid before apparently rushing off to rescue their daughter -- and it does at least mean that all that time spent on soothing Brooke to sleep wasn't being squandered :-p
On the other hand, the fact that his rescue attempt consists of walking out on deck and telling his associates he isn't going anywhere is less than impressive!

Apparently Jackie gets 'rapped' before being thrown down on the floor, and then 'ravaged' before her assailant even gets round to taking off his clothes: this scene has a severe problem with the order of events.
He then takes her off the 'cold hard floor' at the back of the cave on which he had thrown her down, drags her back out, and throws her down on the 'cold hard floor' where he had originally found her.... Well, I'm sure the floor is cold and hard all over the cave, but I wouldn't have thought it came across as such a marked contrast if that's precisely what she was lying on in the first place ;-p

However, I note that while the author's FFnet account still exists (and has favourites on it in a similar style: Jack laughed with her and tossed her onto the bed. He jumped on top of her causing her to expel all air from her lungs -- 240 reviews!) that story is no longer on FFnet. I wonder if she came across this sort of comment :-(