Changing Canon

Today, I changed the names of two characters who had been near and dear to my heart for 15 years. I had created them with help from a person I had once called a friend. After being betrayed by her, I could no longer bear to keep their names as they had been, especially since one of their names had been special to the betrayer. I did not want her coming to me after publication and complaining about how I used ‘her’ character in my novel.

The two characters were already such an intrinsic part of the world, lore, and story of several of my books that I could not merely sweep them away at this point. Had they been characters who didn’t appear until later books, I would have changed them entirely, but these two are secondary characters in Merchants of Knowledge and Magic, which is due to be published in April and is in the editors’ hands. I cannot make such drastic changes to that book now, but I can at least change their names.

The recently renamed character, now Requiem. Art by Vii Morte

It’s not the first time I changed a name. All the Elemental Spirits had been created with painfully punny names. While they still have puns in their names, they aren’t as egregiously groan-inducing. Well, maybe some of them are, but I can at least deal with them. For the Spirits, their pun-based names had been intentional. The language spoken at their apotheosis was their equivalent of Old English. It would *become* English over time. To someone living in the year 0, the name ‘Flamboil’ would not have indicated anything hot or fiery about the individual. To honor the Gods, the people in that era created words based on the Spirits’ names. They had the word ‘fire’ or ‘pyre’, but added ‘flame.’ They did not ‘boil’ their water, but rather ‘heat-bubbled’ it. For the mortals living in the world recently conquered by the Gods, creating words based on the Gods’ names was seen as an act of worship. It symbolically told the Gods that they had become a key part of their lives, their culture. I created the character who would become Lucognidus around the year 2000, but as I developed what it meant to be ‘the Mind God’, his original name had to change as well. I will never share what his original name was, as it is truly the cringiest thing imaginable. Around 2005, I spent a week playing with new names. I had settled on “Lucognideus” initially, because I wanted the ‘deus’ linking him to God. That was a long name, though, and unwieldy to the tongue. I shortened his name to Lucognidus. To be honest, I still wasn’t very happy with it. That name was also hard to say, and hard to type. I still typo it all the time. In fact, I misspelled his name the first time it appeared in this paragraph. I gave him the nickname Luca, then later Lulu thanks to Code Geass (an anime where a manipulative male MC goes by the nickname Lulu.)

Lulu smirking at me for misspelling his name for the 20th fucking time in one day. Pic drawn by Bear Pettigrew

At this point, I would never change Lucognidus’s name, because he’s too ingrained in me. He’s part of my mind and soul. Changing his name would transform him into another entity, one I do not know. But sometimes I wonder if either of us would have been happier if I had found something else. Nothing else worked, though. There are better names, but nothing that carried the same words and implication needed for the Mind God. Lucid/Lucubration. Cognizance. Deus. He needed those words, or similar, so the in-world wordsmiths could worship him by crafting those words. He needed mind/psychic-related words in his name, and those were the best I could come up with.

Changing his name was hard only because I had grown so used to his old name. But the old name was such a bad name that it didn’t take long to adjust. It was less cringey for me to write Lucognidus than to write the old name.

This time, I had to change the names of two characters who I thought had pretty good names already. One of them had a musical name, and I had a few music-related puns, including one in the book that’s in the editors’ hands. I was quite proud of that pun, and I did not want to remove it. Thus, her name remained musical, though perhaps even more appropriate to who she is as a character.

Requiem runs away from her abusive family around age 16, changes her name, and runs away to Ophidia. She becomes entwined with the plots of the Death God, Sawyer, and becomes his ‘drinker’—a person who drinks the blood of a God and gains magical powers, typically in exchange for serving that God.

(Pic to the left is a crossover drawn by Rica Sketches. On the left is Requiem. The character on the right is Pensilea from the books by Maria Blackrane.)

This girl is tied to the very concept of ‘Death.’ She killed members of her family, killed her ties to her old life, joins herself to her world’s God of Death, and acquires powers meant for killing. The name Requiem was perfect. She who sings as she slays.

(Pic to the right drawn by Karkki)

Sayuri is an Ophidian noblewoman by birth, though she hates the way Ophidia treats men and poor women. Her goal is to change things from within, as she also believes that becoming a poor woman herself will help no one. She thinks the only way to change Ophidia is to become a Head of Orochi—one of the eight leaders of the country—but to be elected, she has to play by their rules. She has to legally own slaves, among other things, regardless of how foul she thinks the practice is.

The funny thing about the name Sayuri was that it had been in my head for years. I knew I’d one day have a character with that name. Every time I create an Ophidian woman, I consider various Japanese names (either actual in-use Japanese names or names based on kanji combinations I want). Sayuri had almost become the name of both Mayume Higangaoka and Hiyori Shinozaki, though in both cases I held off. It feels as if part of me knew I had to save the name Sayuri for somebody special. Somebody who would play a much larger role in the stories to come…

At this moment, as I am writing this, the names Requiem and Sayuri have yet to settle in. They feel wrong on my tongue. I feel like I am defiling my characters by calling them the wrong names. But I know these feelings will not persist. Eventually, perhaps in a week, perhaps in a few months… the names will feel right. It will feel as if these had always been their names. These were the names they were meant to have. 15 years isn’t such a long time that I cannot start calling a real human being by the name or pronoun they ask me to use, so why should it be any different for fictional characters?

Requiem is the name that Requiem wants. Sayuri is practically shaking her head at me, saying that her name has always been Sayuri, and I was just blind to the obvious.

Welcome to your new lives, Requiem and Sayuri. The one who helped create you may have betrayed me, but you need someone to tell your stories. You weren’t killed and recreated with new names, you reclothed yourselves in the names you were always meant to have.