Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

I read Brandon Sanderson's "Stormlight Archive" and "Mistborn" series, and I couldn't stop thinking about how awkward the names sounded, from Kaladin to Kelsier. It repeatedly took me out of the scene.

Meanwhile, the team behind Morrowind seemed to have an uncanny ability to produce names that just felt completely right. Somebody responded to my random thoughts on the topic with this very sound summary:

> Morrowind's names are a pretty remarkable achievement. I don't know who was responsible for it but whoever it was did a really good job of ripping off name "templates" from disparate languages, tweaking them enough to retain their associations but not their meanings, and then sticking with those templates across the board. Modeling the Ashlander names on Assyrian was a stroke of world-building genius.

> Mistborn's names, in contrast, never seem to have much purpose behind them. The templates are inconsistent and arbitrary, and convey no information to the reader. You have fantastical gibberish like vin/reen/camon, standard anglo names like dockson/hammond, bizarre nicknamey nouns like breeze/clubs/spook, and cod-french like valette renoux. It's a mess and it makes it difficult to figure out what this world is when there doesn't seem to be any natural way those names could have emerged in one culture. It's fucking weird.

> That being said the only names I never liked in Morrowind were the Redguard names. I could never figure out what they were supposed to be doing.

I think this person managed to both hit upon and miss a key point.

> It's a mess and it makes it difficult to figure out what this world is when there doesn't seem to be any natural way those names could have emerged in one culture. It's fucking weird.

I think that's the point. There's nothing natural about that culture. It's very much artificially imposed over what had been a set of distinct and different cultures. The apparently nonsensical naming is traces of that showing.

I am nearly finished with The Way of Kings. At first the names struck me as odd, but then again lots of stuff did. Giant crustaceans? People with foot-long eyebrows? Gem spheres used as both currency and lamps? Over time I got used to the names.

Actually, I remember one part where Sanderson describes how in the Vorinism religion symmetry is very important, and that the best names are symmetrical or almost symmetrical, like Shallan and Urithiru. I thought that was super creative!

I think The Stormlight Archive should get a slight pass on the oddities of people, creatures and cultures. The Stormlight Archive is aiming to be an epic that is established in a world of disparate cultures and fantastic creatures.

The idea is that culture is very centric to an area and its peoples. Once you leave that area, even if it's only 2 or 3 days by carriage, you transition to a distinct cultural shift. It's as if England and Japan were only separated by 100 miles, but you hit Egypt, Germany, Nigeria, Romania and Mexico along the way. Thus you get a large homogeneous population with their status quo and beliefs alongside markedly different people intermixed.

This is precisely why "Kaladin the Paladin" (he doesn't actually fit the archetype, but it's close) takes me out of it. It's not that it's too weird, it's that it's not weird enough.

Plus they call him "Kal". It's relying just as heavily as Morrowind was on pre-existing expectations, just different ones (worse ones, imo).

Huh, I love the Mistborn books specifically because I found all of the names so easy to pronounce and remember. There are cultures and different species in there, and those names all felt pretty similar in structure to me. (Kandra being the most obvious example.)

To me, the different feeling backgrounds of the names of normal people were something I attributed to the world being a big place, and although we were viewing people stuck within a class system, the naming was so "all over the place" because they're an assimilation of the entire planet.

Fast-forward to the newer Mistborn series and the names have seemed to align pretty well to names similar to the nobles of the earlier books. (Which may be attributed to the fact that many of the characters you follow are directly from that lineage.)

In contrast, I've had a harder time with the Stormlight series because of the number of characters, as well as the names of things and places and people. However, I've never been great at epic fantasy either. Maybe that's why the Mistborn books feel so different to me. Books with me in mind?

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