Character Name Identity Crisis

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Varethyn
Petopia Artist
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Character Name Identity Crisis

Unread post by Varethyn »

Okay so. I was looking through my character screen on WoW and thinking about all their names and where they came from, having recently been picking through some ideas for what to call my demon hunter when they come out. A few of them are original or semi-original. At least that's what I believed until a certain one which I will get onto in a bit. Most original are my warlock, Veronis, and DK, Saltyren, with Varethyn, my hunter and Internet alias, being accidentally based on Varo'then (kept running into his ghost while questing in Azshara way back in vanilla which apparently left an impression), Greill, my rogue, loosely based off Grell from the anime Black Butler and lastly my worgen hunter Swiftrunner who is unashamedly based on the werewolf of the same name from Dragon Age: Origins. The rest all have real names I got from 20000-names.com or other naming sites.

Then we come to the problem child: Kithren. Which is hilarious as when I RP him he's a complete but lovable pain-in-the-butt anyway. Quite some time ago there was a thread made here about Googling our username/character names to see the results which inspired me to check there. Unsurprisingly Googling Varethyn brings up my hunter's armoury, my Deviant Art, my Flight Rising lair and various posts here on Petopia. Googling Kithren gives me a heck-ton of stuff with my paladin's armoury link being the tenth result. We have a Kithren on Twitter, one on YouTube, another on Deviant Art, EVE Online characters called Kithren, a fanfiction.net user called Kithren... And even before getting to my pally's armoury we even get the suggestion of unscrambling the letters of Kithren. Just... how. Why. It's hilarious and concerning at the same time. And I thought that 7 other WoW characters sharing this name was bad. (EDIT: That's just EU servers. There's 33 Kithrens over in the US!)

Now I always had a niggling feeling that the name wasn't unique from the start. At the same time I've had the name since Burning freaking Crusade. I wondered at first if any of the mentioned users were akin to that one time someone purposefully stole and used Vephriel's character on... Tumblr I think? Thankfully none of them are - makes sense as I've never RPd or talked about him as a character outside of an RP forum that has long since shut down. So that leads me to the question... Where else does the name Kithren come from? Have I accidentally named my guy after some obscure character from somewhere else? Or does it just happen to be a popular name?

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Gimlion
Grand Master Hunter
Grand Master Hunter
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Re: Character Name Identity Crisis

Unread post by Gimlion »

To be honest, it sounds to me like one of the randomly generated names that WoW will give you when you hit the random-name button. My guess is that it stuck with a few people, and they kept using it elsewhere.


Edit: I decided to google the name as well. My "research" suggest that the twitter and facebook accounts of "Kithren" belong to some nice looking Asian girl, who lives in London. To avoid creepy status, that's all I took from her two social-media accounts. A second Kithren seems to be a large anime fan, apparently from Alaska, who loves to write fan fic, draw for Deviant, has a youtube page under the name, and loves an "Alan Walker" and a "Tyki M.. something or another"

TL;DR: There are a couple people who use the name regularly, or are even named Kithren, and I believe that Google is just trying to bring up the most likely-to-be-prominent results.

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