Limited number of names available for muns and pups

[yakalskovich]

We used to have that Kate thing, where several muns and pups both were called Kate, but never a Kate-mun called Kate.  There was an Amanda-mun called Amanda at some stage though, I believe I recall, and several other Amandas existed as well.

Now, the newest thing seems to be having lots of Erics. The Huntsman is really called Eric, and Magneto is really called Erik, and then we have Erik Northman who is an Erik outright, and on the side of the muns thre's our Eric AKA alas_a_llama, whom we all meet in chat every night and whose essays are beyond brilliant -- you know the one.

Eric-the-mun, in turn, has TWO pups called Leo.

Makes me wonder: what other names are there to get confused over, or at least have double entendres between muns and other people's pups?


Ooops, seems to have evolved into Weekend Entertainment. But this is a subject of valid interest, it seems!

Comments

[shinyhappygoth]

Reminds me of the Carnegie Mellon KGB. It seems to attract Matts, to the point where none of them can actually be called Matt.

[sky_child]

That's funny because I thought every guy in Pittsburgh was named Mike.

/random

[sky_child]

Why do you think I renamed the permalink text on this one's journal to "Hypertext URL"?

Also, a friend of mine's character elsegame is involved with a character who shares the first name of my favorite composer, so that can get confusing sometimes.

[no_vampires_plz]

How about when you have a character whose name is the title of a popular book/movie series?

[sky_child]

tbh being involved in the Zelda fandom and talking with other Link players has stripped the vampire association from "Twilight" for me.

Also here is a picture of Link's sword sparkling in the Twilight Realm.

[queenofmay]

*is totally the Amanda-mun*




I have this problem with Cat/Kat's in my life from every version of Catherine through Kathleen, who all want to be called the same thing. At the worst period I had six and had to start nicknaming them by something about just so people I was talking to about these people weren't mixing them up.

[sky_child]

You should probably avoid Catherine, then.

[rustedtoaster]

Toast the actual foodstuff is mentioned hilariously often in crackchat.

[acts_of_gord]

"Tag Gordon."
"What?"
"Not you. Jim Gordon."
"Oh."

[aberration]

I'm pretty sure I'm the only mun Veronica, but I do think there were at least a couple instances of confusion when we had a Veronica Mars.

[misslucyjane]

Both my brothers-in-law and my youngest brother are all named Steve.

There have been no hilarious mix-ups yet, but I've only been playing Steve Rogers a month.


We used to have a plethora of Jacks, since Jack is a really common hero name, but that seems to have subsided.

[camwyn]

I went to an all-girls high school with 150 students total, of whom five shared my first name. When I got to college and various official forms or groups asked me what I wanted to be called, I generally told them either "Q" or "Steve", and then explained why.

This worked right up until I went for College Bowl and said "Steve" and the team captain turned out to be named Steve.

Oh well.

Adding my own stuff here now this has turned into WE

[yakalskovich]

In my old else!game, we had an infinite numbers of muns called Jen, plus the daughter of one of the then-mods is called Jen as well. Which is why Huntsman!Eric-mun, who I first met there, is still Scot!Jen to me (in addition to the fact that there was a Vegas!Jen in the Anita Blake fixit plot that she was involved in as well).

I've mostly avoided that kind of thing with my pups, albeit not on purpose. Donovan Reece had all but gone by the time a Claudia Donovan appeared in Milliways. At anything called 'Teja' (that is not a roofing tile in Spanish), I usually take active umbrage, for Reasons. The only slight name overlap I can think of is Ashie's mother's maiden name being Urquhart, so it's the last name of a number of her relatives.

[minkhollow]

quinby double-takes every time there's a character named Quinn in something, even though none of them have been played in the bar to date. (And then everyne yells at Glee!Quinn on Tumblr and she's all 'what did I do?!')

We also hve two Lynnes on the mun side, I know that, it's just that one of them is Lexie.

As for me, I've encountered my name and pronunciation used as a character's name... exactly once.

--And Quinn just reminded me of the Victorian law firm's worth of Peters we used to have - Wimsey, Wiggin, Pevensie and Pettigrew.

[yakalskovich]

Heathers! We have/had two, so they turned into Heater and Feather, right? Heater being Alanna-mun, and Feather Fleur-mun, IIRC?

[jothra]

I'm Jo.

She's Jo as well!

I certainly don't mind sharing a name with her, because she is awesome.

On a related note, have you heard the song 27 Jennifers? It's a good song.

[agoodmusekickin]

I'm one of two Karens, but I've been going by Bing so long I don't know that anyone remembers. This is AOK by me, as I prefer Bing.

It does make me jump in chat though.

[aberration]

[Ahh the embed's not working.]

(Sorry, it's where my mind went.)

[lunamystic]

I didn't run into any other Heathers until high school, at which point I both finally got the movie jokes and learned to hate them. In my college dorm, I became 'Big Heather' to my friend 'Little Heather,' who was shorter than my 5'2". Then I went and moved in with another Heather, so straightening out phone messages was always fun! XD

I don't think I've run into the name confusion problem with any pups except Grace. We had a lot of Graces at one point. And, er, I play two of them.

Oh! And Lana. Seems like a lot of people think Smallville!Lana whenever I mention her. :D

[inlovewithwords]

And then PB-space collision happens when one of your other pups has Kristen Kreuk for a PB, and every time I see her I twitch.

And then I get confused that she isn't Lana!

[bjornwilde]

I have nothing at present to add but in my past I worked at a pizza place. My name is Don and I was a waiter. There was also a Sean waiter, a Don cook and a Sean Cook. Since I worked at the restraint first I got to be Don One. ; p

Oh and my daughter is a Katie and there are so many Katie's on her swim team I have to called her by her last name to get her attention at meets.

[kd7sov]

...Huh. Looking at the cast list, we don't appear to have any characters with my first name. Or my Milli-appellation, but that's not all that unexpected.

[ceitfianna]

Since elementary school, there have always been a lot of Kate, Kats and the like around me. My distinction has always been that I'm plain Kate, not short for anything. In chat, I'm Fi as someone called me it and then it stuck, but I do still blink whenever someone goes tag Kate.

I'm also protective of my name and hate when people try to make it into a nickname or make it longer than it is. In college, I was the original Kate as the others were a Kathyrn and a Sarah Kate, we had a lot of Sarahs and Kates.

[sky_child]

So I guess I should say now that Link's companion in Skyward Sword is named Fi.

[imagemist]

Rebekka used to be an unusual name around these parts, so I always jump when someone says it - to somebody else than me. Often small girls (and in a stern voice - hence the jumping).

As for pups - Eric Northman really ought to Eirikr or Eirik or at least Erik, but I figured it'd bring too much confusion.
Clay could do with a surname. That helps with these things. In another game he needed a passport (or rather someone who looked like him needed a passport) and in that he went by Clay Carpenter ;)

Elrond's Elrond and we all know that Tolkien meant for elves to have unique names so >.> <.

[withherhands]

I forget if we ever had more than one John/Jack Shepherd/Shephard/Sheppard in the bar at the same time, but seeing the name crop up on my flist and in the bar always makes me do a double-take as that was my dad's name. Except, y'know, spelled right. ;)

[bcgphoenix]

At one point, we had something like five Beths in this game (two of whom even shared my full name :O). Now I think we're just down to me and genarti -- even though I usually go by Pho at milli-gatherings, I'll still do a double-take of, "Yes?" if someone calls Gen "Beth" in person.

Pups-wise, there've been a couple of occasions where someone will say "Tag Gabriel!" and both silveraspen and I will snap to attention -- her because of Gabriel Tam, me because of the Trickster. (That's actually been going on for a while, too, since I also played Sylar before the Trickster came along. :D) And I still have to do a quick mental reorientation whenever venusadept_2!Felix gets referenced in M'ways or the back room. No, not every Felix is mr_gaeta.

[demisemidemon]

I still double-take when people call you "Beth" in person, so we get to both be confused!

I've also gotten to the point where I sometimes, depending on the context, double-take a little when people are talking to or about a Jen around me, since I answer to Gen so often to people from the internet. The two names are totally different in my mind, since they're spelled differently, but that doesn't stop them from sounding the same.

[skidmo]

My sophomore year in college, on a floor of 45 girls, we had eight Sara(h)s. To this day, I refer to one of my best friends by either her full name or her first initial and her last name because of the confusion that caused.

Alisha is not a terribly common name, but when I was very small I quite often came up against another one in daycare or Sunday school. Currently I work with an Alicia (who pronounces it Aleesiya, so there's that at least), so I get the alternate spelling a lot in emails.

[yakalskovich]

We have, or at least used to have, a mun named Alicia here, who went by Leesha in chat.-

[not_my_sandbox]

Both my pups a pretty immune. Well, no, someone could app Terry Goodkind!Evil Chicken. And S A R A H could start being active again. And then there was that time Jacob Black came in and Amascut introduced herself as Sarah Black...

As for me, there have only been pups named Tom or Thom or Tommy. No muns so far. I respond to all variants, unfortunately. I still am in limbo when it comes to which variant I personally want used. Tommy really gets my attention, though, since thats the one my parents and anyone who has known me since grade school uses.

[death_gone_mad]

Wait, there is an Ana/Thomas in my list of Milliways muns. That one is confusing.

[shufti]

I have been called Carlotta by mistake - it's only two letters different from Charlotte.

[death_gone_mad]

Not only that, it is practically a direct translation. I am surprised I haven't called you Carlotta yet :P

Anyway, there is a NPC in Amascut's canon named Char that I am still on the fence about writing an OOM around. Namespace collisions like whoa.

[inlovewithwords]

I am reminded of how there were three Pauls in my dorm--just from my year. There were two boys who answered to Pauls around already, and a guy who for some reason sometimes answered to Paul (no one is sure why). This was a dorm with 97 people, by the way. This led to: Paul-alpha, Paul-zero times 2 (Span and Shawn), Paul-1, Paul-2, Paul-3, and Paul-naught (Nate, who insisted he was not Paul). And there was a room which had a series of about four people rotate through it within a year or two, all of them named Daniel. There was also the LARPing group which once upon a time sported The Andy Conspiracy (five Andrews in a group of, again, 100-150). But at uni, some of those WTF name-space collisions are stopped by using our network usernames, which are necessarily unique.

Personally, I've never really had problems, though I do have a friend/daughter of a friend who, as we were discussing comics and RP, accidentally called me Lois a couple times.

I think I have no pups, present or near-future, who have potential namespace collision. I can think of no other Henrys (the only potential danger) around Bar-space.

[kd7sov]

There is, in MLP:FIM, a background pony whom the fans have named Octavia. Quite often, in fic or discussion, this is abbreviated to Tavi.

(Fortunately, there's essentially no other similarity or overlap; she's female, and either a cellist or a bassist, and possibly one of Pinkie's sisters.)

[muji]

There used to be three Stephanies.

'S how I became Mu Ji, actually.

[ask_the_right_questions]

*magically appears*

On the list of Eriks, there's also this guy here, the good Dr Selvig.

*vanishes for another couple of weeks.*

[yakalskovich]

Oh yes, yet another Erik! The whole place is HOPPING with them by now. If somebody came into the bar from the kitchen, carrying something big they can't see over that is teetering precariously, shouting "Eric! I need a hand here!" would be a very good option: chances are that at least ONE Erik/c would be around, think he is meant, and help.-