What’s in a name?

Writing based on other people’s characters has its own pitfalls, and then when those characters are based on real people, that can add a layer of awkward.

I’ve had experience with this before, with the Bigg City Heroes franchise. Everyone in that came from a real person, even the villains (though their identities were a little more disguised). The audience understood that these characters were supposed to be them, and they were fine with that. They also understood that it was fictional. After all, no matter how closely the superpowers sprang from the personalities of those involved, none of us truly had superpowers.

At the same time, artistic license was taken, because the characters became their own people, and one thing that I found was that I could not feel right using actual last names. Real first names were fine, but somehow the last name made it too real. That ended up being the same thing here, so it is Gerard and Mikey White, and Ray Torres, and Frank Ayers. (Though Ayers doesn’t sound right, so I am still hoping to think of something better. Current page count 342.)

That little bit of distance is important. Maybe that’s part of why the band took on alternative identities for the album too. On a similar note, I did think of using the wives’ names for the love interests, but there were two problems with that. One is that Frank has three potential love interests (Mikey sort of has two), and a future where anything can happen. He could end up with Beth, Michelle, or Lark, or someone completely different, and that’s fine. That’s the point of still being alive—the future is unwritten! However, name one of them Jamia, and there is no question that she’s the one.

Also, and I don’t know parent and sibling names anyway (though the internet would probably tell me), but this could correlate for them too: everything is just so grim! In the long run it ends up optimistic, but there’s a lot of death and destruction along the way, and yeah, it’s good to maintain some distance.

There is one name that will probably leave some confusion. In the story, Ray has a brother named Bob, and it would be easy to think that is Bob Bryar. That was not intended. The truth is, around the time that I really liked “I’m Not Okay”, but had not yet gotten into the band, I thought Ray’s name was Bob. I thought it was just a mistake, but now I think there was probably something about Bob that I thought was referring to Ray, and that’s where it started. I don’t know, maybe Bob should be Bob Bryar. He’s my favorite of the drummers, in that my favorite drum work is on Black Parade, and that’s him. But I sort of pictured Bob Torres as looking more like Ray.

The other name that really bugs me is Liu. That’s one I came up with, and it sounds right, so I don’t feel like I can just discard it, but it bugs me because it’s a Chinese name. On “Party Poison”, the dialogue (which could totally be her) is in Japanese. In “Sing”, she has a sword that also seems to be Japanese. I think it’s too short to be a katana, but that is outside my field of expertise. (Though there will be a fun post on weaponry coming up.) The point is, she shouldn’t be Chinese, but she is. I think somehow it is wordplay with “Liu” and “lieu”, because she supplants the regular leadership. Finding a name that feels right is hard, and once a name sticks, it’s hard to move past it, so I’m still calling her Liu, but I think I have a Japanese person with a Chinese name. Maybe she’s half.

Also, I haven’t actually written anything about Jimmy yet, and I still think maybe I should not add that layer in because this thing just keeps getting longer. If I do, he is named for Jimmy Urine, and it’s because the Agent Cherri Cola storyline did not fit, but different pieces of it ended up in other places, and that would be the final piece.