Alicornutopia

Kappa wrote:name is already the term for the primary name of a character.

By my understanding, at least some of the proposed designs intend to replace the primary-name-of-the-character feature with one or more equally valid "primary aliases", so we'd get to decide whether the word "name" generalized better to "aliases" or to "primary aliases" (or neither).

My plan was not to replace name. (Though maybe some people did suggest that.) In the case of Aether, the name would still be "Isabella Mariel Swan", possibly with the additional "Ψ", but the primary aliases would be the common names that are not – that one? (i.e. Boots, Aether, since they're template nicknames, and then possibly others in the future or non-primary aliases.) For some characters there wouldn't be a name that fits a concrete description such as "birth name" or "name most commonly used on home world" but… vaguely that direction.

I agree with the things Kappa said

My main use case for aliases is Glam and other situations where the characters and/or the reader do not know the name of the character or they're disguised or whatever

I would also find it useful to have a "null alias" when I didn't want a character to have a name for a bit

I don't think the lack of a "nickname" column in the character list is that objectionable? Does it serve a function that screenname doesn't and means it has to be replaced rather than removed?

Recognizable distinguishable name? I find it far easier to memorize nicknames than to memorize screennames.

Yes that. (Also often it takes me a while to come up with a screenname and it is useful to nevertheless be able to distinguish between a pile of "Jean Dulac"s when selecting a character.)

I would find this adequately substituted by little "show this in the character selection dropdown?" checkboxes, so that I could pick a particular nickname or nicknames I found memorable to be listed along with screenname and main name. (Bonus for having one next to other fields as well, so that I could for instance not have screennames in the dropdown if I found that unhelpful, or could have the character's setting listed, or so on.)

Of words mentioned so far I like “epithet”. It gets at the “this is a different perspective on the same person” reason for using them.

I find 'epithet' a little confusing (I expect it to be, like, 'rosy-fingered').

Moriwen wrote:I would find this adequately substituted by little "show this in the character selection dropdown?" checkboxes, so that I could pick a particular nickname or nicknames I found memorable to be listed along with screenname and main name. (Bonus for having one next to other fields as well, so that I could for instance not have screennames in the dropdown if I found that unhelpful, or could have the character's setting listed, or so on.)

+1 for the first thing, +0.5 for the parenthesis thing

I too wish to increment support for Moriwen's suggestions

And yeah, the Nickname field represents (at least to me) "which alt is this?" in cases where the character's full name does not answer that question (e.g. when the character's full name is Sherlock Holmes or Anthony Edward Stark or Nelyafinwe Maitimo and there are a whole bunch of those). But, as proven by characters with names like "Nelyafinwe Maitimo (Seven)", there's also a job for aliases there; it would be nifty if there was a way to say "I want this character to have an alias that is Full Name (Nickname) and I want that to be the alias they use everywhere", because I personally would not parenthesize a nickname into a character's name field.

My personal use case for aliases is... well, I've set two character aliases so far.

One is for Kereve Seikaras, a Serg who gets kidnapped as a baby and raised under the name Sorani Tassairen. He's Seikaras for two replies in the beginning of his first thread, then Tassairen the whole time he grows up, and soon he's going to start going by just Sairu, and then he's going to be Seikaras again when he rediscovers his heritage. I want the name displayed next to his replies to reflect these changes without having to make three entire separate characters for him, and now it does and I'm delighted.

The other alias I've set is for Kadiran Serani, a Mark, who doesn't start out with a name at all and ends up naming herself different things in different threads. Now I have a way to have different instances of her go by different names without creating entire separate characters for them, and it's awesome.

I am also about to go alias all my Harmonics fairies and Worm capes, although right this minute I am probably not quite up to the task of going through all the capes' threads and deciding when they should have their cape names and when they should have their name names.

Update: Nicknames: Arcane, Arcane is a little silly but I'm not totally sure what exactly to do about it. Maybe some kind of "make the thing in the nickname field available as an alias" thing? Like, sometimes you want "Full Name (Nickname)" as an alias, and sometimes you want just the nickname as an alias, and sometimes you don't want either, but you probably don't ever want "Nicknames: Nickname, Nickname".

Replacing the Nickname field with a "primary alias" (which I'm picturing as vaguely similar to a default icon) would also work, I think? For "this is the thing that gets displayed in the Nickname column to distinguish this Tony Stark from all other Tony Starks". But idk.

further update: Another aliasing use case that I suspect I'm going to be leaning on a bunch is characters who were not previously soulbearers becoming soulbearers, or soulbearers changing their soulname for reasons.

Kappa wrote:Replacing the Nickname field with a "primary alias" (which I'm picturing as vaguely similar to a default icon) would also work, I think? For "this is the thing that gets displayed in the Nickname column to distinguish this Tony Stark from all other Tony Starks". But idk.

Yeah methinks picking an alias/nickname to be a primary alias/nickname sounds cool