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newmayhem · 5 years

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Racelifting + Renaming

I’m going to start with the racelifting because that’s going to affect pretty much everything else from setting to character names.

Let’s start with the main character, Risika. This was a little challenging because her background, for obvious reasons, is so specific. I need a setting that’s super pious and restrictive and it probably has to be a Christian setting because hell and damnation was kind of a formative thing for her and Alexander. I ended up re-setting her origin story to colonial-era Puebla, Mexico (one of the first European settlements in the country so it’s kind of similar to Concord) and making her Mexican of mixed Indigenous, African, and Spanish heritage. Based on this, I changed her birth name to Remedios Vásquez (La Virgen de los Remedios was closely associated with Spanish conquest of the ‘New World’, and her having substantial non-Spanish heritage might’ve made her parents want to give her a super Spanish name to help her out). I’ve also updated the names of her family members:

Alexander->Alejandro

Lynette->Lupita (also a name derived from an epithet of the Virgin Mary that has strong ties to Mexico)

Peter->Pedro

Lila Light->Lucía López, birth name: Amara Tlahuilli* (Amara is Igbo for ‘grace’, Tlahuilli is the nahuatl word for ‘light’) / vampire name: Ceniza (the Spanish word for ‘ash’)

I also went ahead and changed her vampire name, too. Just because Risika sounds...like a goth teenager made it up #noshade. I settled on Roksana because it has most of the same letters. It comes from an old Persian name that means ‘bright’ or ‘dawn’.

*I decided to give Lila/Lucía multiple aliases because it seems really unlikely that Risika and Alexander wouldn’t have noticed that someone who just happens to have the same name as their mom was the last of a famous line of witches. I think it makes sense for her birth name/the name that she uses with the witch community to reflect her heritage (she’s mostly African and Indigenous) since it seems like lineage is such a big deal amongst witches, and it would make sense for her to take on a more Spanish name in order to function (slightly) easier in the highly racialized human society she was living in. I also changed her vampire name because Charcoal sounded dumb.

All of that said, I thought it might also be interesting to have Peter and Lynette be more white-passing/have more European heritage. First off, I think it would be a good deconstruction(?) of the whole Fantastical Racism trope, but it would also add an interesting family dynamic. Like maybe it’ll exacerbate Risika and Alexander’s early feelings of alienation not just from their community and their immediate family, but also from a part of their heritage (since they’ve been raised away from their mother’s community in every sense).

Yeah, I just think that especially in the flashbacks, making Risika poc opens it up to a lot of interesting possibilities for character development and also for further developing her relationships. Like, what if Risika was really resentful of the racism that she and Alexander face (but that their father and sister almost never experience and therefore have no comprehension of), but Alexander thinks that if they work hard and ‘behave’, they can ‘overcome their heathen roots’ or something like that?

Aubrey, according to Word of God was from Ancient Greece, but I’ve been really into the Gupta Empire Chola Dynasty in India, so that’s the background I’m giving him. His birth name has never been revealed, but I decided that it’s now Amit Surya, which means ‘infinite’ or ‘immeasurable’ ‘sun’ in Sanskrit. I’m also updating his vampire name (because Aubrey doesn’t seem to suit him, imo). Ather renamed him Sikander (based on the (probably) Old Persian version of Alexander (yes, I did this on purpose)), but later on he just shortened it and went by Andros.

I don’t think Ather’s ethnicity has ever been mentioned, but because I wanted to fancast aMEI, who’s Puyuma, I decided to make her Austronesian and to give her a new birth name, Qamis, which is from the proto-Austronesian word meaning ‘north wind’.

So a bunch of the characters have gotten renamed and that has the potential to make things on this blog a little confusing, so I guess as a rule- whenever I’m doing a post specifically about the original book, I’ll use their original names, but everywhere else I’ll use their new names. I will also use their new names to tag.

#in the forests of the night #amelia atwater rhodes #den of shadows #nyeusigrube #Roksana #Alejandro #Andros #Ather #Pedro #Lupita #Amara #intro #characters

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