Talk:Mark Juniper/@comment-67.183.219.219-20141218055205/@comment-26414442-20141218113530

Okay before I answer this, thank you thank you. I've wanted to talk about this forever. It's been something that has irritated me for ages, and an issue that I pointed out to my friends, who said I shouldn't change his name because "it's honestly not a problem" and "we're so used to it anyway".

I went through this whole period where I refused to call Avian as Avian, but "the one Juniper guy". I went through lists of apple varieties and other ways of naming juniper trees and variations of the name "Marlinchen" to find something that clicked. I had a bunch of names, like Alfriston or Macintosh or Mark but the names just didn't have the personality that fit Avian's. It was a very distressing time.

But anyway, let me take you to the beginning, when I decided to make Avian. It was August, I think, where I sat down and thought "i'm going to make a son of Marlinchen, and it will be AWESOME". It was awesome, but I needed a name for this guy. My friend suggested Cedrus, it didn't click with me. I was going to make a blog for this guy, so I went "to hell with everything" and made his name Avian because why the heck not, there were birds in his tale!!

This was before I made Icarus Juniper, so the two were made separately, and ended up being developed together. That meant I thought about their names separately, so that's why their names "Avian and Icarus" don't sound like that they would be from the same family. Man, I absolutely sucked at this OC naming thing last year (for example, my scandinavian OCs don't even have scandinavian names :/ ).

Anyway, for months and months, Avian's name was Avian. He's not a bird. As the next Marlinchen, he's obviously associated with birds and he likes birds and more recently I've given him the power to attract birds in the same way sugar attracts ants, but Avian's not the bird of the family, Icarus is. So why is his name a bird? That's exactly the question I've been asking myself.

I can't change his name because now, after I gone through all the distressing about his name, my friends kept validating his name and telling me that it suits him, so Avian, name-wise, fits nicely with Avian. But, if he's not a bird, then how did he get his name?

Real-world speaking, it's basically just me slapping a bird-related name on him and going "ok it works for now i might change it". But Avian doesn't exist in the real world. He exists in the fictional world, where an explanation for his name also needs to be implemented.

Marlinchen, in the tale, when she saw the bird rise from the moving branches of the Juniper tree, felt happiness. In the last hours, she thought she killed her brother. She had thrown his body into a stew, she had collected his bones, and with her face stained by her bloody tears, she buried in under the tree in her backyard. The bird, to her, was a pivotal moment of her destiny. To her, it symbolised hope and freedom and familial love. The bird was the spirit of her older brother and a path of escaping the disturbing hours previous. And when her destiny was drawing to a close, it was a bird who handed her a pair of red shoes – the red being a mark of traditional womanhood, showing that she had left her childhood and innocence behind and was now fully mature.

Birds meant a lot to Marlinchen. Birds were her escape, birds lead her out of her fairytale world into adulthood, and most importantly, birds symbolises her brother, who she regarded as the most important family member she ever had. Her mother was abusive, her father was oblivious, her brother cared for her, and despite Marlinchen being the most irritable and rebellious girl in her teenage years, he tolerated her. Marlinchen and her brother were impossibly close.

When she fell in love with an attractive, foreign student at her university and married him, she made sure he knew of her love for birds and made sure that he got along with her brother. When she and her new husband had a child, she thought that she would finally escape her cruel destiny. She thought that she wouldn't have her child be exposed to the same fate as she did – because surely, her brother would remarry as soon as his wife died and have another Marlene to satisfy that destiny, right, right? So, thinking of escapism and freedom, she named her son after what she thought represented it best.

Birds. And with that, she kissed baby Avian on the top of his forehead and silently celebrated the fact that he would never have to be a Marlene.

But oh, she was wrong. She was horribly wrong.

Her brother's wife died, leaving two children. Her brother fell into depression, thinking nothing would ever replace his late wife. For a decade and a half, he never remarried. He never thought of marriage.

There was no way his daughter, Annmarie, could serve as Marlene. She wasn't Icarus' half-sister. While she had a Marlene-worthy personality, she, like her brother, stood in the way of the next Marlene inheriting the family fortune. She simply did not fit a Marlene role.

Marlinchen was distressed, obviously. Her son, her innocent son, was obviously the only one who could serve the Marlene destiny. Everything that she named him after – the freedom, the love, the escapism, the finally-getting-out-of-this-fairytale-hellhole – it all collapsed. Was that severely ironic? Probably.

This was severely fowl. But so was a Juniper's destiny, which had to be faced anyway.

Just as I distressed over the meaning of Avian's name and how it didn't fit, even though it sounded perfect for him, Marlinchen distressed over the lost of meaning in his name. In real life, Avian is my child. I made him out of a keyboard and pixels and constant rereadings of the Juniper Tree. In the fictional world, Avian is Marlinchen's child.

He's our son, and his name is the most distressing thing about him.