The problem with names

The hermit character actually proved to be more interesting then I expected. Granted, I was not expecting to have to do the artwork for the hermit character myself. When I first showed the hermit artwork to some of my friends they almost immediately came to the conclusion that the hermit was modeled after myself. Even when the fact that the hermit was not overweight, the response was, "He was stranded on an island. If you were stranded on an island you would lose weight too." While I did have a real person in mind when creating the hermit, it certainly was not myself.

The look of a character, however, is only part of the design. There are other factors that make up a character. The background of the character, the personality of the character, the fact that a mysterious beast did something to the hermit to not only make him afraid but caused him to lose his memory. Of course, the one thing that one must always do with a recurring character is to give that character a name. This is where I messed up big time!

The character is rich, so the name Charles immediately popped into my mind. Charles, at least for me, sounds like a name a rich person would have. The character therefore was named Charles. This was not a mistake. The mistake came with the last name. I was going to go with Cash for the last name, to again let the player know that this is suppose to be a millionaire. The problem I had with this is the simple fact that my parents are big Johnny Cash fans and I really didn't want people thinking that the character was somehow related to the singer. The solution I came up with was to pick up a thesaurus and find a slang term for cash. The thesaurus I had had many options, but the word I picked was chink. I thought the name sounded good so I went with it.

Now Armstrong is a small town where everyone knows everyone else. That being said, there is another slang use of the word, and at least one person knew this use of the word and emailed me about it after episode 16 was released. The other slang use of the word was a derogatory use of the word in reference to people of a particular region of the world. I honestly never thought of that use for the word, and if I do receive other complaints, may go back and change the character's name, but hope that it does not come to it.