What's In a Name?

I've found it interesting to hear how people choose the names for their in-game alter egos.  A name creates an impression and an identity, even in-game, so it is usually better to choose something creating the impression you would rather see and can live with, rather than something like "Ganksrus".  (Unless, of course, you really are intending to make yourself a target on a PVP server.)  In my case, my main character's name is easy, because of its history in my real life.

Anachan is a name by which I have been known for several years on various forums and such.  Its origin is from my college Japanese classes . . .

My alma mater is famous for having a lot of people who speak foreign languages, due largely to the fact it is a school owned by a church which sends out young men and women as missionaries to many countries worldwide.  I had started taking Japanese classes when I was living in Japan as a military kid my senior year of high school, and I continued studying in college because I had fallen in love with the simplicity of the verbs. (Compared to Spanish conjugations, Japanese verbs are downright easy!)  I could pass tests well enough, but the method usually employed to teach languages in schools does not impart fluency to any degree.  In other words, if you gave me a test, I could get an "A", but Heaven help me if a Japanese person needed help at my dormitory.  (Which happened.)  I could not speak it at all.

Nevertheless, I continued to take classes, but by the time I was in 300-level Japanese classes, my lack of fluency was becoming a problem.  My classes were filled with guys who had the advantage of having lived in Japan for two years as missionaries, interacting with the people on a daily basis.  They chattered among themselves in the language I had been studying for three and a half years, while I stared blankly at them.

Around this time, some of my classmates gave me a nickname.  We had learned the Chinese character for "hole", meaning a hole in the ground, and learned one of the readings was "ana", which is very close to the first half of my name.  It struck one of them that I had a hole in my head for taking these advanced classes without having lived in Japan to gain the fluency first.  And so I became, affectionately, "Ana-chan"--the one and only nickname I have had in my lifetime.  (By the way, after four years of struggling through college Japanese, I did finally end up on a mission in Japan and gained the fluency I so sorely lacked in class.  I now work with my daughters to give them a basic foundation in the language.)

When the day came I made my first personal website, just to have a web presence before Facebook and the like existed, I used this nickname in the title.  When I joined forums, I used this nickname as my alias.  And when I finally made my own character on my very own account in WoW, I named her Anachan.  It had become my alternate identity.

So it was natural that the character I intended for my main in SWTOR would bear the same name.  My one and only alt of any consequence bears my given name.  (As my Legacy name is my maiden name, I do not display it on her.  Just seems a little too creepy.)

My husband's characters' names have a different origin:  all three of his main character names were names we would have given our daughters if they had turned out to be boys.

We tell everyone that we believe the Lord didn't send us boys because He didn't like the names we picked.  The first three daughters would have been named Peregrine Rand, A'Lan Malkieri, and Quinndarius, respectively.  The fourth daughter never had a boy name picked for her, because we finally asked the sonogram technician to tell us the gender, which we hadn't done for the first three.  And the fifth daughter had a possible male name picked before her sonogram:  Cougar James.  (I still remember the sonogram technician's exclamation:  "I don't know what you did to deserve five girls!")

So for my husband, the thought behind the names of the main characters he created in SWTOR--Quinndarius, Peregrin, and Cougarjames--was done years before the game was even in development.
And that is the story of our SWTOR character names.  What is the story behind your characters' names?