What's in a name?

Something I've been meaning to touch upon is just how I got the name, "Tuufless". Since entering Vana'diel nearly two whole years ago, the name has since grown on me quite a lot. ^^



Someone even once told me that I had "one of the very cutest taru names [she'd] ever heard of," which really made my day back then, so yes, I really do like the name, "Tuufless".



However, I've also gotten the occasional funny look from people when they ask me, "Do you mean, 'Tuufless' as in 'Toothless'?" To that, I have to say, "Yes."



For those who are more into role-playing, my story, in a nutshell, is this:

While growing up as a tarutaru cub in the streets of Windurst, some silly, blind Hume didn't see me and walked rightaru into me, kicking me in the mouth as he was walking by. As a result of that, I've lost some of my front teeth, and some people started calling me "Toothless". That was all very meanie-weanie of them, but my friends turned that into "Tuufless", and now it's all cutaru! ^^

Of course, there is a real-life story behind the name, "Tuufless". Upon puchasing my copy of Final Fantasy XI, my roommates had decided that blowing things up was really fun (something I concur on), and so, I wanted to be a Black Mage. To make things fun, we decided that the most unlikely thing to go around bringing about death and destruction would be a little girl, knee-high, and so I went straight to a Tarutaru girl, and picked a face that looked purrrty. ^^



I was then plagued by the question that haunts every single RPG gamer.







Goodness knows how many names I tried, both standard, and more exotic. All of them, obviously taken. The random name generator wasn't much help either, although when my roommate was using it to get a name for a Mithra character, the name "Pyunii" interestingly came up. ^^

Eventually, after several minutes of suggestions from some of my roommates (and my shooting them down), I was basically resting my head on my elbows, watching the tarutaru model dance around on my computer screen.



It was then that I noticed this shot in particular:







I thought out loud to myself, "Hey, she's toothless..." But was it coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. At that point, I wasn't able to take a screenshot, so I wasn't sure that the tarutaru really was, in fact, missing at least a few of her left incisors, but then the dance sequence continued, and the second screenshot put my doubts to rest,







"She's toothless!" I exclaimed. All of a sudden, I had a name. XD



(For the record, I don't actually know if it was a problem with my computer rendering, or if the model actually is missing her teeth on everybody's computer (or PS2), but after watching the tarutaru dance over and over again, it's definitely missing on my version!)



I was actually going to run with "Toothless" as my name, but then there was this little quirk down at the bottom that said that characters with names nine letters or more ("Toothless" is exactly nine letters -_-) may get their name truncated at certain points, and I certainly didn't want that!



So now, I had to find something a little shorter. Fortunately, I managed to easily eliminate one letter by cheating on the phonetics a little bit, changing "~ooth" into "~uuf", and voila! Tuufless was born!



Of course, it was a rather nice perk that, someone toothless wouldn't be able to sound her name out correctly, so maybe my real name actually is "Toothless", just that I'm unable to sound it out correctly? ^^;