name-on-wrist musing
May. 7th, 2019 07:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
siegeofangelsStill thinking about the name-on-wrist trope.
I'm coming at this from the perspective of it HAVING to be a genetic mutation, because in my mind everything has to be a genetic mutation. And I suppose it could be a relatively recent one, given that there are other mutations that are relatively recent.
(blue eyes: ~10kya
lactose persistance: ~10kya
and writing: ~9kya for the earliest proto-writing)
so it COULD be a thing. Maybe just a thing among certain ethnic groups? Maybe a thing among other subsets of the population? Maybe it's a recessive gene. Maybe it only expresses in gay couples.
Maybe it started out as a symbol and then evolved into an alphabetic representation of your soulmate's name. Maybe some people in the current time have a full written-out name and some people have other sort of representative symbols. Maybe the script comes down through the mother's side and is "fixed" when your mother's ova form in utero, so if your ancestors are from China and then your parents move to America and have you and you grow up mostly speaking English, your wristname is still gonna show up in Chinese characters.
ANYWAY what this could mean for a story is that maybe not everybody has a wristname, or there could be a bigger variation in what they look like: everyone in your family has their names in the Latin alphabet and then you're born with, like, a little turtle and three circles.
Which I think could be interesting to play with, as a writer, a world where it's not that unusual to have a wristname that looks different from other people's, or something you have to puzzle out, or other kind of variations.
Thoughts?
I'm coming at this from the perspective of it HAVING to be a genetic mutation, because in my mind everything has to be a genetic mutation. And I suppose it could be a relatively recent one, given that there are other mutations that are relatively recent.
(blue eyes: ~10kya
lactose persistance: ~10kya
and writing: ~9kya for the earliest proto-writing)
so it COULD be a thing. Maybe just a thing among certain ethnic groups? Maybe a thing among other subsets of the population? Maybe it's a recessive gene. Maybe it only expresses in gay couples.
Maybe it started out as a symbol and then evolved into an alphabetic representation of your soulmate's name. Maybe some people in the current time have a full written-out name and some people have other sort of representative symbols. Maybe the script comes down through the mother's side and is "fixed" when your mother's ova form in utero, so if your ancestors are from China and then your parents move to America and have you and you grow up mostly speaking English, your wristname is still gonna show up in Chinese characters.
ANYWAY what this could mean for a story is that maybe not everybody has a wristname, or there could be a bigger variation in what they look like: everyone in your family has their names in the Latin alphabet and then you're born with, like, a little turtle and three circles.
Which I think could be interesting to play with, as a writer, a world where it's not that unusual to have a wristname that looks different from other people's, or something you have to puzzle out, or other kind of variations.
Thoughts?
no subject
Date: 2019-05-07 01:08 pm (UTC)