name-on-wrist musing

[siegeofangels]

Still 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?

Comments

[celli]

*chinhands* I love it.

[melannen]

The only time I tried to write this was Les Mis canon, where it's a major canon element that a) literacy is still very limited (in France, less than 200 years ago - writing existed 10000 ago, but universal literacy has been a lot slower), and b) the spelling of names, even among the literate class, is not settled, and "everybody having a surname" is still very new. So I couldn't just gloss over how it made no sense without contradicting major themes of canon.

So it was really tough, in that setting, to come up with any way where "Everybody automatically has a name written on their wrist" makes any sense. Because on the one hand, 75% of the population wouldn't be able to read it. And on the other hand, within living memory 75% of wrists would have just said "Jean" or "Jeanne" and nothing else anyway.

I needed it to say words for my story conceit to work, so I went with Miracles, and specifically that it was something that boys of a certain class had done as a religious ceremony in the Catholic Church around the time of confirmation, which let me play with the class issues, and also made sense to me since the Church was so closely associated with literacy in the West for so long. (Presumably in secular periods you could also have it done via secular magic, and presumably other culture groups would have other variants, and presumably somebody who didn't want to believe in magic could say it was all a fraud and the officiant just tattooed/branded whatever they felt like or were paid to write.)

I have seen variants where it's automatic and natural and symbolic in nature, though - pictographs or actual pictures or abstract color swirls. Those can work really well (and be really cool, depending on how evocative you go with the images.) Sometimes you have to decode the pictures, sometimes they match. (It would actually be really cool to write a story where most people have pictures, but you have words, because you and your wristmate are both extremely verbal-oriented people. Or where increasing global literacy - more and more people thinking in text - means wristmarks are in the middle of a shift from symbolic to textual. And maybe this is happening at different rates in different cultures;

[ellen_fremedon]

I would love to see a contemporary story where someone was born with an emoji soulmark, before emoji were a thing.

[melannen]

...now I just want the story of someone whose soulmark is eggplant eggplant peach....

[siegeofangels]

Lol, like you're born with those on your wrist and for the first 20 years of your life it's just like LOOK HOW CUTE MY SOULMARK IS and then emoji become a thing and then people start using the eggplant emoji as shorthand and then you're all OH. OHHHHH.