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TIFU by naming one of my characters.

I'm a (white american) digital artist working on a webcomic, and I've always wanted to see a Black main character in a high fantasy cartoon, so I tried to create a really awesome character--and ended up settling on a fun design for a little 9 year old boy from a small village, but with textured hair and Black features. I tried to go with a regionally neutral name that seemed like it could fit in with the world.

ChatGPT gave me a list of names and I settled on "Kieran", as it seemed like a name that would work and CGPT said it meant "dark haired", which, yeah, he's dark haired, so I went with it. Seemed like it would work.

I created lots of content with this character for pre-production--I made an expression sheet, a character rotation, a full render, and I legitimately got to know this kid as Kieran.

Flash forward a bit and i'm almost ready to make my Art Fight bio for this kid (art fight is basically this huge event where artists draw each other's characters, etc), and I start to look up the meaning of his name. The name of this little kid whose design i pored over and whose hair and features i have come to genuinely love. I type Kieran Meaning into google and my asshole closes in Very White Horror.

Kieran means "Little Dark One".

bombs go off in my head, and i see my twitter notifications ablaze in cancellation. i now have 2 days to come up with a new name for this character, and more importantly, to stop accidentally calling him his old name in my head.

TL;DR I accidentally named a Black character a name that means "Little Dark One"

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