User:Vlain

Vlain - strength with honor

Vlain (aka Vlainstrike) is a name I created around 2003 for use in the MMORPG Anarchy Online. Since that time the name has surged in popularity across several MMO's, usernames, and story characters.

A lot of thought went into the name's creation. Players have a habit of shortening people's names, so I wanted a name that wasn't easily reduced into a shortened form. I wanted a strong sounding name like Bane, Venom, or Vlad, but without the awful cliches which accompany such names.

I'm rather fond of the letter "V" though; the letter itself has an extremely strong 'feel' to it, so I settled on coming up with a short name starting with V. Combine V with Bane, and you end up with Vane, but that is also a pre-existing word, and neither vane, vain, nor vein have particularly desirable meanings attached to them. Thus, it wasn't a huge leap to take the 'Vl' from Vlad, and attach it to the '-ane' sound of Bane, to come up with the entirely new name, "Vlain".

I never considered spelling it Vlane. Once the sound of the name was in my head, the -ain spelling was the first one that occurred to me; it felt perfect, so I had no reason to reflect on the spelling further.

Vlain was intended to be my 'main' character in AO, but after messing up my first character (Divalen, which has long since been deleted), I wanted to develop a 'test' character so that I wouldn't mess up my "Vlain" character. Thus, Vlainstrike was born. Ironically, after developing this 'test' character for so long without messing it up, it eventually became my 'main', while "Vlain" sits in the shadows, awaiting the day I return to develop him further.