The Star Wars universe is one in which characters have a wide variety of different names. Some characters have names not that different from some actual people might have in the real world. Others seem to be complete gibberish. Now we know where the name of Rogue One's heroine came from. The man who first proposed the idea for the film's story also created the name Jyn Erso, which he based off of actual women that he knew and loved.
My youngest daughter is Jane, and my wife is Jen, so [Jyn] is sort of mashup of them. And growing up my aunt was Aunt Ginny, [short] for Virginia, so there's a little bit of that, too. It's a mix up of a lot of my favorite women in my life.
Visual effects artist John Knoll is the man credited with first pitching the idea of setting film around the retrieval of the Death Star plans to Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy. However, his contribution did not stop there, as he tells Yahoo Movies that he named the lead character as well. It would appear that he's the reason the movie was led by a woman. Knoll had three growing daughters when working on the Star Wars prequels and wanted to make a character that young girls like them could look up to.
It's a much better way to go about naming a Star Wars character than those random images that float around social media that tell you which parts of your name to smash together in order to come up with your "Star Wars name." Although, it must be said that the name does have the benefit of feeling like it's a part of the world. Jyn Erso makes total sense around names like Bib Fortuna and Mon Mothma.
John Knoll's comments, however, are apparently limited to how he came up with the first name, Jyn. If he gave her the family name Erso it's not clear where that part of the name came from.
At this point, one has to assume there are entire meetings of the Star Wars story team just to come up with character names. With all the new films that are on the drawing board, there will need to be a lot of new names created for them. On the plus side, not all of them need to be complete names. Rey and Finn are still just single name heroes, although we're guessing Rey has a last name, maybe we just don't know what it is yet. As far as we can tell, she doesn't know it yet.
Do you have a favorite character name in the Star Wars films? Let us know what it is down in the comments.
