#teckla

It took me a long time to get around to reading Teckla for the first time. It was just hard to get my hands on it, and this was well before the days of ebooks making that kind of thing easy.

And then it turned out to be a hard fuckin read, too.

It's bleak. A lot of stuff starts crumbling beneath his feet, and he's flat-out told at the start of the book "nothing you do is going to change the outcome". Which isn't quiiiiiiiite true but it's still ROUGH.

Time for spoilers. There'll be a reference to some stuff we find out in Orca, so spoilers for that book and everything after.

(also if ever you want an (almost) comprehensive list of Naboo terms I do actually have that list somewhere because I myself spent three days making it and...never used it)

But back to the fact that you have taken a world that's seen a little bit in the films and made it so beautiful and big and added meaning to things said in the films - I find myself absolutely amazed at the hard work and thought you've put into this.

I do have...a lot of questions lol which I made note of as I was going through the blog, but I won't ask them all now - but there was one thing that's been bugging me and that I haven't been able to think of a satisfying answer for yet and that is about Duja, Teckla and Motée's names.

So why Duja and Teckla keep their original names and not take the é at the end? And why Motée is spelt with an extra e? I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that!

Anyway, thank you for sharing all of this I guess?? I have had such a good morning going through it all lol

Hi! Thank you so much for your interest and enthusiasm for this silly little conlang of mine. I've been seeing your notes come in and I am genuinely so delighted to see how keen you are on it!!

Re: the three names!

Teckla isn't from Naboo. The name changing thing is common practice for handmaidens because of the interchangeability of identity and the sort of giving up of their individuation. It's a cultural practice that none of the others - even someone like Dormé who takes up the role for Padmé's senate role and not her period as queen - would really question doing, just naturally. However it's not something that'd occur to Teckla, not something Padmé would ever ask her to do, and sidenote she's never actually acting as Padmé anyway as far as I remember.

Duja... I'll be honest, I had just never heard of her until your ask! There are a lot of sort of canon-ish characters from all these novels and comics and audiobooks and I don't listen to them or read them so I just don't know them.

From a Doylist perspective, I assume it's that somebody forgot the pattern. That quite bothers me, actually. All of Padme's royalty-era handmaidens rather famously have that é ending.

From a Watsonian perspective... it does say on the wiki she was a former handmaiden of Padmé's, so it could just be that after she gave up being a handmaiden, she went back to using her original name. I think this would be a practice that quite a few people went to if they were no longer acting in capacity as a handmaiden, or for a number of other personal reasons, including but not limited to having had a harrowing time as a handmaiden or not wanting to be identified as one of Amidala's people.

Re: Moteé... the name I've assigned her, Motil, is derived from the phrase "to grow wings", and the original phrase mohu tenote, when it is used to construct a name in the é form, maintains the e which gets turned into i in Motil. So there you go!

Dress for Teckla Minnau

Wedding dress for Teckla Minnau