Lore-appropriate Voss names

In my previous Fashion Friday post (Fashion Friday: Like a Voss), I wrote a guide on how to create a head canon Voss character in Star Wars: the Old Republic. The guide focuses on how you can make your character look as physically close to a Voss as possible (as you cannot roll a character of the race officially in-game), but one thing was missing: how to name your Voss. I couldn't find any guide for Voss names, so I decided to do some research and write one myself. Here you go!

Naming conventions

• General make-up: one or two syllables, hyphon, one syllable.
• No alliterations.
• Last syllable often ends on a vowel; -a, -e and -o are particularly popular.
• 2nd syllable of female names often end on -a.

Full list of known Voss names

It turned out to actually be hard to find named Voss NPCs. While there are a lot of Voss on planet Voss, most of them are unnamed or only have a tag showing their position and/or rank. I checked all outposts on both Imperial and Republic side and many didn't have any named Voss at all! After that, I went through screenshots of flashpoints and class stories to look for more Voss names, but without much success. That said, I didn't have the time to play through all Voss quests myself recently, so it's likely that I did miss some that are hidden in quest instances. If you know a name I missed, let me know in the comments and I'll add it to the list.

Male:
Asa-Ku
Bas-Ton
Char-Le
Dalga-Wo
Dal-Rin
Edan-Je
Fadith-Ki
Gaden-Ko
Garel-Mo
Karish-Ma
Ker-Na
Lekk-Ji
Lucen-Tok
Mar-La
Nim-Sa
Nodin-Fe
Sathra-Kan
Sama Zo
Shajahm-Do
Suva-Rak
Talan-De
Telsin-Fal
Tolec-Da
Velan-Raz
Vortine

Female:
Bera-De
Kina-Re
Sana-Rae
Tal-Na
Tala-Reh
Talsa-Ko
Yana-Ton

There; I hope that was of any help with finding the perfect Voss name for your character.

Gender discrepancy

Now if you look at the list, there seems to be an overwhelming majority of male over female named Voss characters (25 male vs 7 female). I find this interesting, so I want to look at this briefly. I see two possible explanations:

1) Voss society is a patriarchy, or at least a society where people of the male gender predominantly take in positions that allow for communication with 'outsiders'. However, the codex entries on the Voss somehow fail to mention this;

2) The game developers working on Voss didn't consider gender representation while designing quest lines. Countless studies show that we think of male as the default in Western society, and this is something that is taught to us unconsciously, starting at a young age.

Now this would make for an interesting dev question; something else than the usual game balance and nerf inquiries. But of course nobody will ever ask such an explosive question.

I think it says something that nobody noticed this; at least I didn't, until I started counting. This says something about us and our expectation patterns, too. Overall I'd say Bioware is doing a great job at this sort of thing: there are plenty of strong women in their games, and SWTOR is no exception. If anything, when it comes to gender equality, the SWTOR universe feels more desirable to me than real life. It may be that gender has been a conscious factor when designing protagonists, but has been forgotten when it comes to 'the plebs'.

But I'm just hypothesising here. In order to say something scientifically conclusive about gender equality in the SWTOR galaxy, one would have to hunt down all NPC names on all planets, make lists sorted on race and gender and count them. This is not something I intend to do: it goes beyond the scope of this little gamer diary, which is to share my enjoyment of games, and occasionally leave some food for thought. So I'll just leave it at this observation and move on.

I'd say, let's all create head canon female Voss characters to even out the scale!