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I never planned to create an AITSF OC, Ringo just came to me one day while I was outside and I knew when I came home I'd have to sit down and draw him. Initially I wasn't gonna do much with him but the design grew so much on me I eventually had to come up with a name, personality and backstory for him. I also decided to make him a guy as the AI series haven't introduced a male AI-ball as of writing this (August 4th 2023).
I usually struggle with coming up with names for my characters so I wasn't sure what to name him at first, but I still wanted to keep in line with AI-balls names being puns related to eyes. In AITSF lore, Aiba is the first ever AI-ball and as such, her nickname, Aiba, is derived from it. "AI-Ball" is obviously a pun taking advantage of the fact that "AI" and "eye" sound similar. In addition, Aiba's name in Japanese is actually "Aibou", which also happens to be Japanese for "partner" (相棒), which is very fitting considering her role. Tama's name isn't as elaborate but is still a fun one as "tama" is Japanese for "ball" (玉). AINI SPOILERS:
Marco is also yet another pun, as "maru ko" means "round child".
With all of that in mind, started thinking, what would be a good name for Ringo? Since I'm not Japanese and know very little of the language, I couldn't really go diving into that, but I speak other languages and figured, maybe I should look into them and play around with that? Initially, I thought about finding a gemstone related name for Ringo as "augasteinn", which is Icelandic for crystalline lens, literally translates to "eye stone", but a gemstone name felt a little bit generic to me. A friend then suggested that I come up with something related to "øyeeple", which is Norwegian for bulbus oculi, but literally means "eye apple". I figured, a fruit themed name would be really cute, plus apples are round, can be green, and are fruit, just like the kiwi fruit! And since this character is an AI-Ball who lives in Japan, I settled on "Ringo", which is also Japanese for apple!