I don’t imagine a lot of people will actually care about this, but now that I have a blog platform, I have a place to write this sort of nonsense regardless of who cares!
The reason I went with Iron Carrot Archives is a small story. When I began prototyping this work I was just using a rather bland name, like with the sheets. But it was just so… boring and generic. “Arknights Mastery Priority Guide” has no flair to it and no identifiability. I could have named it something like TacB’s Mastery Priority Guide but that seemed a little self-fellating. Anyway, the latter is exactly what the Sheets version of the guide is named now, but that feels like it works better for the dedicated sheet. Here, there’s another issue, which is that if I’m going through the trouble of building a website, I don’t want it to just be stuck to the Mastery guide. Aside from something like this blog, I have other works like my fiction, or the efficiency sheet, or the tier list (although this one is shared).
I didn’t want to be strictly stuck by the name Arknights either. I have no intention of stopping any time soon, but the future is always a mystery. I may find another interest worth making guides for in the future, or even fictional work that isn’t AK related that I’d like to share!
So I started thinking of related things that were still AK related, but were meaningful to me, and also not strictly tied to AK. I can’t remember why, but eventually the Rim Billiton cities occurred to me. The first I thought of was actually Alloy Carrot which is Avy’s hometown on Talos-II, but I don’t really like EF that much, so Iron Carrot, which is April and Savage’s hometown, felt like a better fit.
The initial idea I had was an expedition company. Like the sort you would hire to go on hunting expeditions. I could imagine a fic scenario where April and Kazemaru moved on from RI after the adventures in Paper Thin Songs (which I’m still thinking about, I promise). Maybe they move back to April’s hometown and found an expedition company. I could even add in some of my other favorites that are related like Ray or Cairn!
However, initial feedback to this wasn’t great, and I could see why. It was a fic idea, not a website idea. There was nothing about “Iron Carrot Expedition Company” that indicated, even vaguely, that this was a guide repository. Windgesang, who is a jerk, suggested Iron Carrot Archives instead. I didn’t love it at first, and honestly, I’m still a bit hesitant on it, but I think it works. It doesn’t “mean” anything really. It’s not like we have any real lore on Iron Carrot, let alone something that would indicate any sort of library or archive there. But it sounds nice at least, and does refer to my favorite’s hometown.
I probably could have dwelled on it more, but I didn’t want to get hung up on the name. Development was progressing rapidly, and the domain was rapidly becoming the stopping point. So, that’s what I went with!
And now you know why this site has this name. Thanks for reading.