This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: Fantasy Reality Name Mixing: From YKTTW
Why, oh why did this thing get launched? This is the most anglocentric trope ever.
Mouser: I see nothing wrong with it. Care to elaborate?
James T: Yeah, no-one's calling 'Mohammed' or 'Kenji' or 'Rajiv' bizarro fantasy names just because they're less common in English. ...Meanwhile, the "games that allow you to change your character's names will also occasionally result in this trope" entry is jaw-dropping in its pointlessness. Sure, if you're playing any game other than Boogerman or Conker's Bad Fur Day, calling your character "Shit-for-Brains" IS going to make them stick out, but that's like saying GTA 3, Spyro the Dragon and Super Mario Bros all embody a "protoganist stands on the spot jumping for thirteen minutes" 'trope' because you once took your characters in those games and made them stand on the spot jumping for thirteen minutes. I am unashamed to unilaterally ditch it.
Althor Enchantor: I feel ashamed at having to stand up for Paolini, but "The Inheritance Cycle has characters named Garrow, Eragon, Roran, Helen, Sloan, and Selena all from the same out-of-the-way village." doesn't seem to fit the trope. None of those names sound particularly more or less exotic than any others. If one of them was named Jim and another Adrasteia Born-of-Stars, that would be this trope. Less so as is.
HeartBurn Kid: Well, "Helen", "Sloan", and "Selena" all aren't terribly exotic (though Sloan is usually a family name, not a given name), while "Garrow", "Eragon", and "Roran" are. Sounds to me like it fits.
Danel: As much as it also pains me to defend The Inheritance Cycle, none of those names are really exotic - certainly not real-world common, but they're all fairly simple names with a similar structure. In a world completely unconnected from our own, there's not really going to be a distinction between names we'd use and others.
Kizor: It's past 2 AM here and I'm far too tired to fix a conversation on the main page and an outright "objection!". That's why "this troper" sucks - look what happens to article quality when we give the false impression that examples are personal property. Could someone who's more awake please fix these two examples, remove them from this page and stick them back in?
- Harry Potter. Oh lord, Harry Potter. Half of the characters are named plain names, while the others are nigh unpronounceable.
- Justified in that some characters are from the normal world and some from the wizarding world. And some are from the wizarding world but use normal Muggle names like the Weasleys, yes. And some are the opposite, from the Muggle world but with still unusual names - Hermione?
- One of her parents must have been a real Shakespeare buff.
- Hermione is not -that- uncommon of a name, America.
- They may have also been mythology buffs, since Hermione is the name of (one of) Helen of Troy's daughter(s).
- Justified in that some characters are from the normal world and some from the wizarding world. And some are from the wizarding world but use normal Muggle names like the Weasleys, yes. And some are the opposite, from the Muggle world but with still unusual names - Hermione?
- The Silverwing series. It's about bats, but the two main characters are Shade and Marina. The villain is named Goth. The child of the first two is named Griffin.
- Found to a much milder and more tolerable degree in the Tales Series of games by Namco, due to their fond habit of using names inspired by wildly different real-world linguistic sources. It does not break plausibility in Tales Of Symphonia for the party to include Lloyd Irving, Sheena Fujibayashi, and Presea Combatir. Sheena was from Wutai (in the original, her name was Shiina), but the inconsistency with the others is slightly less explicable.
- Objection! The default world produced humans Lloyd and Collette, common enough names, and half-elves Genius/Genis and Refill/Raine, which are Theme Naming in the Japanese and mildly exotic in English. The really "exotic" names (Zelos, Presea, Regal) are from another planet entirely. Shiina, as mentioned, is named in raw Japanese.
- Interestingly, in the series' first installment Tales Of Phantasia, the hero's name is the vaguely-Anglo-but-notably-fantasy Cress Alvein, but his (apparently Hispanic?) parents are named Maria and Miguel.
- Tales Of Destiny has siblings Stan and Lilith Aileron, and colleagues Rutee and Mary. (The formers marry and have a son named Kyle, who himself has a brother named Loni.) Chelsea fits in well enough with Woodrow, but Woodrow's name was changed to Garr in the English release, so... yeah, Tales Of Destiny and names.
Twilightdusk: Pulled the Tales of Symphonia example:
- The protagonist of Tales Of Symphonia is named Lloyd. Among his companions are Colette, Raine, and Sheena. Also among his companions are Genis, Kratos, Zelos, Presea, and Regal.
First off, Lloyd/Colette and Raine/Genis are the only pairs of people who were named in the same town. Even then, Colette can be exempted somewhat because her status as the Chosen may have impacted the naming process. Sheena is from a hidden ninja village cut off from the rest of the world as far as culture is concerned, Raine and Genis were born in a hidden elf village, also cut off from the rest of the world, Zelos also has the excuse of being a Chosen, Kratos is 4000 years old, so he's exempt (names change a lot over time). That leaves Presea and Regal, Regal perhaps being named as the son of a wealthy family which leaves Presea who was named in a remote village. I see no reason why this belongs on this page.
In case I'm not being clear enough; The description says:
- Note that this doesn't count ... in a cosmopolitan setting where characters might be reasonably expected to have diverse cultural backgrounds without this necessarily being explicitly stated.
if that's the case, than a situation which does explicitly show that the characters have different cultural backgrounds shouldn't count either.
Jack-of-Some-Trades: The fact that you can handwave it doesn't mean that it doesn't belong. We have no reason to assume that any Chosen receive noticeably different names from anyone else, especially since Colette is a Chosen and has a fairly normal name.
Regardless, everyone in-game reacts to names like Presea, Regal, and Genis like they're exactly as normal as names like Colette and Lloyd. It counts.
Bobby G: I abbreviated the unwieldy and self-contradicting A Song Of Ice And Fire example, but it's still massive. For historical purposes, here's the original example:
- A Song Of Ice And Fire features a more-or-less justified version. You get some real European names (Robert, Jaime, Jon, Bran), some unusual spellyngs of real names (Catelyn, Margaery, Jeor, Willem), some that aren't obviously related to any real name but at least sound plausibly European (Cersei, Ygritte, Sansa)...and then several nigh-unpronounceable straight-up fantasy names (Daenerys, Valamyr, Drogo, Qhorin). Eventually, though, it becomes clear that most of the weirder names just come from cultures outside mainstream Westeros. (If the name contains the letters "ae" or "rys", bet on Valyria; otherwise it might be a wilding name, or come from one of the Free Cities.)
- Actually Willem is a perfectly good spelling of a European name (William the 3rd, king of England, was actually born 'Willem Hendrik van Oranje'), so is Sansa, which is short of Constance is even now some areas of continental europe, Ygritte, which is a good transliteration of a medieval bastardization of Ingrid, Cersei was in fact ridiculously common for a while as a variation on Circe (without realizing the two Cs are pronounced as Ks), same with Drogo. Valamyr and Jeor, in turn, are very weird spellings of otherwise acceptable European names (Valmir/Valmer and Geor, with the last one probably being coincidental). Qhorin and Daenerys could be names, in the sense that they are constructed from parts of acceptable names in medieval European languages, but they are each made with two parts from two different languages. Why is this still a good example though? Because while they are all perfectly good (or somewhat unusual, but acceptable) medieval names, they come from all over medieval Europe. Which leads to the Lannister family having, among other gems, two parents with medieval english names who have a daughter: Cersei (an late-medieval italian bastardisation of a greek name) and two sons, Jaime (an early medieval bastardisation of a latin bastardisation of a hebrew name) and Tyrion (a two language composite name that sounds like Tyron, an acceptable medieval english name).
Removed this from the "real life" folder:
- Averted in certain European countries, which have strict laws regarding the naming of children. In Germany, for example, a name given to a child must be either a traditional German name or a Biblical name, or, if one or both parents is non-German, a demonstrably traditional name of their native culture/religion. Danish law isn't quite as strict, but a judge there recently issued an injunction barring a pair of new parents from naming their child "Metallica".
Not only is it not true (there was a German couple naming their twin "Neo" and "Trinity"), even it were, it still wouldn't avert the trope: Since biblical names are okay, you can have brothers Peter and Nebukadnezar.
Vampire Buddha: Removed this:
- * Oddly enough, this comes up in The Bible, as some names (such as David, John, and Hannah) are still popular in the modern Anglophone world, while others (such as Hezron, Abijah, and Elkanah)... aren't, so much. An interesting example in that their presence in the Bible itself is the entire reason the former names are so common, and as such, why they sound "normal" to modern ears.
- Although there is often an element of transliteration making the more popular ones popular - for example John derives from the Hebrew name Yochanan and Jesus and Joshua/Josua both derive from Yeshu. On the other hand Hannah is pretty much unaltered...
No. No it doesn't. The names in the Bible are all correct for the time and place which the various books describe. It's just that some of them have fallen out of favour, and thus sound odd to modern ears, but if you lived back then, they would all have sounded perfectly reasonable.
Firefly - seems odd to single out River and Simon. After all, a dude named John named his kids Rain, Summer, Liberty, Joaquin, and... River. And Summer Glau's sisters are named Christie and Kaitlin.
It seems a bit of an exaggeration to say that Phinneas is "in current use"...
Danel: Should we just plain remove the part from the description about cosmopolitan settings and what not, since nobody adding examples cares about it at all and just adds different names, regardless of whether the characters in question come from entirely different worlds or whatever?
Bardic Feline: Really, if the setting is a cosmopolitan setting, then it isn't an example of this trope, regardless of how out there the names are. (And it really shouldn't count in regards to the names of pets...I'm just saying.) Basically, this trope only applies if it makes no sense for the characters to have bizarre or foreign (to the setting) names. Can we please revise this page?
