Five Reused Names
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The Top Ten Tuesday subject for today is “Ten Characters I’d Name A Child/Dog/Cat/Car/Etc. After”. Fictional characters frequently have cool or memorable names, don’t you think? I’ve only been able to think of five examples of fictional namesakes – and yet it’s curious how many names we’ve snitched over the years.
1. On April 27, 2006, I created a ranger character for a D&D campaign my dad was game-mastering. I named this character “Elwin“, after Elwin Ransom in C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy.
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Along these same lines, my brother named his goblin priest in World of Warcraft “Geezel“, after a little goblin-ish mage character in SnarfQuest by Larry Elmore.
2. I also gave a World of Warcraft character a literary name. My gnome priest owes his intellectual, titular heritage to G.K. Chesterton’s engrossing theological and psychological detective Father Brown (or as Blizzard’s database renders it, “Fatherbrown“).
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3. According to my father, one of the names on the extensive list of possibilities for me was “Aravis“, after the Calormen warrior princess in The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis. In the end, for better or worse, they chose Kimia instead.
4. We’ve had several cats over the years; one kitten my brother insisted on naming “Maid Marian” after the girl in the Robin Hood story. Thus, while her official name was Maid Marian Marie, we actually just called her Marie.
5. As I don’t have any children yet, I have to be satisfied with naming my own characters 😉. I could pretend that the Hayes and Hayes character Sgt. Hank Blake is named for Blake’s 7, but although that’s the first place I remember hearing about this name, I’ve never seen the show and mostly thought it sounded cool and that someone should have it. Pity Hank wasn’t more of a sci-fi police sergeant 😜.
BONUS: The characters of White Mesa utilize many names from real people in the Bible. There are the obvious ones – such as the principle characters of Soldier: Thomas, Benjamin, Samuel, and Mattias – but I’m having fun picking some of the less-common ones – Mephibosheth, Jeduthun, Tubal-Cain…
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Along those lines, the two brothers Sam and Matt Parker started life as “Sam and Max.” But I found myself unable to read their names that way.
So, what do you think? Do you think any future children I might have are doomed?