Many forms of popular media, particularly children’s, contain characters who have names related more or less directly to their species. Naturally, this goes only if the characters are non-human: so it will be an animal or fictional species that is recognizable to the audience by some easily noticeable trait or traits. This may go for all the characters in the story, but it is also quite common to have such naming only for members of “minority” species, causing them to be at least partially defined by what, and not who they are. (This is markedly different from characters having meaningful names that relate to their own personality or other individual, not racial, powers and traits.) Presumably, this serves to make the characters stand out, be memorable, or simply be funny. The site TV Tropes is full of examples - check out A Dog Named “Dog” and many similar tropes linked in there if you wish.
But let us look at a few examples directly to illustrate the point. A childhood favourite, Care Bears all have different powers and related names, most of them not particularly associated with bears as animals: Tenderheart Bear, Cheer Bear, Share Bear, Grumpy Bear, etc. However, when we look at the Care Bear Cousins from the Forest of Feelings, there is only one of each animal species, and they are all named after something typical of the species: thus we have Swift Heart Rabbit, Brave Heart Lion, Lotsa Heart Elephant and so on. And Noble Heart Horse, whom you’d never guess is a horse, but that’s another matter.
Speaking of horses, My Little Pony has a variety of meaningful names for the pony characters - ranging from dramatic, romantic ones such as Twilight (Sparkle), Majesty or Sunset Shimmer, to those based on various forms of tasty (usually sweet) food, such as Cotton Candy, Minty or simply Yum Yum. While pony naming customs in the franchise could merit an article of their own, the vast majority of them aren’t particularly horsey-themed. But not so with other species in the pony world(s). Let’s take zebras as an example. (Though we could also mention Catrina/Katrina the cat woman, Rep the shape-shifting reptile, etc.) The first generation of My Little Pony had only two zebra characters: a greedy villain named Zeb (in the show, but with no toy, as G1 didn’t produce any toys of antagonists), and a cute little friend of the ponies named Zig Zag (in the comics, with a toy made). Both had only episodic roles: no distinctive zebra culture was implied, and their names were only meant to start with Z and remind us, in Zeb’s case, of the species’ name, or, in Zig Zag’s, of zebra stripes. (Though her stripes mostly don’t go in zig-zag!)
Zebras returned in G4, first in the face of Zecora. This time, they obviously had a culture different from that of the ponies and modelled on African cultures - appropriately enough, since real-world zebras live in Africa - and it was precisely Zecora’s exotic looks, strange customs and unusual manner of speech that served as a red herring in her first episode, posing the question of whether she’s a villain, and then breaking that trope and giving the ponies and viewers a lesson in tolerance and multiculturalism. And yet her name not only resembles the word ‘zebra’, but also means ‘zebra’ in the Oromo language. At least she wasn’t Karl Freund. It does bear mentioning that other zebras who appear later on (mostly in the comics) have much more varying names - but none are nearly as prominent as Zecora.
If the difference between species is greater, the species-naming may be even more obvious. Many cute children’s picture books have characters named solely by their species - Mrs Rabbit, Mr Wolf, Miss Mouse etc. - but some more serious works have them, as well. Take Narnia: not even counting that Aslan’ name means ‘lion’ in Turkish (a special case, since he is not just a lion, he is the Lion - more on archetypes soon), let’s look at the first creatures the Pevensie children meet in Narnia. Lucy first meets the faun, Mr Tumnus, who has a proper name, and then we have… Mr and Mrs Beaver. Now, we could, maybe, presume that they do have first names, but that it is a Narnian custom to use animal species as a sort of last name. Lots of children’s media do that - you need look no further than Mickey Mouse or Peppa Pig. But then again, Lewis never states this explicitly in the Chronicles of Narnia. We never learn not just the Beavers’ first names, but even if they have any at all. Lewis seems to have let go of this approach in later books, as further animal characters do have names - but in the beginning, Mr and Mrs Beaver obviously sounded fine to him.
In some franchises, practically all characters are walking species stereotypes. Think of Monster High and Ever After High. In the first, everyone is named after the type of monster that they are, or some notable characteristic of that species, sometimes with puns: thus we have Draculaura, Clawdeen Wolf, Abbey Bominable, Ghoulia Yelps, Heath Burns, etc. In the latter, the names are based on the fairytales that the characters, or rather, their parents, come from: it’s enough to gaze at the names of Apple White, Briar Beauty, Alistair Wonderland or Hunter Huntsman to understand which famous fairytale characters are their parents. It’s similar with Disney’s Descendants, although they went with regular names that sound like the parent’s names or even nicknames: Aurora’s daughter Audrey or Jafar’s son Jay may still sound plausible, but ‘the Evil Queen named her daughter Evie’ really strains credulity.
And that is, of course, the whole problem we as the audience may have with such names: they don’t sound plausible. Pet names, as described in the aforementioned TV trope, are different: we can imagine an owner naming their cat Kittie all too easily. We might have met such pets, or we might even be such owners ourselves. But would you, human reader, name your child Humie or Humana? Maybe, if you want a fancy name, you’d go for Homosapienta? Of course not. Even going with a name based on one’s nationality would likely sound pretentious or in bad taste. So why would we expect zebra parents to name their son Zeb, or zombie parents to name their daughter Ghoulia? And it gets even worse if we don’t think about it as individual parents with weird naming choices (those do happen!), but entire races or cultures naming their children only things that have a strong resemblance to what they are as a race, which would have to be the case if, say, all zebras have zebra-sounding names. It would sound like a caricature.
So, does that mean you should never use such a naming strategy? That it’s a mistake that just makes your characters sound unrealistic, to be avoided at all costs? Well, not quite.
First, a caricature may be precisely what you want. Monster High’s show writers and doll designers didn’t really think all monsters would want names that are puns on what they are: they just don’t take their universe too seriously, very much on purpose. If you’re writing something that’s supposed to be comical, you may play with stereotypes and funny and punny names to your heart’s content. If the whole story is fairly tongue-in-cheek, the names won’t really stand out. But if your story is striding the thin line between humorous and serious (think of Terry Pratchett’s hilarious Discworld books or The Order of the Stick webcomic, which manage to drive some very deep messages and have highly emotional scenes despite essentially being parodies of fantasy works and RPGs), you may want to make sure that silly names, whatever their format, do not reduce the impact of your dramatic scenes.
But humour isn’t the only reason that may justify a certain type of stereotypical names. Another valid reason could be if your characters are meant to be archetypes. That is most often the case with classical fairy tales: a protagonist is there to fulfil a certain archetype - say, of a strong and brave hero or of a kind and merciful motherly figure - and often doesn’t have distinct personality traits. They often don’t even have names: they are just “the (brave) young man”, “the king’s (beautiful) daughter” and so on. And even when they do have names, they often just describe who and what they are. Snow White has that name because her skin is white as snow (which Disney seems to have forgotten lately), and nobody else in the original fairy tale is named. Cinderella’s “name” is really a mocking nickname coined by her stepsisters due to her often being smudged by ash and cinders: while some modern retellings have taken the opportunity to claim that her proper name was Ella, that doesn’t exist in the original story (nor is it originally in English). Trope hero names are also common: it would probably be hard to count all the Russian folk tales where the hero is called Ivan, regardless of whether the concrete Ivan is meant to be a lazy village boy or an emperor’s heroic son. It’s not implied to be the same Ivan in all these stories: Ivan is just the name of the Hero, any hero. Fables show this all the more: their animal heroes are just meant to embody certain human characteristics traditionally associated with that animal. Foxes are cunning, so a fox is there just to represent a cunning person: it, thus, suffices for it to be called the Fox, and nothing more.
If your story embodies that sort of archetypal writing and characters, race names are, once again, quite safe. If your cartoon or picture book is just about a hare and a bear, you may as well call them Hare and Bear. That is not to say that those are their names, or that they have no names: those are their roles in the story. They may have names. The names, unbeknownst to the reader or viewer, may be Johnny and Janie, or they may be Bartolomeo and Theodosia, or they may be Runs-through-the-Thickest-Grass and Collects-Honey-All-Year-Round. They may be combinations of animal sounds that we could never translate or transcribe in human letters. But for such a story, with a stereotypical Hare and Bear, their proper names are irrelevant. Even if Hare comes to meet Bear’s family, it will suffice to call them Mother Bear, Father Bear and Brother Bear. Or they may even be Honey, Teddy and Cuddly.
But if Hare comes to Beartown and meets dozens of bear characters there, this approach is no longer the best. The characters may even all have very stereotypical roles, but can you imagine Hare visiting (Main) Bear’s school in order to meet Bear Math Teacher, Bear Music Teacher, Bear’s Best Bear Friend, Bear’s Nerdy Classmate, Bear Class Bully and Little Shy Bear in the Back Bench? While, yes, I am making them awkward on purpose, and it could be played more smoothly, it still stands to reason that the more characters you introduce, and the more individual and less archetypal they are, the greater is the need for personal names. And then you may decide whether you want them to have human names or descriptive names with meanings, and so on. That depends on what you want the bear society in your story to be like. But it may be best to avoid Berny and Bearlinda.
No comments:
Post a Comment