sistermagpie | The Naming of Names

I know I'm years behind the rest of the fandom, but I've just read my first super-Americanized fic and I can't stop chuckling. It was just so...odd. And it made me think about the question of naming characters as well.

I hope this just doesn't sound terribly catty, picking on ff.net-authors, but for some reason this story made me gleefully giggly. Because it's not like it's the worst thing ever on ff.net by a longshot. It's just very...what it is.

So in the story Will goes to a made-up University (Linxton, which isn’t so bad as fake-University names go). He got in on a full scholarship because of good grades, a zillion hours of community service and an excellent essay on how being the seventh child in the family means his parents were already paying off college tuition for six other siblings. It's like a Brit-picker test: how many things wrong can you find in this sentence? (Extra points if you remember Will is the youngest of nine and not seven.) Anyway, his roommate turns out to be Bran, which is a surprise, and then he discovers that Jane lives down the hall with her roommate, a Phi Nu Delta who gets notes from her secret sis “sprawled” across her door. In what may be the very first gratuitous product placement scene in a fanfic, Will sets up her DELL computer while Bran jokingly repeats DELL’s slogan, "Dude, you're getting a DELL." Is this a possible source of revenue for fanficcers? Because as I read the fic I distinctly remember feeling dissatisfied with my Gateway.

My favorite part was after the pepperoni pizza, as Bran and Will are getting ready for their first night at college (I assume there will be no slash in this piece as upon meeting his old friend Will gives Bran a "manly" hug) Bran says, "I’m going to bed. Buona Sera, Will," to which Will replies, "Buona Sera right back at ya."

Because Welsh is just SO last week. (And btw, shouldn't that be "Buona notte?")

Anyway, the thing that made me think about names is Jane's roommate, who presumably will make up the fourth of a quartet (Bran has already told us the "chick is sort of cute"). That means the main characters will probably be: Will, Jane, Bran and...Amber.

Amber. Kinda stands out like a turd in a punchbowl, dunnit? Even more so when you stick it in amongst Jane and Will's brothers and sisters: Simon, Jane, Barney, Stephen, Max, Paul, Robin, Gwen, Amber, Barbara, Mary, James, Will. Even Margaret is less jarring and she’s a mistake leftover from an earlier draft. TDiR does have one American character, actually, Will's aunt-by-marriage. But her name's Fran.

Even without something as aggressively teenie as Amber, I've just always been fascinated at names in general, and which ones go together. Like, growing up I loved the way brothers and sisters had names that fit together. My sister married a guy with two kids, and they now have two more, and the names do really pair off with each other, meaning you can almost "hear" that the second two have a different influence. (In fact, my cousin has recently had a third child and given it a name that is such a non-sequitor everyone describes it as sounding like she’d remarried.) When I got to college it seemed like the names of the people my friends had been friends with in high school went together as well. The girl from Georgia, whose name ended in "y" had friends whose names ended in "y"--they sounded like a cheerleading squad. The one from Minnesota came from a group of plain, unassuming names. My own friends and I had names that read like “greatest hits of the nineteenth century.”

But king it must be really hard if you're writing an OC to choose a name that fits in with a set canon while still being new, because in a way all the characters in a canon are part of the same family in that they came out of the same head, even though the author presumably tries to give them different-sounding names depending on their background. For instance, JKR obviously has chosen to use a lot of floral names for female characters--but not all of them. Certain types of Purebloods get constellation names. But really there's a mixture, with the most important thing being that everybody winds up having the right name, somehow. There's a reason Gregory and Vincent are bad guy names here while Neville and Ron are good guy names. There's a reason Luna works while a fanfic OC called Star might not. I wonder how people go about coming up with OC names. Presumably you would try to start with the idea of what JKR was going for with the type of characters you're writing. For instance, I think a lot of young fanfic-ers like to give their OC present-day Slytherin a cool, Goth-sounding name when really we're talking Greg, Millicent, Vincent, Theodore, Marcus. There's Severus, Draco, Bellatrix and Blaise as well, but none of those is Jade, Brianna or Sequoia.

I guess I've been thinking about this too because I'm working on two universes at the moment who are slowly being peopled, one with my partner and one by myself. They're both very different worlds so the names reflect that, but also one world comes from both our heads and the other is just mine. What's the same, though, is when you finally hit on the name that's right. Sometimes, especially with the thing that's from just my head, I'll be using one name sort of awkwardly and then finally the real name will pop out and everything will sound much more normal. Still, if anyone was ever to write a fanfic in either of these universes, I wonder how they could approach making up an OC name, since especially I know that very rarely would a name from one universe fit in the other. I'll bet there would be times where if an author read a fanfic s/he might think the name was a good one; or s/he might not like the name at all just because it's never a name s/he would choose, either because they have different associations with it or because they just don't like the sound of it.

All of which is I guess a vote for those fics about those characters who are so minor they're OCs because hey, at least you've got the name right and that's important.

Also, in case I'm not updating tomorrow, would it be obnoxious to wish