Name That Villian

[redbrunja]

(yes, I know I'm spamming. I'm sorry.)

Okay, so I have a scene in my current prospective novel, where two of the main characters are sitting around chatting about their pasts and trying to figure out what's going on now, and I need names.

Specifically, names for people they've fought.

This story is set in modern times, the only difference is that magic works, and the two characters work for The Council which is tasked with making sure that practitioners (magic-users) don't abuse their powers.

The reason I'm asking is that 1.) I'm lazy and 2.) when I go to name sites, I, on average, spend 20 minutes to get just one name, and it's really not time efficient.

(Also, randomly, is Girl Genius not awesome? *enjoys actually being caught up*)

Comments

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

If the setting is in a city or state that isn't deeply familiar to you, looking through websites for local newspapers, schools, volunteer organizations, and so forth can be a good source for names and help you get a feel for unique regional trends in first names and prevalent ethnicities for surnames. That name list above, for instance, would seem fairly unremarkable for a lot of cosmopolitan mainland-US settings like the DC-metro area, but for other parts of the country, say a piece set in Hawai'i it would feel very, very wrong unless most of the characters were meant to be military, tourists, or otherwise non-local -- too many European surnames (and too many of them from the wrong source countries), nowhere near enough Chinese or Japanese surnames, and no Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander ones; similarly the first names, while most of them could work individually, taken as a group also give something of the wrong feel if it was meant to be a local-born group -- no Asian names, no Hawaiian names, and none of the uniquely local-fied versions of common English names. I see similar issues a lot when non-native writers are trying to do Indian characters -- there's often a regrettable tendency to go for awkward-literal-English-translation names like the sort you'd see in Dances With Wolves, and while you *do* see that sort of thing a lot in some nations, it varies an awful lot; there are groups where I would expect the most common surnames to be English, or French, or Spanish, or Russian, or even untranslated names from the relevant native languages. A lot of that sort of thing goes back to which European group was the first one to make contact with that tribe, or the most politically dominant one in that region; a little bit of historical research and a glance at local newspapers, tribal government websites, etc. for names will help keep a writer from coming up inappropriate "generic Indian-looking" names.

Now those examples are a bit more dramatic than a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic urban setting, but even there the same principles can help you get the subtle little elements of place to have more of the right feel; figure out where this is set, what the demographics of the city or state are, whether most of the characters are local or out-of-towners; also, don't forget the influence of religion on naming choice -- a character named "Brigham" or "Moroni" is probably from an LDS background, for instance!

[chomiji]

Eh, she didn't specify location. And if I were doing Native characters, I'd look up some of the tribal council web sites, and see what names were being used by people listed on committees, or as students on teams at the local schools, or whatver. And of course, I wouldn't use Navajo surnames for Ojibwa people, or anything stupid like that.

There are 2 Hispanic surnames on that list, 1 Chinese, 1 Eastern European, 1 Middle European. The only one whose derivation is not clear to me is Kass with the "K" instead of the "C." The rest are indeed British Isles. The personal names are most mainstream U.S. - but there's Juan and Nadia, and Angie could be from Hispanic full name. Personal names are more fluid - by the second or third generation in the States, most people are given mainstream U.S. names, with possibly a middle name in the original ethnicity.

Like I said, I like names. Seriously.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Oh, not criticizing your list -- just pointing out that since she didn't specify location, that's another thing she should bear in mind for fine-tuning such a set of random names; even within a more cosmopolitan setting, there are going to be little shifts in regional demographics that can help give things the right flavor with a bit of extra attention. In a Philly setting, for instance, I'd expect to see a bit more Italian and Eastern European surnames than in DC; someplace like San Francisco or Toronto should have a slightly higher proportion of Asian surnames, that sort of thing. For a similar list in Hawaii, for instance, Asian and Pacific Islander surnames would be much more common than in other parts of the US, and European names primarily drawn from the British Isles (both directly and indirectly, by way of the New England missionary connection), Portugal, and Spain-via-the-Phillippenes; Middle/Eastern European names are comparatively much, much rarer.

Personal names are more fluid - by the second or third generation in the States, most people are given mainstream U.S. names

Although again, that can vary a lot regionally, and after a generation or two of "assimilated" names you will sometimes see the pendulum shifting in the other direction with folks returning to ethnic names. Then there are the ethnic/international names that become trendy outside of the original culture, like the 1950s vogue for French girl's names, or the similar trend in I believe it was the 40s and 50s for "Juanita"; and in more recent decades there's been the boom in Celtic names. You see a similar mix-and-match effect in place like Hawai'i where intermarriage is much more prevalent than the national norm; there's a whole subset of shorter Hawaiian given names like Lani, Keone, Ikaika, Malia, etc. that are popular first names in the islands even amongst folks who are not directly of native Hawaiian descent. (There's also just a lot of mainstream names that for whatever reason are a lot more popular in the Islands than they seem to be on the Mainland, and a local version of the roll-your-own creatively-spelled/combination name that's a little bit reminiscent of some classic Utah Mormon naming practices (http://wesclark.com/ubn/)...)

(Yep, also a name junkie here! *grin*)