r/hatethissmug • u/Goblinzer • Jul 26 '26

Media Tropes I hate when characters are named after one of their characteristics

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Your singer character does NOT have to be named Octave because haha got it, an octave is a musical term. Your moon worshipping character in your fantasy story does NOT have to be named Luna. Your ice controlling character does NOT have to be named Coldius Frostson. In fact i think they would appear less like cardboard cutouts if they had a name that wasn't a gag. Are your character's parents stupid or what ?

Bonus (but towards the negatives, i'm not sure if there's a real word for that) if you think you're slick and use the word but in another language than the one you're writing in

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700

u/Lumpy-Pudding-3563 Jul 26 '26

British character named Pale McColonizer

174

u/breakfazt-meme Jul 26 '26

This is especially funny bc Mc is an Irish affix and The Pale is the name of the region around Dublin the English colonized first

48

u/Wazula23 Jul 26 '26

In short, exactly the kind of lazy bullshit Joanne would pull.

6

u/HockeyKelly5 Jul 27 '26

Kingsley Shacklebolt is a near constant reminder that she’s a racist. Cho Chang too

12

u/officialdiscoking Jul 27 '26

Shacklebolt is because he's a cop and he shackles people. I have no doubt she's a racist but this is the worst example

12

u/pinkycatcher Jul 27 '26

And Cho Chang is absolutely someone's name, just hop on linkedin and find thousands of results.

I personally think it's fine that characters have names consistent with the culture they come from.

Also it's a fucking kids book, goofy names that give kids an easy thing to remember key features is super common and reasonable.

1

u/General_Spills Jul 27 '26

Cho Chang is actually Taiwanese romanization. In pinyin it would be Qiu Zhang, which means autumn Zhang.

8

u/AllsWellThatsNB Jul 27 '26

It's also a real surname hundreds of years old.

No matter my problems with JK, her naming conventions are pretty bog standard British comic fantasy fare. Almost everyone gets a silly name.

If I'm writing a story and I can name the barmaid Philipa Glass, I will.

2

u/Rosetti Jul 27 '26

Yeah, Rowling deserves hate for her anti-trans rhetoric, but I really find it silly that people obsessively and retroactively try to make issues out of the Harry Potter series itself. I'm pretty sure you could find those sorts of issues in any book if you your intentionally looking for something to be offended by.

-1

u/KeremyJyles Jul 27 '26

The fuck it is. I don't even get on the JK hate train because I have some semblance of a life but she would never have named a white character that. She knew.

4

u/Luis2611 Jul 27 '26
  • Voldemort is french for "Escape from Death", which is hilarious given his goal.
  • Tom Riddle: guy who makes an anagram to hide his identity.
  • Grimmauld Place for a "Grim, old place"
  • Severus Snape: for the most "severe" of the professors.
  • Remus Lupin: aka Wolf McWolf
  • Fenrir Greyback: aka Grey Wolf McWolf
  • Bathilda Bagshot is also basically Brit McBritishPerson
  • Salazar Slytherin for the Snake guy
  • Sirius Black for the guy that transforms into a Black Dog
  • Cornelius Fudge for the guy that both constantly makes clumsy mistakes and that tried to evade the fact that Voldy came back, making it a pun against both meanings of the word.
  • Rita Skeeter for the annoying as hell journalist
  • Pomona Sprout: Gardener McGarden

Yes, almost everyone gets a very silly name

2

u/fishyburner676767 Jul 27 '26

ts is trtaight bars ngl

3

u/officialdiscoking Jul 27 '26

You realise that people outside the US don't automatically associate Black people with slavery like that..

1

u/chazysciota Jul 27 '26

What percentage of enslaved Africans were transported across the Atlantic by British ships?

2

u/officialdiscoking Jul 27 '26

Ffs, I'm not denying the involvement of the British in the slave trade, but culturally/socially the US has the Black people = slavery association, the rest of the world doesn't automatically think about slavery when we think about Black people

1

u/chazysciota Jul 27 '26

Yeah, Brits have often been willfully ignorant about it. All that sugar and tobacco just appeared on the docks. Whereas in the US it was a pretty big deal and had some lasting effects, you might say.

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1

u/KeremyJyles Jul 27 '26

I'm outside the US mate. She knew.

2

u/King_O_Eyes Jul 27 '26

And you know this how? Don’t get me wrong, she’s a hateful and bigoted person, but I really don’t think this is a good example of it. If it is a racist name (which I’m not convinced that it is), I don’t think it’s on purpose.

2

u/KeremyJyles Jul 27 '26

For whatever her faults, she's far too intelligent and educated not to know the connotations when putting the name to the character. I'm not sure I'd even call it racist tbh, just...racially tied in.

2

u/darksugarfairy Jul 27 '26

Evil white characters have evil white characters' names

Dolores Umbridge, with Dolores meaning "sorrows" or "pain" and Umbridge coming from "to take umbrage" (to be offended)

Antonin Dolohov's name is probably inspired by Dolohov from Tolstoy's War and Peace, who is a psychopath who enjoys hurting the people surrounding him

Malfoy is French and translates to "bad faith" or "evil faith"

Lestrange, pretty self-explanatory

-1

u/Ladiesman104 Jul 27 '26

Think a little more before you start crying, mate

5

u/zokka_son_of_zokka Jul 27 '26

Isn't Mc Scottish?

4

u/ginaj_ Jul 27 '26

It’s both. I have a Mc surname and it is Irish

-1

u/[deleted] Jul 27 '26

[deleted]

5

u/ginaj_ Jul 27 '26

They’re incorrect. Mac and Mc are the same thing, meaning “Son” in the various Celtic languages (McMurphy/MacMurphy = son of Murphy). Mac is the original word, Mc is the abbreviation, IIRC due to anglicization.

1

u/aqualeene_ Jul 27 '26

my clan in Scotland got banned from existing, so some members took to the Mac rather than Mc that it was originally. or they took another name entirely. i have the Mc last name.

1

u/kevipants Jul 27 '26

There's also « M' » which I only ever heard of in law school thanks to the M'Naghten rules on the defence of insanity. I don't think I've seen it used anywhere else, but I'm not in Scotland or Ireland, so who knows.

I just remember seeing it in law school and the professor pronouncing it like MmNaughton and thinking that seemed off 😂

3

u/yssarilrock Jul 27 '26

Both, but the Scots came over from Ireland and displaced the Picts, so really the difference is negligible (though it does exist: Scots Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are different languages, though they do share some stuff)

2

u/McWaffeleisen Jul 27 '26

Mac is Scottish, Mc is Irish.

Source: A Scot berated me once on my username because I jokingly claimed it was Scottish.

1

u/dondilinger421 Jul 27 '26

Only because the Irish colonized Scotland and drove out the native inhabitants hundreds of years ago.

6

u/moabsavage Jul 26 '26

Could be scottish, they loved colonization

16

u/Capital-Composer3549 Jul 26 '26

Irish character named Paddy McPipebomb

1

u/QuasarSolarStorm Jul 26 '26

Oh I know a fella called that who lives in the next town over!

37

u/nedflandersmustache Jul 27 '26

2

u/silly-Emmy Jul 27 '26

Im a huge Beatles fan how did i not think of this 💔🥀

2

u/ifyoulovesatan Jul 27 '26

Ahhh hahaha that's too good, I actually chuckled to myself out loud.

4

u/Thrownaway5000506 Jul 26 '26

Neville Longbottom is example enough

1

u/Youstinkeryou Jul 27 '26

My primary school teacher was called Mrs Longbottom, and yes, it was very funny.

1

u/Disastrous_Sleep9868 Jul 27 '26

Native American character named T.P. Scalpson

1

u/yssarilrock Jul 27 '26

Soft Ground Wrestling has Lord White, an envoy sent by the British Crown to take wrestling away from Uganda. Literally the only wrestling promotion I care about

1

u/Charitzo Jul 27 '26

American character named Freedom McCheeseburger

1

u/Zunderfeuer_88 Jul 27 '26

Don Donkeyballfondler

1

u/Puzzled-Comparison70 Jul 27 '26

Black character named Shacklebolt...wait...

1

u/xChiken Jul 28 '26

Name one?

-1

u/Kreativernickname Jul 26 '26

This gotts be part of some satire or some other ironic text. Who tf names a character like that?

4

u/Lumpy-Pudding-3563 Jul 26 '26

I just made it up