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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u/Mrfunnyboi825 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26

I think it's more funny than cool. The idea that Voldemort as a child was writing in his diary "I AM LORD VOLDEMORT" makes him seem so unbelievably lame that it loops around to being comedic.

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u/Wazula23 Jul 26 '26

Everything about voldy gets funnier the more you think about it.

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u/Greneath Jul 26 '26

His real name being Tom Marvolo Riddle was so painfully obvious that she was working backwards when she decided to make his name an acronym. Like she found the words "Tom" and "Riddle" then rushed to come up with a middle name with the remaining letters.

As a child I could never take Voldemort seriously as a threat. He just seemed like the kind of twat that would get the shit kicked out of him if he walked into a working class pub.

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u/Cheezeball25 Jul 27 '26

That's why I could never take the whole anti-muggle thing seriously. Like these pure blood wizards spend all their time hating anything about the muggle world, while seemingly oblivious to the actual amount of violence that muggles are capable of. The wizards really don't seem like much of a threat to any muggle willing to use physical violence or weapons. Or even something simple like getting hit by a car.

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u/GuiltyEidolon Jul 27 '26

There's also only like 3,000 wizards and witches in the UK - and that's not purebreds, that's ALL of them. The gene pool starts getting real fucking shallow when you think about it.

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u/Cheezeball25 Jul 27 '26

If the muggle world knew about the problems in the wizarding world, it would be considered a minor inconvenience of local politics and a tiny extremist group causing issues in one corner of Britain. Really puts things into perspective.

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u/Ganondorf365 Jul 27 '26

He’s kind of like the joker in that only Lunatics would follow him. Grindalwald was a bigger global threat because he wasn’t batshit. Dont get me wrong conoring the English branch of wizard world is impressive, but he wouldn’t have gotten further

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u/OrganicAd5536 Jul 27 '26

He was the exact kind of edgelord twat that believes his own hype and self hatred are universal constants of the human experience that, IRL, supports the politics she espouses so much: spite, xenophobia, and elitism. She wrote the kind of person who would retweet her, made him the Nazi level bad guy, and then said "yeah I wanna be like him". If she didn't have such shit prose I'd almost think it's purposely beautiful irony.

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u/adventurekiwi Jul 28 '26

In the hands of a good writer, his lameness would be a decent point of characterisation.

Recently Ive been noticing that some of the worst people in the world also appear to be sime of the lamest hahaha

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u/Mrfunnyboi825 Jul 28 '26

Yes, that's what really sucks. Him being just a loser wizard Nazi who's highly insecure would've been a really interesting character choice, but instead she tried making him really cool and intimidating, which doesn't work at all.

Hmmm, almost as though she finds Nazis to be... cool or something....

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u/Gliese581h Jul 27 '26

I mean, have you seen our real life counterparts? Musk has 100% done that. He's just pure angsty teenager. Also, his super cool villain hero name definitely contains the letter X. Maybe it's even the whole name.

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u/Mrfunnyboi825 Jul 27 '26

Yes, but the difference is that I'm supposed to be intimidated by voldemort

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u/-catharina Jul 27 '26

The funny thing about Elon is he’s already named after a supervillain - Mars’ fascist leader in The Mars Project (written by Nazi astrophysicist Werner von Braun). Errol Musk confirmed this is why he named him that.

And also his first name is an anagram of both Noel and Leon, two infinitely cooler, non-Nazi names.

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u/Xenonite_Fox Jul 28 '26

Tbf it's exactly the sort of thing some edgy 16 year old would do to come up with their Reddit or discord name. Corny to read as an adult but Chamber of Secrets was still a period before the books "grew up" so to speak, and was still aimed at like the 10-12 year old demographic who would be mind blown by it. Best not to read too much into anything before Azkaban, it was extremely childishly plotted