His major series has “Thursday Next” as the recurring protagonist. Thursday’s husband is named “Landen Parke-Laine”, being a pun on the British version of Monopoly. She is stalked by “Millon de Floss” and confronts frequent antagonists “Jack Schitt” and his half-brother “Brik Schitt-Hawse”.
His other books are no better. His “Shades of Grey” series features a world in which social standing is determined by what colors you can see. Character’s last names are related to the colors seeable by that character. The lowest social class are the Greys. Fforde seems to have a lot of fun with the first names of these, such as “Jane” and “Dorian”.
Yet it makes perfect sense, given that many people with famous lastnames give their children firstnames associated with the lastname.
Jiménez is one of the most common Spanish names - the amount of males by that lastname whose firstname is Juan Ramón after one of our most famous 20th-century poets is just absurd.
Bree is a pretty common girl’s nickname, (for Brianna, usually) and a time honored means of coming up with an RPG character’s name is to take a real name, switch the vowel and/or add some silent letters.
On fantasy, JK Rowling loves cutesy names. A few of them manage to achieve cool name level, (the clear winner being Hermione Granger) most range from odd to silly. You’re expecting me to believe a guy named Cornelius Fudge actually managed to get people to vote for him? Of course, given the number of people with prophetic names, (you named your kid Remus Lupin, and were **surprised **when he got turned into a werewolf?) the other guy was probably named something like Doomedbylow Voterturnout.
Ed McBain’s 87th precinct had a cop named Meyer Meyer. It did not make his life easier.
A side effect of pop-culture explosion is that more and more common names are taken by established characters. So writers in fringe media, like webcomics and small computer games, are forced to find odder and odder names if they want people to remember who’s who.
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Wait. Did I just defend R.A. Salvatore? I think that means I officially took a level in Warlock . . . Crap. I don’t have the charisma to pull that off.
In Jonathan Lethem’s very weird near-future detective story Gun, With Occasional Music, there’s a character named (for no discernible reason) Catherine Teleprompter.
When the seemingly sympathetic character Oberon Sexton first showed up in the Batman comics, one blogger noted that, if he were Batman, he would punch that guy out immediately, because there’s no way someone with a name like that doesn’t turn out to be a villain.
Lemony Snicket’s characters often have names that are winking literary references. For example, there’s a couple named Jerome and Esme Squalor (Salinger fans will get the joke).
One fantasy author with a tin ear for names is E. R. Eddison, whose The Worm Ouroboros includes characters named “Goldry Bluszco” and “Lord Juss”—who hail from places like “Demonland,” “Witchland,” and “Pixyland.”
That reminds me. My nomination is General Deftinwolf Mayo from the Coheed and Cambria universe (which does have a novel about it so it technically fits the thread.)
I mean, Mayo isn’t a horrible surname. But when you have Claudio Sanchez singing very earnestly “I need Mayo!!!” it sounds pretty ridiculous.
ETA: come to think about it, Newo Ikkin is a pretty ridiculous name, too since it’s obviously Nikki Owen backwards. But that can be explained by the source of the world which is that the world that Coheed and Cambria are singing about is a figment of a man from the “real world’s” imagination, who broke up with someone called Nikki Owen and is making up a fantasy world to deal with the breakup.
P.N. Elrod wrote two novels (and a short story) set in the D&D world of Ravenloft. (I, Strahd: The Memoirs of a Vampire, I, Strahd II: The War with Azalin, and “Caretaker” from Tales of Ravenloft.) As an established author, she started to chafe under the heavy-handed editing and hand-holding from TSR’s fiction branch, and toward the end of the second book, she slipped in some silly names as a sort of revenge. They went unnoticed by the editors and now Ravenloft officially includes characters named “Yersinia Wachter” (Yersinia pestis is the bacteria that causes the Plague) and “Tew Yssup” (look at it carefully).
