There are millions of dogs named Max, but my Welsh Terrierist was registered as Maxwell Edison. Pretentious, maybe.
My present dog’s previous owners named her Layla after the song Clapton wrote about his wife. She’s a short dog, so if I want to see eye-to-eye with her, she’s “got me on my knees.”
The dog next door is named for Milo Minderbinder. Eh, passable.
A fellow down the block named his Shih Tzuh Domino, for a fortune-telling dame in a Bond novel.
A friend had a Doberman called Atouk for Ringo Starr’s caveman character. Predictable.
I once knew a couple of tomcats named Solshenitzen* and Siddartha. Pretentious, but not fictitious.
*I sense I have misspelled that name. The cat didn’t care, though. He couldn’t read.
I had a rat called Lucretia, after the Borgia. Pretentious? Yes, I do believe so, but I was only 18. But then I called her Lucy after the character in Dracula. Predictable.
My sister had a gerbil called Greymarsh after a character in Nicholas Nickleby. You decide.
One of the best pets we’ve ever had was a big Siamese cat named Tuvix, after a character who appeared in a single episode of Star Trek: Voyager. The name is probably pretentious, but the cat didn’t seem to mind.
Hmmm, close but not quite, my pets are named after:
Gertie (shih tzu): Gertrude Stein (passable, cause it’s a cute name for the breed)
Hugo (ginger tabby): Victor Hugo (predictable)
Heloise (Jack Russell): Heloise of Abelard & Heloise fame (pretentious?)
When I told my old Medieval Lit professor that I had named my dog Heloise, her response was quite short: did you castrate her?
I sort of have a fish named Typh, named after Typhoid Mary. You see, the other goldfish Typh lived with died, so I was given him and a sucker fish about 2 months ago. The sucker fish died, then my two fish Fish and Other Fish died, then the person who gave me Typh felt bad and bought two new goldfish, both of which have since died…
I say I “sort of” have this fish because basically I’m feeding because it’s alive. I’m not a fan of it, though.
She wasn’t consciously named for the RAH cat - it was the combination of her very unusual colouring and the fact that I was somewhat over identifying with my IT job at the time. She got lucky with predictable, rather than pretentious.
(The current cat has a blessedly non fictional, non IT related, and I think non pretentious name).
Apart from cats:
A rat named Kay; for some reason people assumed he was named after Kay in John Masefield’s The Box of Delights. This was not actually the case; I just liked the name.
Two gerbils named Geraldine and Josephine after the main character’s in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot
Just for clarity, I was aiming more for lists of rated potential pet names culled from a single work, rather than real-life examples, although the contributions so far were great anyway.
What about a dog named Starship Enterprise? My parents called their Samoyed “Star,” but that was her full name. I leave it to you to decide which category that goes in. I think it’s pardonable because it’s cute-ly dorky.
Naming your lizard after characters from Lolita:
Predictable: Lola
Preferred: Cue
Pardonable: Humbert [pretentious, but it’d work on a lizard]
Pretentious: Vivian Darkbloom
Cat Stiggs is named after one of the eponymous characters in “The Utterly Mind Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs” a hilarious article in the National Lampoon circa mid '70s–it was also made into a film by Robert Altman which apparently nobody but me has ever seen.
Cat Pratchett is named after Terry Pratchett, who is not fictional–I just thought it was a cool name for a cat, especially a big ass roughneck palooka of an orange tom who will probably top 25 lbs when full grown. Truly an Unadulterated Cat.
I had a Pixel cat too–named her that trying to give her something to live up to, as she was a total 'fraidy cat. Same reasoning behind naming the scrawny mutt bred rescue pup German Shepherd Siegfried. I also had a cat named Dybbuk, which isn’t so much a character as a class of beings, but it was a pretty cool name nonetheless.
My friends had cats named Cosmo and Kramer. Now they have a cat named Gary–apparently it’s a Spongebob thing and the kids named him that.