Pets named after fictional characters, the spectrum from predictable to pretentious..

[Guinastasia]

Of my cats, the only one I can think of is Gypsy, who was named after one of the 'bots on MST3K.

I do have a Buffy, (Gypsy’s litter mate), but I chose that because she’s orange (buff-colored). My sister’s the Buffy fan in our family.

[Otto]

@elfkin477

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.

Heh heh. I used to have a houseplant I felt the same way about. sickly little stick with five leaves on it, I used to wish it would die but I felt bad about letting it die. Now it’s this enormous bushlike thing that’s taken over a good portion of a room. Hope your fish doesn’t behave likewise.

The only pets I had named after other things were two dogs named George (the first named after Curious George, the second named after the first) and my late lamented snake Boots (named after, well, boots plus, you know, no feet on a snake). My current cats are named Etta Louise and Archibald No’count, because there’s no accounting for him, Archy for short. Not sure where those all fall on the continuum.

[JThunder]

@Mangetout

Pet hamsters named after characters from Star Trek

I once had a hamster named “Tribble.”

[Labtrash]

My Black Lab is named Morgana.

My Yellow Lab is named Willow.

Witches, they are…

[WhyNot]

@elfkin477

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.

You do realize Typh will live to be 104, right?

I had an African Clawed Frog (those cute little aquatic guys) who was the wrong species - instead of being one of the quarter-sized frogs, he was about 3 inches across, and 6 or 7 when all stretched out. He act everyone else in my tank, including aggressive fish and all his [del]littermates[/del] [del]podmates[/del] [del]schoolmates[/del] brothers and sisters. Damn thing lived for four years before I finally found someone to give him to. I stopped feeding him around year three, but I guess there was enough gunk in his tank for him to live off of. Monster frog.

[WhyNot]

@WhyNot

He act everyone else in my tank,

sigh ATE. He ATE everyone else in my tank.

And I don’t think he ever had a name, come to think of it…

[mlerose]

One of our cats is named Petra, after Petra Arkanian in Ender’s Game.

Predictable: Ender
Preferred: Hot Soup
Passable: Bean
Pretentious: Bonzo Madrid or Mazer Rackham

[drachillix]

@RickJay

Depends on the animal, doesn’t it?

Friends of the family had a dog named “Worf.” In context it was a hilarious name because the dog weighed about eight pounds and seven of them were hair, and its bark was this tinny little “yip!”

I have always wanted to get a horde of chihuahuas and name them all the most evil and or all powerful sounding names I could find.

Zeus
Apollo
Asmodeous
Nicodemus
Thor
Ragnarok

Either that or name them after Clan battlemech designs and train them to hunt in groups of five.

Then I would have to have one reddish/rust colored female and name her Natasha Kerensky to fill out the picture.

[Abby_Emma_Sasha]

My cats have literary names, but they are not all named after any character in particular. They are:

Sasha- like the name
Emma- like the name and also Madame Bovary
Damon- Damon Runyon
Otto- like the name
Abigail- like the name (maybe for Abigail Adams)
Jackson- like the name

Jackson, Emma and Abigail are names I would give to children if I had them.

[Marley23]

@badbadrubberpiggy

Pretentious? Meh, I don’t think these are - Emory & Oglethorpe sound like good ratty names even if you don’t know where the names come from, so it works.

They’re good rat names, but it does sound pretentious if you know that Emory and Oglethorpe are the names of colleges in Georgia.

[FlightlessBird]

Here’s the Firefly edition:

Predictable: Malcolm
Preferred: Jayne or Wash
Passable: Kaylee
Pretentious: Sinhon

Meet Malcolm
He’s a browncoat, a thief and a scoundrel. And I call him Mal. When he’s bad I mutter, “it means bad”.

[Velma]

The Simpsons: (has lots of good options for animal pairs)

Predictable: Santa’s Little Helper or Snowball
Preferred: Kang and Kodos, or Burns and Smithers if there’s a Dom/Sub relationship
Passable: Lenny and Carl for males, Patty and Selma for females
Pretentious: Jeff Albertson and Agnes Skinner

My own dog is named Rory Calhoun from the 2 dozen and one greyhounds episode, and she is always standing and walking. It’s obscure if not pretentious.

[scule]

@xnylder

Back in the years when my in-laws had pets (the '70s), they named them after figures from Homer. They had a cat named Telemachus and a dog named Penelope, among others. Pretentious? Sure, but pleasantly eccentric, especially considering they were living on a farm at the time.

Funny, because that’s the first thing I thought of when reading the OP:

From the Illiad

Predictable: Achilles
Preferred: Paris
Passable: Hector
Pretentious: Agamemnon

[Jophiel]

I used to own two fire-bellied newts named Behemoth and Leviathan after the Biblical beasts of myth.

I guess that counts as pretentious. Or at least severe delusions of grandeur.

[JacobSwan]

We have three hens called Snap, Crackle and Pop.
Until last night we had a goldfish called Gordon, because he was originally Brown. The two others we got at the same time were called Tony and Cherie. As Ben Elton would say: ‘a little bit of politics there’
Last night my 7 year old decided to be helpful and wash the castle in the tank without telling us. He gave it a good scrub with washing up liquid and didn’t rinse it properly. 30 mins later we had 6 dead fish with bubbles coming out of their mouths.

[FlightlessBird]

@JacobSwan

Last night my 7 year old decided to be helpful and wash the castle in the tank without telling us. He gave it a good scrub with washing up liquid and didn’t rinse it properly. 30 mins later we had 6 dead fish with bubbles coming out of their mouths.

That’s the plotline for a Full House episode I just watched with my 6yr old niece. You can rest easy; in the end, little Mary Kate/Ashley learned a valuable lesson.

[Stinkum]

I had a hamster named Hamlet. Strange little thing . . . he’d sit up on his Habitrail tower and brood all day.

[Rubystreak]

@Stinkum

I had a hamster named Hamlet. Strange little thing . . . he’d sit up on his Habitrail tower and brood all day.

Predictable: Hamlet
Passable: Ophelia
Preferred: Horatio
Pretentious: Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, I can never tell them apart

[AndLuna]

@Stinkum

I had a hamster named Hamlet. Strange little thing . . . he’d sit up on his Habitrail tower and brood all day.

Heh. So did I. He died. (Really. And then I got another and named it Macbeth. He lasted a little longer.)

I suppose you could do a Shakespearean-tragic-heroes set.

Predictable: Hamlet
Passable: Romeo
Pardonable: Othello
Pretentious: Titus Andronicus

[astorian]

Years ago, when I was more heavily into mysteries, I had a cockatiel named Sherlock and two rabbits named Fletch and Miss Marple.

Today, I have one dog. The shelter where I adopted her was calling her Holly, and since it was just before Christmas, that seemed an appropriate name.

So, I guess I’m over the detective phase.