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Some of my favourite are the ship names in Ian Banks' culture series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_in_the_Cult... They're all great, but here are some examples * Only Slightly Bent * God Told Me To Do It * Ethics Gradient * I Blame My Mother * I Blame Your Mother * Poke It With A Stick * Don't Try This At Home * Contents May Differ
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the same problem with Family Guy.
That's sort of the point of satire. Family guy isn't just making fun of current events and society, it's also making fun of it's source material and the way it makes fun of current events. Peter is Homer taken to the extreme, such that when you question why Lois would stay with such an ass, you're forced to consider the lesser, but still relevant case of Marge staying with Homer (which to its credit the Simpsons have…
When you're just nodding along to the commentary I suspect satire is largely wasted in a haze of confirmation bias.
Tl;dr family guy isn't funny anymore.
Some of my favourite are the ship names in Ian Banks' culture series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_in_the_Cult... They're all great, but here are some examples * Only Slightly Bent * God Told Me To Do It * Ethics Gradient * I Blame My Mother * I Blame Your Mother * Poke It With A Stick * Don't Try This At Home * Contents May Differ
And on the other end of the spectrum, his drone and human names can be impenetrable. I can never keep them straight, even within a given book.
I read Brandon Sanderson's "Stormlight Archive" and "Mistborn" series, and I couldn't stop thinking about how awkward the names sounded, from Kaladin to Kelsier. It repeatedly took me out of the scene. Meanwhile, the team behind Morrowind seemed to have an uncanny ability to produce names that just felt completely right. Somebody responded to my random thoughts on the topic with this very sound summary: > Morrowind's…
To me, the different feeling backgrounds of the names of normal people were something I attributed to the world being a big place, and although we were viewing people stuck within a class system, the naming was so "all over the place" because they're an assimilation of the entire planet.
Fast-forward to the newer Mistborn series and the names have seemed to align pretty well to names similar to the nobles of the earlier books. (Which may be attributed to the fact that many of the characters you follow are directly from that lineage.)
In contrast, I've had a harder time with the Stormlight series because of the number of characters, as well as the names of things and places and people. However, I've never been great at epic fantasy either. Maybe that's why the Mistborn books feel so different to me. Books with me in mind?
There is a practical consideration worth keeping in mind with names: they distinguish characters from each other . I found One Hundred Years of Solitude virtually incomprehensible because it features an enormous cast of characters whose names are all similar. There is José Arcadio Buendía, José Arcadio, Arcadio, Aureliano José, 17 (!) other characters named Aureliano, José Arcadio Segundo and José Arcadio (II) (who i…
Thomas Pynchon is a great inventor of names. From "The Crying of Lot 49" alone, we have: Oedipa Maas Wendell "Mucho" Maas John Nefastis Stanley Koteks Mike Fallopian ...and so forth. Granted, the humour in "Lot 49" is a little more juvenile than, say, "Against the Day".
I loved the names in Bleeding Edge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Edge
I read a lot of scifi and have generally been impressed by the naming. I dislike Cratylic names when they're trite but authors like Phillip K. Dick and Gene Wolfe manage to pull them off. Neal Stephenson uses them humorously in Snowcrash (the protagonist's name is 'Hiro Protagonist'). I can't say I'm a fan of Asimov's names in the Foundation series - not Cratylic, just a bit off sounding. "Bayta Darrell" doesn't give…
Whenever Asimov was stuck, he would make a play on meaning in his names: Preem Palver => Prime (First) Palaver (Speaker). Hari Seldon takes the name "Chetter Hummin" => Cheater Human. Dors Venabili => Gift of the Venerable Bel Riose is simply Belisarius. Ebling Mis has bad health (it ebbs) and then he misses the right answer.
There is a practical consideration worth keeping in mind with names: they distinguish characters from each other . I found One Hundred Years of Solitude virtually incomprehensible because it features an enormous cast of characters whose names are all similar. There is José Arcadio Buendía, José Arcadio, Arcadio, Aureliano José, 17 (!) other characters named Aureliano, José Arcadio Segundo and José Arcadio (II) (who i…
Flying Spaghetti Monster help anyone writing Roman fiction. The romans only used about a dozen or two dozen first names[1], and not too many more variant nomen. Keeping who is who straight when studying Republican Rome is hard. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praenomen
It was good enough for Shakespeare. There's "Malvolio," the discontent from Twelfth Night . "Horatio," the even-tempered observer in Hamlet . "Elbow," the drunken constable in Measure for Measure , and "Dull," the slow-witted constable from Love's Labors Lost (which also features the empty-headed schoolmaster "Holofernes"). "Prospero," the artist-magician who makes all right in the end of The Tempest . "Hotspur," the…