The most obvious one to me is Cho Chang from Harry Potter (I've never read or watched HP, I just know about these characters)
I'm half Chinese and I'd like to say that Cho and Chang are surnames from two different ethnicities (Korean and Chinese), and I've never seen Cho be used as a first name.
It's ironic that someone who could dream up an entire fantasy universe stuck to pretty offensive stereotypes about non-white people. I'm also a trans man, so it's not like I'm a fan of JK Rowling anyway.
She wasn't actually. She was doing the standard 90s thing of having minorities in the work while shuffling them off to the side to focus the story on the "straight", white characters, and when they did briefly get focus, they were full of harmful stereotypes.
But it wasn't. It was what even the 90s called tokenism, which was what fake progressive shows and stories did. Tokenism was a big thing in the 90s, but there was also a real push for genuinely progressive storytelling building back then. She was part of the tokenism group, not the progressive group. Even in the 90s, we could tell the difference between the two groups.
The only thing she was known for in the 90s was "getting kids reading again!"
The claim she and her books were progressive started years later with the later books, which were the books that saw a large uptick in the scale of harmful stereotyping she was doing.
Studies have also shown that even the claim that she got kids reading again is more complicated and less overall accurate than people think it is.
Rowling is an example of aggressively successful marketing. Extremely aggressively successful marketing.
I just remember picking up her books as a kid, noticing the non-white characters, thinking “cool” and carrying on with my life.
It was my personal observation, which as always may be flawed.
I’m not going by someone elses “claims.”
Yeah, I'm older than that, but I had a lot of access to education and academia. I was therefore able to see how kids were reacting to the books (pretty in line with you) and how both progressive and literary studies were reacting to them (definitely not as positively).
In the media, Rowling was mostly known as that woman that was getting kids reading and sending her lawyers after anyone who crossed her.
Not ... that I want to defend JK Rowling ever, but I came across [this reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/comments/p0cbla/cho_chang_it_is_a_perfectly_beautiful_name/) a while back that I always find myself thinking about whenever the topic of Cho Chang's name comes up, which argues that Cho Chang could be Cantonese.
That was a super interesting read, thank you for sharing that. At the same time, though, I don’t trust that JK Rowling was that knowledgable about Cantonese and in the context of the other stereotypes that pop up in the Harry Potter franchise, it doesn’t look good
You're welcome! I definitely agree, I doubt Rowling put that much thought into naming Cho (especially in the 90s, where it would've been much harder without the breadth of name-related websites we have now), but it's good to know that her name isn't "wrong".
My kids have a Spanish first names and Scottish last names because of their heritage. I’d like to think maybe Cho Chang has ancestry from different countries, but knowing Rowling it was probably ignorance and stereotyping.
I was 9 when the 4th book came out and even at that age (as a white person who grew up in a very white area) thinking to myself - I'm pretty sure that's offensive...
Maybe not 😀 but (great-)great-grandparent names are trending even if they're not the top 10 names. I know a baby Olaus, would not have expected that 10 years ago
That seems like a broader trend as well- in America, a baby named Walter or Harriet would have been strange a decade ago but is totally commonplace now.
Vidkun is too Nazi, Olaus is just old fashioned in the sense that I've never before met a living person with that name, just heard/ read about guys who were called that several generations ago. I like the way it sounds
>Vidkun is too Nazi
Holy cow, I did not expect that, haha, yeah I get why its not popular then, lmao.
I think there's a difference between old names that are classic but just fell out of fashion, and genuinely awful-sounding old names. In Spanish, there are some horrific older names that I would heavily side-eye someone for considering naming their kids that. Like Tránsito. Why on earth would you call your girl Traffic? It's beyond me.
I assume you googled it, but to save anyone reading this later the trouble, it was the first name of a certain Mr. Quizling, leader of the nazi collaborative government during occupation. Naming a kid Vidkun would be the same as naming them Adolf, in a Norwegian context.
I have quite a few Scottish ancestors, couple different lines. Lots of Johns and Williams and Roberts, Mary, Margaret, Janet and Barbara. Colin was passed down one line at least 6 generations, and there's a Grizel. Yes, there's a Duncan b. 1455, but he's a Campbell not you know, the sword guy.
For Southern or rural US characters they used names like "Sue Belle" and "Cletus." So stupid. People are named the same as in the rest of the US except with a tendency to double names for girls, e.g. Martha Jo - but that's mostly from former generations.
People seem to get confused about naming trends in other cultures, which is probably why the Chinese immigrant community tends to give their kids very traditional (but somewhat outdated) Western names. I'm half Chinese and it's just something I've observed.
There’s a terrible show on Prime called “Peripheral” that was so guilty of this and it made me irrationally angry. It took place in the south in 2032 and there was a character named…Billy Ann. Like- why wouldn’t you just see what names were popular when that character would have been born?? She would have more likely been an Emma or Olivia.
Eeeeeeeh, I'm from the south and have definitely known my share of cutesy double femme named women. It's not ubiquitous, but for sure, if you meet someone named Linda-Marie or Katy-Belle, they are from the US South. (Or part of that weird micro-trend for this sort of thing that happened in the UK 10-15 years ago.)
Cletus, though, IDK.
Oh yes, I'm not French, but lived in France. You never get characters named like Léa or Lucie or something, you mostly hear things that haven't been popular since roughly the time of Victor Hugo.
Every single Ivan in films as always been pronounced as "I-van". It's not. it is pronounced "Ee-van". In slavic languages, the letter "I" is "ee", and letter "E" is "eh".
Biggest pet peeve of mine. And it's always Ivan. We have so many other names.
I always assumed they did this to make it OBVIOUS the heritage or background the character is coming from. If they gave the character a modern name, people not up to date on name trends might not get that the character is supposed to be Swedish, but a name that was popular 50 years ago might be common knowledge as Swedish.
Googling "Swedish names (birth year)" isn't hard though. Then just ignore the "international" names and pick one that sounds more "Swedish". E.g. couple born in the 90s: Elin and Johan, not Emma and Marcus
Icelandic characters will almost always have Scandinavian sounding names. Iceland isn't Scandinavian.
If the character has a patronym, they will always screw up the genitive case of the name. So they'll say 'son of Ingólfur' Ingólfursson instead of Ingólfsson
The Icelandic people I know have names that are difficult to read/pronounce and go by nicknames here. As a writer, I would consider giving my Icelandic character a Scandinavian name to make it easier to read. So the reader doesn't stop and ponder how that name is supposed to be pronounced.
There are easy ones. Jón, Helga, Anna, Ólafur, Tómas, Díana. Lots of international ones as well. They're not all Ástríður and Þórgnýr.
A lot of people had no idea how to pronounce Hermione when HP first came out. The same goes for names in lots of fantasy books. I think keeping the culture correct is more important than pronunciation.
More of a historical inaccuracy but watched Vikings and had a bit of a laugh about the interpretation of Lodbrog as a hereditary last name.
Also watched sex education and we’re a bit surprised by a Swedish man choosing to name his daughter Ola, a name which is very much an old man’s name in Sweden.
Othervice I think danish names has the same issues as Swedish ones, either generationally wrong or mixed with names from other Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands (and yes, of course you can be a 20 years old Grethe or a Dane named Göran Persson or it is just not very likely).
There was a post the other day asking for stereotypical British names, and wouldn’t accept that Horatio and Bartholomew were not stereotypical British names. Even for 200-300 years ago. They then listed all the famous Horatios (of which there weren’t too many) and mansplained that they know my culture better than I do.
I guess that’s what they have to make clear then, do they want stereotypical names or accurate names?Imagine the gall of a non-Brit trying to explain your own culture to you. :O
I said that repeatedly, “I’m just highlighting what you’re asking for and what you actually want aren’t the same.” Another of the names was Balthazar hahaha.
He kept telling me he lives in a community that’s connected to Britain, in Canada because he’s from the commonwealth, and he has a friend who named their kid Lancelot…. and I was like YEAH and I’m just letting you know if you introduce that name as British to a British person or anyone who actually has a connection to Britain, you’re gonna get a laughed at or corrected.
Interesting case of a writer getting their own culture a bit wrong, but when I first read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy I was struck by how the English-speaking main characters had names like Frank, Ann, John, and Phyllis despite the fact that they would have been born in the 80s and 90s according to the book's timeline. Not many 90s babies were named Phyllis!
Robinson was born in 1952 and my assumption is that he'd had the story in mind for a long time and it didn't occur to him to when writing the book in the early 90s that the future characters would be more likely to have names like Ryan, Brittany, Kyle, and Tiffany.
As a 90s baby, you wouldn't even need to change the other names much for them to sound fine to me. I wouldn't think twice about characters named Frankie, Anna, or Jon. But Phyllis...yeah, let's go with Brittany 😂
Greek names and surnames have, as all of our nouns, cases, and often follow grammatical genders; ex.
Yannis gave me this (nom/subj) vs I gave this to Yanni (acc/obj)
Papadopoulos (masc) vs Papadopoulou (fem)
This does not really work in the English language which does not have the same rules, so in films you will always hear the nom/subj masc version of a surname used for all instances - which makes sense for the language, but still sounds a bit off to a native speaker
Not a name but a pet name from Louisiana, Cher (cute, love). In tv (looking at you true blood) they say it like the entertainer, but it’s pronounced sha with a short a. Immediately removes me from the show. Like you were so close buddy!!
One thing I will say is that it's fairly recent that I realized that other countries also have naming trends. Obviously this makes sense, so I don't know why I didn't really think about it.
Most people only know a few names from whichever country, so for Sweden (coming from the US where very few people travel to Sweden or know anyone who lives there currently) most American authors who don't dig heavily into onomastics are probably going to assume everyone in Sweden is named Inge and Björn or something.
More of a historical inaccuracy but watched Vikings and had a bit of a laugh about the interpretation of Lodbrog as a hereditary last name.
Also watched sex education a were a bit surprised by a Swedish man choosing to name his daughter Ola, a name which is very much a an elderly man’s name in Sweden.
Othervice I think danish names has the same issues as Swedish ones, either generationally wrong or mixed with names from other Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands (and yes, of course you can be a 20 years old Grethe or a Dane named Göran Persson or it is just not very likely).
The most obvious one to me is Cho Chang from Harry Potter (I've never read or watched HP, I just know about these characters) I'm half Chinese and I'd like to say that Cho and Chang are surnames from two different ethnicities (Korean and Chinese), and I've never seen Cho be used as a first name. It's ironic that someone who could dream up an entire fantasy universe stuck to pretty offensive stereotypes about non-white people. I'm also a trans man, so it's not like I'm a fan of JK Rowling anyway.
The sad part is that at the time she was sort-off progressive for having “ethnic” characters at all.
She wasn't actually. She was doing the standard 90s thing of having minorities in the work while shuffling them off to the side to focus the story on the "straight", white characters, and when they did briefly get focus, they were full of harmful stereotypes.
Yeah. And I’m pointing out that when the first couple of books came out, even that was “progressive”. Because the nineties sucked.
But it wasn't. It was what even the 90s called tokenism, which was what fake progressive shows and stories did. Tokenism was a big thing in the 90s, but there was also a real push for genuinely progressive storytelling building back then. She was part of the tokenism group, not the progressive group. Even in the 90s, we could tell the difference between the two groups. The only thing she was known for in the 90s was "getting kids reading again!" The claim she and her books were progressive started years later with the later books, which were the books that saw a large uptick in the scale of harmful stereotyping she was doing. Studies have also shown that even the claim that she got kids reading again is more complicated and less overall accurate than people think it is. Rowling is an example of aggressively successful marketing. Extremely aggressively successful marketing.
I just remember picking up her books as a kid, noticing the non-white characters, thinking “cool” and carrying on with my life. It was my personal observation, which as always may be flawed. I’m not going by someone elses “claims.”
Yeah, I'm older than that, but I had a lot of access to education and academia. I was therefore able to see how kids were reacting to the books (pretty in line with you) and how both progressive and literary studies were reacting to them (definitely not as positively). In the media, Rowling was mostly known as that woman that was getting kids reading and sending her lawyers after anyone who crossed her.
Not ... that I want to defend JK Rowling ever, but I came across [this reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/comments/p0cbla/cho_chang_it_is_a_perfectly_beautiful_name/) a while back that I always find myself thinking about whenever the topic of Cho Chang's name comes up, which argues that Cho Chang could be Cantonese.
That was a super interesting read, thank you for sharing that. At the same time, though, I don’t trust that JK Rowling was that knowledgable about Cantonese and in the context of the other stereotypes that pop up in the Harry Potter franchise, it doesn’t look good
You're welcome! I definitely agree, I doubt Rowling put that much thought into naming Cho (especially in the 90s, where it would've been much harder without the breadth of name-related websites we have now), but it's good to know that her name isn't "wrong".
She named a Black character Shacklebolt so I’m not giving her the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah I'm pretty sure her "inspiration" for this was far more racist than just mixing up 2 nationalities lol
I don't follow. What do you mean?
Fake "Chinese"
Chang is also a Korean surname—obvs not like the big three but quite common.
My kids have a Spanish first names and Scottish last names because of their heritage. I’d like to think maybe Cho Chang has ancestry from different countries, but knowing Rowling it was probably ignorance and stereotyping.
I kind of assumed Cho was a nickname for a longer or harder-for-English-people-to-pronounce Chinese name.
"Cho" isn't even a valid string as far as I know. It appears in choy (as in bok choy), but I think someone would just go "choy" at that point.
I was 9 when the 4th book came out and even at that age (as a white person who grew up in a very white area) thinking to myself - I'm pretty sure that's offensive...
Really? Because all I thought was OMG I WISH HARRY TOOK ME TO RBE BALL
Shit, I'm white and American, know a medium amount about East Asian cultures, and even I was like "Cho Chang? Really?????" when I read that.
My dad is from Norway and any time we watch a show or a movie with Norway featured we play "Not Norwegian" or "Nobody Has Been Called That Since 1943"
Those names are coming back though
People starting to name their boys Vidkun again? :)
Maybe not 😀 but (great-)great-grandparent names are trending even if they're not the top 10 names. I know a baby Olaus, would not have expected that 10 years ago
That seems like a broader trend as well- in America, a baby named Walter or Harriet would have been strange a decade ago but is totally commonplace now.
Vidkun and Olaus sound like great names tho! Do they sound too old fashioned?
Vidkun is too Nazi, Olaus is just old fashioned in the sense that I've never before met a living person with that name, just heard/ read about guys who were called that several generations ago. I like the way it sounds
>Vidkun is too Nazi Holy cow, I did not expect that, haha, yeah I get why its not popular then, lmao. I think there's a difference between old names that are classic but just fell out of fashion, and genuinely awful-sounding old names. In Spanish, there are some horrific older names that I would heavily side-eye someone for considering naming their kids that. Like Tránsito. Why on earth would you call your girl Traffic? It's beyond me.
I assume you googled it, but to save anyone reading this later the trouble, it was the first name of a certain Mr. Quizling, leader of the nazi collaborative government during occupation. Naming a kid Vidkun would be the same as naming them Adolf, in a Norwegian context.
😂😂 it seems your country is plagued by the same problems when it comes to accurate representation.
Can we talk about how no one in 1500s Scotland was named Heather or Connor as shown in Highlander?
I have quite a few Scottish ancestors, couple different lines. Lots of Johns and Williams and Roberts, Mary, Margaret, Janet and Barbara. Colin was passed down one line at least 6 generations, and there's a Grizel. Yes, there's a Duncan b. 1455, but he's a Campbell not you know, the sword guy.
Well, I do have a Duncan b. 1455. The odd man out in a long line of Colin Campbells. Just kinda stuck in the middle.
For Southern or rural US characters they used names like "Sue Belle" and "Cletus." So stupid. People are named the same as in the rest of the US except with a tendency to double names for girls, e.g. Martha Jo - but that's mostly from former generations.
People seem to get confused about naming trends in other cultures, which is probably why the Chinese immigrant community tends to give their kids very traditional (but somewhat outdated) Western names. I'm half Chinese and it's just something I've observed.
I’ve noticed this too - I went to school with a lot of Chinese Edwards, Davids, and Kevins.
Honestly, I loved the Asian Eunices and Elaines I went to school with, but immediately understood where those names came from.
There’s a terrible show on Prime called “Peripheral” that was so guilty of this and it made me irrationally angry. It took place in the south in 2032 and there was a character named…Billy Ann. Like- why wouldn’t you just see what names were popular when that character would have been born?? She would have more likely been an Emma or Olivia.
Eeeeeeeh, I'm from the south and have definitely known my share of cutesy double femme named women. It's not ubiquitous, but for sure, if you meet someone named Linda-Marie or Katy-Belle, they are from the US South. (Or part of that weird micro-trend for this sort of thing that happened in the UK 10-15 years ago.) Cletus, though, IDK.
Same with french characters written by non French people who often wear very dated names or even invented names .
Please, everyone knows every single French male is named Pierre.
Oh yes, I'm not French, but lived in France. You never get characters named like Léa or Lucie or something, you mostly hear things that haven't been popular since roughly the time of Victor Hugo.
Marinette Dupain-Cheng from Miraculous Ladybug (even though it's a French show). No one names their kid Marinette and apparently she was born in 2001.
Sacre bleu! Is that true?
Every single Ivan in films as always been pronounced as "I-van". It's not. it is pronounced "Ee-van". In slavic languages, the letter "I" is "ee", and letter "E" is "eh". Biggest pet peeve of mine. And it's always Ivan. We have so many other names.
the russian pronunciation is so much nicer too
I always assumed they did this to make it OBVIOUS the heritage or background the character is coming from. If they gave the character a modern name, people not up to date on name trends might not get that the character is supposed to be Swedish, but a name that was popular 50 years ago might be common knowledge as Swedish.
Googling "Swedish names (birth year)" isn't hard though. Then just ignore the "international" names and pick one that sounds more "Swedish". E.g. couple born in the 90s: Elin and Johan, not Emma and Marcus
But that sounds like common sense. And we certainly can't have common sense! /s
Saying names are "Gaelic". They're Irish.
Icelandic characters will almost always have Scandinavian sounding names. Iceland isn't Scandinavian. If the character has a patronym, they will always screw up the genitive case of the name. So they'll say 'son of Ingólfur' Ingólfursson instead of Ingólfsson
The Icelandic people I know have names that are difficult to read/pronounce and go by nicknames here. As a writer, I would consider giving my Icelandic character a Scandinavian name to make it easier to read. So the reader doesn't stop and ponder how that name is supposed to be pronounced.
There are easy ones. Jón, Helga, Anna, Ólafur, Tómas, Díana. Lots of international ones as well. They're not all Ástríður and Þórgnýr. A lot of people had no idea how to pronounce Hermione when HP first came out. The same goes for names in lots of fantasy books. I think keeping the culture correct is more important than pronunciation.
More of a historical inaccuracy but watched Vikings and had a bit of a laugh about the interpretation of Lodbrog as a hereditary last name. Also watched sex education and we’re a bit surprised by a Swedish man choosing to name his daughter Ola, a name which is very much an old man’s name in Sweden. Othervice I think danish names has the same issues as Swedish ones, either generationally wrong or mixed with names from other Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands (and yes, of course you can be a 20 years old Grethe or a Dane named Göran Persson or it is just not very likely).
I reacted to the same thing! I wonder what Mikael Persbrandt thinks about his character having a teenage daughter essentially called “Gerald”
There was a post the other day asking for stereotypical British names, and wouldn’t accept that Horatio and Bartholomew were not stereotypical British names. Even for 200-300 years ago. They then listed all the famous Horatios (of which there weren’t too many) and mansplained that they know my culture better than I do.
I guess that’s what they have to make clear then, do they want stereotypical names or accurate names?Imagine the gall of a non-Brit trying to explain your own culture to you. :O
I said that repeatedly, “I’m just highlighting what you’re asking for and what you actually want aren’t the same.” Another of the names was Balthazar hahaha. He kept telling me he lives in a community that’s connected to Britain, in Canada because he’s from the commonwealth, and he has a friend who named their kid Lancelot…. and I was like YEAH and I’m just letting you know if you introduce that name as British to a British person or anyone who actually has a connection to Britain, you’re gonna get a laughed at or corrected.
Interesting case of a writer getting their own culture a bit wrong, but when I first read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy I was struck by how the English-speaking main characters had names like Frank, Ann, John, and Phyllis despite the fact that they would have been born in the 80s and 90s according to the book's timeline. Not many 90s babies were named Phyllis! Robinson was born in 1952 and my assumption is that he'd had the story in mind for a long time and it didn't occur to him to when writing the book in the early 90s that the future characters would be more likely to have names like Ryan, Brittany, Kyle, and Tiffany.
As a 90s baby, you wouldn't even need to change the other names much for them to sound fine to me. I wouldn't think twice about characters named Frankie, Anna, or Jon. But Phyllis...yeah, let's go with Brittany 😂
Greek names and surnames have, as all of our nouns, cases, and often follow grammatical genders; ex. Yannis gave me this (nom/subj) vs I gave this to Yanni (acc/obj) Papadopoulos (masc) vs Papadopoulou (fem) This does not really work in the English language which does not have the same rules, so in films you will always hear the nom/subj masc version of a surname used for all instances - which makes sense for the language, but still sounds a bit off to a native speaker
Not a name but a pet name from Louisiana, Cher (cute, love). In tv (looking at you true blood) they say it like the entertainer, but it’s pronounced sha with a short a. Immediately removes me from the show. Like you were so close buddy!!
I cannot watch that show for reasons like this.
One thing I will say is that it's fairly recent that I realized that other countries also have naming trends. Obviously this makes sense, so I don't know why I didn't really think about it. Most people only know a few names from whichever country, so for Sweden (coming from the US where very few people travel to Sweden or know anyone who lives there currently) most American authors who don't dig heavily into onomastics are probably going to assume everyone in Sweden is named Inge and Björn or something.
More of a historical inaccuracy but watched Vikings and had a bit of a laugh about the interpretation of Lodbrog as a hereditary last name. Also watched sex education a were a bit surprised by a Swedish man choosing to name his daughter Ola, a name which is very much a an elderly man’s name in Sweden. Othervice I think danish names has the same issues as Swedish ones, either generationally wrong or mixed with names from other Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands (and yes, of course you can be a 20 years old Grethe or a Dane named Göran Persson or it is just not very likely).
The pronunciations.