What's in a Name?

I’ve recently returned from Gen-Con 2014, and goodness was it an awesome trip!  Great new games to try, tons of new people to meet, and quite a few very cool costumes to gawk at! There were even some things that fit the theme of this blog, with a few independent authors selling comics and books that had some anthropomorphic element to them. The majority of it consisted of retellings of fairy tales, however, and didn’t have quite as much animal representation as I would have liked, but we’ll see if we can get one of them up here on this blog! After all, just because we’re focused on anthropomorphic literature here, that doesn’t mean there’s not a ton of great reading out there otherwise!

I collected a lot of author and artist cards over the weekend, and I’ll try to make a full listing of some of my favorites at a later date.

Over that weekend, a very good point was brought up to me by a good friend of mine that I felt was relevant here. We were seeing a good deal of Rocket Raccoon memorabilia on display at the convention and he asked me: “Why do so many animal characters just have their animal as their last name? We don’t have comic book characters that are called ‘Steve Human’, so why is something like ‘Bugs Bunny’ okay?”

This isn’t the first time such a question has graced my mind, but I’d never been asked it directly before. It bears a little bit of thinking…

We have a ton of anthropomorphic animal characters who go by their animal type for their last name: Bullwinkle T. Moose, Mickey Mouse, Roger Rabbit, Sonic the Hedgehog, Daffy Duck, Michael J. Fox (Okay, fine, he doesn’t count…), the list goes on.

Why do we do this so often and why is it acceptable?

Well, first and foremost, the majority of these characters tend to only go by their first name. It’s extremely rare for Sonic to be greeted as anything other than ‘Sonic’ by all but strangers and enemies. And in those cases, rather than using his full name, they tend to just call him ‘hedgehog’. Even though that’s a part of his character name, it’s also something he is majorly identified as. In a way, it’s not unlike in the olden days when using a last name was something reserved for those with noble or socially important families. You would have names like “James the Younger”, “Farmer Joseph”, “Lancelot the Brave”, and “George of Elizabethtown”. Names used like these were meant to convey things about the person so that you knew what to expect before you met them. For instance, if you were told you were going to do business with a man named ‘Blacksmith John’, you could make a reasonable assumption of what kind of business you’d be doing.

I think, when it comes to the animal character names, the creators are going for a similar idea. When your primary targets are younger audiences that can have very specific likes and dislikes, making things simpler for them to separate can be very handy and even win you viewers/readers that would have otherwise never looked your way. I’m certainly guilty of taking immediate notice of Rocket Raccoon when I was younger due to the name alone. If I’d only been told he was some little fellow named Rocket who’s good at shooting stuff, I might have just written it off.

Another thing such a naming convention does is, frankly, help your readers out. After all, if we hadn’t been told that Sonic was a hedgehog, would we just naturally assume that’s what he was? Scratch that, if we hadn’t been told that one of the other characters in his series had the surname ‘Echidna’, would we have even thought to consider that as a possibility? As artistic styles vary wildly and many artists keep trying to make their characters look unique and different from other popular figures, it can be tough to discern what exactly this or that non-human character is. Even in literature, giving a character the name ‘Mole’, brings to mind an immediate image, with no need to remind the readers what the character looks like on a base level and having the freedom from that point to focus on what he DOES instead.

Of course, I won’t deny that many folks do this naming convention out of laziness too. Last names can be tough to create, especially if you don’t want them to sound strange or contrived, and with animal surnames being so widely accepted, it can be easy to do that as a default. Then again, some just stick to having characters with only one name or even NO first name at all. Mrs. Frisby certainly didn’t seem to mind…

What do you readers think? Do you think the concept of animal surnames should be on its way out, or is there still a place for it in modern tales?

Wearing a name badge is sort of like having an animal surname...

Until next time, happy reading!

-Chammy

Currently Reading:

Air Ferrets Aloft by Richard Bach