There’s a book series by Robin Hobb where many characters are named after virtues the parents hope they’ll embody, and most of them work shockingly well as names.
There’s a family in a Terry Pratchett book where a family did that for the girls but didn’t quite understand the rules and just knew that it should be different for boys. So one of the secondary characters of this book is called Bestiality Carter.
Pratchett handles it beautifully, too. Like, he’s a character for a good third, maybe even half of the book with it not remarked on at all before he gets an asterisk next to his name, which leads to a footnote which starts off (paraphrased, but the tone is correct): “okay, look, so it’s like this…”
There’s a book series by Robin Hobb where many characters are named after virtues the parents hope they’ll embody, and most of them work shockingly well as names.
There’s a family in a Terry Pratchett book where a family did that for the girls but didn’t quite understand the rules and just knew that it should be different for boys. So one of the secondary characters of this book is called Bestiality Carter.
Pratchett handles it beautifully, too. Like, he’s a character for a good third, maybe even half of the book with it not remarked on at all before he gets an asterisk next to his name, which leads to a footnote which starts off (paraphrased, but the tone is correct): “okay, look, so it’s like this…”