Character names in contemporary fiction

Here’s an interesting rant I happened across recently:

Authors are forever naming a character Cassandra and having the other characters ignore her predictions, or slipping the word Abel into a character’s name and having them struck down by a trusted friend. They’re calling people Goodman or Christianson to show that they’re heroes. Grant Morrison just managed to claim the last acceptable use of Damian for the (symbolic) antichrist, and only managed to make it a surprise because he built it up for years. No one is going to be surprised if an angelic character named Beth dies, or a character whose name is based on Judas is a betrayer. …

This is something I’ve never noticed, actually. Except maybe for Cassandra, and there are certainly Cassandras who play entirely different roles in their stories.

The author of this post especially hates the name Katherine and all possible derivatives … which I think is a stretch, because she identifies Caitlin as a Katherine-derivative. But there are so many relatives of the name “Caitlin” that the whole concept becomes unwieldy, imo. Kaylin, Kayleigh, Kaylee, Cally, where does it stop being a variant of Catherine and start being a variant of something else? Keep going with this idea and Kali starts to look like a variant of Katherine, which it certainly is not.

I must say, I pick contemporary names that just somehow seem to fit the character, without much reference to literary uses elsewhere. Now I am inclined to name a character Cassandra just so I can a) have her not make predictions at all, or even more tempting, b) have her predictions be entirely wrong.

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