This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Ununnilium: "Sometimes this rule goes further - two characters will not share similar-sounding names. (If there's a Laura, there will not be a Linda.)" From what I've seen, this is almost never true. So many series with a Sarah and a Susan in the main cast, or a Konoka and a Nodoka, or whatnot.
- Carpe Diem had a Kevin and a Ken.
Morgan Wick: I think it's a reference to the "rule" Un mentions above.
Shay Guy: Something oughta be said about Harry Potter, though it had at least two exceptions: Tom (which lead to some revealing dialogue in book 6) and Augustus (a Ministry guy and a Healer). Plus characters named after others in book 7. (You know, it's a shame that markup's useless when others edit.)
Idle Dandy: On a soap, you know someone's been Killed Off for Real when a baby is named after them!
This makes me think of a related thing where no name is a nickname. Is that around here anywhere?
Scrounge: Is anyone else thinking "The Tick versus The Tick"? LATER: Added.
HeartBurn Kid: Pulled a Parabomb
Kriegsmesser: More than half of these appear to be aversions, with the occasional subversion.
Blork: That's because this is an Omnipresent Trope, examples of it being played straight are a) incredibly common, and b) boring unless taken to extremes like having 500 named characters with no duplication. We'd just end up with a huge list of examples along the lines of "In Show X no two characters have the same name".
Nits: Added a line about listing aversions rather than actual examples to make that clear. Also, I'd like to do something about that paragraph that only talks about Mexico, Brazil and "some other countries" when discussing how people with same names get differentiated from each other. It shouldn't really narrow places down like that. I'd vote for changing it to say how there are numerous ways to deal with this in Real Life, including calling them by their surnames, adding the first letter of the surname after the first name and giving them different nicknames.
Lord Seth: Deleted the italicized from the following line:
- However, since they use the correspondents' real names (for the most part — Jon Stewart's real LAST name is Liebowitz) and didn't have the option of making them up, this isn't really subverting the trope. As pointed out in the trope description, in real life duplicate names are very common, particularly if they were "fashionable" in the time period when the people were born.
How can the Monty Python "Bruce" (in which all the characters are initially named Bruce, and a character comes named Michael and they decide to call him Bruce to "keep things clear") not be mentioned here
DG Then there were the two British Pop star born David Jones. One joined the Monkees. The other changed his name to David Bowie.
MH: Johnny Marr changed his name from John Maher to avoid confusion with the Buzzcocks guitarist. Is that under this or under the One Mario Limit? I suspect it's this.
Uncola Man: Concerning the DCU, I had read in Wizard, that Bruce Gordon (Eclipso: The Darkness Within) and James Gordon (Batman) had met, but weren't related. Did that change?
SirRed: Would Office Space's Michael Bolton be a subversion or another trope entirely?
Anyone else think of the No Homers Club?
