Appropriated Appellation / Literature

• In Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony, the demon warlord Leon Abbott gives all the demons in his clan a name of his choosing when they metamorphose from imps into true demons, and refers to one of the imps as 'Number One' as an insult, because he is the only member of his brood who is reluctant to transform. By the end of the book, when it turns out that Number One is actually a warlock demon and will develop powerful magic and cerebral powers instead of transforming, he decides to take the name as his own.
• In Codex Alera, it's a joke among veterans that new recruits are "fish," since their flailing around is more reminiscent of a landed fish than a legionnaire. The legion Tavi was assigned to happened to have an outsized regiment of Knights Aeris: namely, ones who were powerful enough to qualify but so short on practice that they couldn't fly (which is the entire point of Knights Aeris). Tavi dubbed them "Knights Pisces." It stuck. Then the battle of the Elinarch rolled around, when Tavi stopped the enemy army from sneaking across the river by having butchers and the like dump buckets of blood and offal in the river to attract sharks. Next time we see the Knights, they've chosen a certain fish as their new insignia. They keep the name for the rest of the series.
• The 15th century biographical text Crónica particular del Cid contains a variation in that the target appropriates the insult for someone else rather than themselves. The chronicle tells an anecdote from El Cid's childhood, in which his godfather took him to get a horse. Among all the stunning looking ones, he spotted an awkward, sick looking horse, which he chose. For this decision, his godfather angrily called him babieca (or in the Old Spanish spelling, bavieca) meaning "fool", so he decided to bestow that name unto the equine, while affirming that he would be a good horse.
• In The Culture novel Excession the Affront is a xenophobic Proud Warrior Race who were so named when they ate a delegation from an Involved civilisation, since they were an affront to civilised species. They adopted the name enthusiastically.
• In one of Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, an older student tells Rowley to move away from his locker and calls him "Slick". Apparently, Rowley likes it as a cool nickname (despite Greg tells him otherwise) and starts to sign his messages and notes with the word "Slick".
• Discworld:
  • In Jingo, 71-Hour Ahmed might qualify. His tribe called him 71-Hour Ahmed because he had killed a man one hour before it was acceptable (his tribe offers everyone hospitality for three days, i.e. 72 hours.) He explains to Vimes that the man was a mass-murderer, and that once all the evidence was in, why wait even a single hour? While clearly not meant to be complimentary, he lets people refer to him by that title because its meaning is known and frightening to Klatchians. He doesn't let custom get in the way of doing what's necessary.
  • Also applies to his tribe, the D'regs. The name is Klatchian for "enemy". It's "not the name they chose for themselves, but they adopted it out of pride".
  • Mad in The Last Continent might also count.
    Mad: Most people call me Mad.
    Rincewind: Just "Mad"? That's ... an unusual name.
    Mad: It ain't a name.
• In the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel Prisoner of the Daleks, the Dalek Inquisitor adopts the name Dalek X from Earth Empire reports.
• In The Dresden Files:
  • There is a mysterious island in the middle of Lake Michigan. It is a Genius Loci and from it spawns a lot of magical power. It never had a name that was known, but titular hero Harry Dresden first calls it Demonreach, which is unknowingly appropriate because it imprisons many eldritch and evil gods, whose magical energy leaks from their cells resulting in the magical power. Later on in Skin Game Harry is living on the island and names the 9ft tall hooded spirit of the island "Alfred" in a snarky fashion after it helps Harry. The spirit asks if "Alfred" is to be its new designation as while it is part of the island itself, what Harry sees is also a separate entity as well. Harry permits it and now the spirit is called Alfred.
  • The Archive is the repository of all human knowledge. Anything ever written, typed, or printed becomes part of her perfect memory. From an everyday shopping list to the current nuclear launch codes. The power is typically past from mother-to-daughter when the daughter is an adult and has a lifetime of experiences to help handle the burden of all the knowledge and past memories of the previous bearers. The current incarnation isn't like that. Her mother died soon after giving birth to the girl, not even giving her a name, out of jealousy and spite she would be able to enjoy life for a while, while the mother has to endure this power she never wanted. So, the Archive is all this girl is, until at the age of five she met Harry, who nicknamed her Ivy, and this helped her develop a small fraction of personality that would continue to grow.
  • For a long time inside Harry was host to the Shadow of the Fallen Angel Lasciel. It was the Shadow's duty and sole mission to convince Harry to fully accept the full Fallen into his body, but Harry resists the temptation for years. As the Shadow later admits, most don't succeed in resisting for weeks. No one has ever lasted for as long as Harry has. This has left an interesting change to the Shadow who has developed into a slightly different being than the carbon copy of the True Lasciel she started as. As Harry notes, the Shadow has the same problem as Harry: his malleable human mind. She exists inside it and is just as malleable as he is. So while she could turn him evil, he could change her as well. The realization that should Harry take up the offer would mean the Shadow's demise as Lasciel would just erase the Shadow from existence. After one conversation, when discussing all the above, Harry calls her Lash. Inadvertently, this also gifted some of his own soul into the Shadow, transforming her slowing into her own unique being. When she realizes that Harry would truly rather die from a powerful mental attack rather than embrace Lasciel, Lash rebels against her master, will offer Harry any aide, any help she can without the pressure to accept Lasciel. Lash dies soon after, sacrificing her existence while shielding Harry from the mental attack.
• In Ender's Game, Ender gains his nickname because his older sister couldn't pronounce "Andrew".
• In Ender's Shadow, Bean gets his name when some other street children are taunting him that he isn't worth a bean. He then immediately lampshades that the name sucks, but the mere fact that he has a name at all is enough of a sign of status that he'll take it.
• In Everworld, Senna's name is actually "Senda", which means "Pathway". She didn't meet her father until she was about eight, at which point her mother left her with him and literally disappeared; he mistook her name for "Senna", and eventually she came to hate the correct pronunciation.
• Several villains (and tragic heroes) from the GONE series seem to take pride in all the nasty things the Perdido Beach kids say about them;
  • "Whip Hand" was originally a terrifying code word for Drake Merwin who has a tentacle for an arm (It Makes Sense in Context , we swear!) He seems to like this analogy a awful lot, even elaborating on it and calling himself "Uncle Whip Hand".
  • An Orc is a type of troll. Before the FAYZ, Charles Merrimans nickname was this and he loved it. When he actually becomes a stone monster, for once all he wants is for people to call him Charles and grows to hate the name, making it subverted. Lana remarks that when he was a boy he relished in being known as a monster, but when he was a monster all he wanted was to be recognised as a human being...
  • The talking coyotes in the series (Makes Just as Much Sense in Context), refer to Brianna as Swift Girl. The coyotes hate Brianna and have tried to kill her a multitude of times. Which makes her take all the more pride in the nickname.
  • Diana Ladris had no qualms with her reputation as a "Bitch", "Slut", "Mean-spirited", "bad girl" and seemed to refer to herself as it even more than the heroes who hold her in so much contempt for it. This is later deconstructed as Diana is slowly humanized and Rescued from the Scrappy Heap , eventually leading to the fandom feeling sorry for her and yes, it did get her fangirls.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:
    • The Slytherins compose "Weasley Is Our King" thanking Ron for his terrible goalkeeping skills helping them win a match. Later the Gryffindors use the song themselves after Ron's first successful turn as Keeper, much the same way the Americans adopted "Yankee Doodle," though the Gryffindors changed the lyrics to praise Ron and his Quidditch skills rather than keeping the insulting ones.
    • The Ministry attempts to restrict the amount of defensive magic students can learn out of fear Dumbledore wants to turn them into his own private army. Since the Big Bad is out there building up his power base, the students form a secret Defense group and name it "Dumbledore's Army". When they're discovered, Dumbledore goes along with the idea in order to prevent any blame falling on the students. He notes it's "Dumbledore's Army", not "Potter's Army."
  • In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Minister Scrimgeour tries to convince Harry to support the Ministry; Harry, however, has zero trust in the Ministry due to their questionable policies and refusal to help him when Fudge was smearing him and Dumbledore. As a result, Harry decides to follow Dumbledore's lead in distancing himself from the Ministry, when Scrimgeour angrily calls him "Dumbledore's man through and through", Harry accepts it. Later, after once again refusing to help Scrimgeour and the Ministry, Harry calls himself "Dumbledore's man through and through".
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Hermione is the first known character to utilize this trope in the series for the term "mudblood."
    Hermione: I’m hunted quite as much as any goblin or elf, Griphook! I’m a Mudblood!
    Ron: Don't call yourself—
    Hermione: Why shouldn’t I? Mudblood, and proud of it!
• Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth: When Malcolm MacKenzie moved to Titan a computer error changed his surname to Makenzie. He spent two years trying to correct the misspelling before accepting it. Two generations later the Makenzie family view their unique surname as a source of pride and a symbol of their success.
• The eponymous character in the Jack Blank trilogy never had a last name, so he'd leave a blank after his first on all his school papers. The name Jack _____ morphed into Jack Blank, and it stuck.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • Aragorn's alias Strider is initially a derogatory nickname given to him by the people of Bree, who see the Rangers as mysterious, dangerous ruffians. When he becomes king of Gondor, he translates the name into Quenya and uses it as his family name.
  • In a minor but humorous moment with Gollum, Sam calls him a "sneak", causing Gollum to go on a sarcastic rant about Sam's rudeness, causing Sam to apologize. Then Frodo wakes up:
    Frodo: Hullo, Smeagol! Found any food? Have you had any rest?
    Gollum: No food, no rest, nothing for Smeagol. He's a sneak.
    Frodo: Don't take names to yourself, Smeagol. It's unwise, whether they be true or false.
    Gollum: Smeagol has to take what's given him. He was given that name by kind Master Samwise, the hobbit that knows so much.
  • One of Gandalf's more derogatory nicknames is "Stormcrow", given to him by an at-the-time weakened Theoden. The name refers to the observation that he only ever shows up when something terrible is about to happen and then starts making demands, supposedly with the intent of twisting those situations to his benefit. When Gandalf leaves Rohan on the way to Gondor, he uses the name with pride, as it was his beseeching that saved the entire country from being burned to the ground by Saruman's army.
• In Robert Asprin's Phule's Company series, the Legionaire who had chosen the name "Rose" for herself was usually called "Violet" (from "Shrinking Violet") by the others due to her crippling shyness in face-to-face contact. But when it's discovered that over the radio, she's phenomenally good as a Communications Officer (If she can't see the person she's talking to, she's fine) and very motherly to everyone in the company, everyone starts calling her "Mother" and she adopts it herself.
• Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain:
  • Bad Penny adopted her name when a superhero called her that. Completely coincidental, in fact, that her real name is Penny.
  • Penny calls Ray Viles "Reviled" in the heat of battle; afterwards, he decides that he likes it and adopts it as his name.
• In the Chris Wooding young adult novel Poison, the village children of Gull choose their own names when they turn sixteen. The eponymous character chooses hers as a jibe against her much disliked stepmother after she called her "a poison to their family". Also a bit of a Stealth Pun as her original name, Foxglove, is the name of a poisonous plant.
• To go with several other sibling mispronunciations, Beezus, who got her name when Ramona Quimby couldn't pronounce Beatrice.
• Subverted in Relativity. The supervillain who can talk to bugs? The heroes always call him "Cricket". Even the narrative calls him that. However, he only refers to himself by his real name.
  Cricket (I mean Matthew Morton): Seriously, who the hell came up with that name? Do I look like a cricket? I don’t even have wings!
• The Reynard Cycle: In Defender of the Crown, Rukenaw is called The Fairlimb, a name she shares with the morningstar she wields in battle. The origin of the nickname? A bad pick-up line. The guy was referring to her legs.
• In the League of Legends novel Ruination, Erlok Grael takes the insult 'Thresher', a mocking title that has been tossed at him for decades, and adopts it as his new name. Becoming the fearsome, soul-stealing monster known as Thresh.
  Erlok: Erlok Grael is dead. Now there is just Thresh.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, after Daylen slaughtered the aristocracy of Hamahra, the leaders of the other nations began calling him "Dayless" to defame him. Daylen responded by making it the most feared name in the history of Tellos.
• A Song of Ice and Fire is full of nicknames, some of them falling into this trope:
  • Jon Snow is dubbed "Lord Snow" by Ser Alliser Thorne to cast him as a spoiled noble's bastard and estrange him from the other recruits. It quickly loses its negative connotations as the recruits start looking to him for leadership, and ultimately he becomes the Lord Commander, making the name official.
  • Tyrion Lannister ("The Imp") actually tells Jon Snow to use this trope.
    Tyrion: Let them see that their words can cut you, and you'll never be free of the mockery. If they want to give you a name, take it, make it your own. Then they can't hurt you with it anymore.
  • Sandor Clegane is known as the Hound due to the hounds on his coat of arms and his perceived total lack of ethical concerns interfering with his loyalty to his master. The self-loathing Sandor wears a helm crafted into a horrible dog-face.
  • The ex-smuggler Davos Seaworth was knighted for delivering food to a besieged city. The other nobility look at him as a common thug who bought his knighthood with onions, dubbing him the Onion Knight, but Davos proudly put the onion on his coat of arms.
  • Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish is lord of a tiny tract of worthless land on a group of peninsulas called the Fingers, and is also physically short. He goes by the name as part of his scheme to get people to underestimate him.
  • Jaime "Kingslayer" Lannister got his name for murdering Aerys Targaryen, who he had previously sworn to protect. He hates the title, but uses the name and the reputation that comes with it to get away with a lot.
  • Brynden "The Blackfish" Tully was labelled the Black Sheep of the family after he refused to enter an Arranged Marriage set up by his elder brother and leige lord. Because the sigil of House Tully is a fish, Brynden said a "black fish" would be more appropriate, and adopted it as his own personal coat of arms.
  • The warrior-slaves The Unsullied are given a new (and always demeaning) name each day, to remind them they are so worthless they don't even deserve a real name. After the Unsullied are freed and allowed to choose their own names, their leader chooses to keep his current name, "Grey Worm," believing it to be lucky because it was the name he had on the day he was freed, whereas his original name was the name he had on the day he was enslaved.
  • The future Maekar I Targaryen was the youngest of four sons so he was not expected to do much. He made his coat-of-arms four dragons in response.
  • Tywin Lannister is said to have flecks of gold in his shit because of his wealth. Tyrion knows that the man who came up with that joke is imprisoned in Casterly Rock's dungeon while Tywin commandeered his story.
• Bane from the Star Wars Expanded Universe. To put this in perspective: the first person to call him this was his father, who was physically and emotionally abusive, calling his son the "bane of his existence." When he joined the Sith, he became Darth Bane.
• Star Trek: Enterprise Relaunch: The Orions didn't originally call themselves such, but after first contact with humans they wound up with the nickname, checked it out and decided being named after a great hunter was pretty cool, so they stuck with it.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In Dark Disciple, after taking up bounty-hunting, Asajj Ventress becomes known as the "bald banshee". She takes the name Banshee for her personal starship.
  • Darth Bane: Young Dessel's abusive father Hurst blamed him for most of his problems, calling Dessel "the bane of my existence". So when he later joined the Sith and was given the chance to reinvent himself, Dessel took the name of Bane.
• The Stormlight Archive: When Szeth-son-son-Vallano was sent to assassinate the Alethi King Gavilar, his Parshendi masters made him wear white; they believe that if you are going to assassinate someone, you at least owe him the courtesy to let him see you coming. Szeth soon becomes known as "the Assassin in White," and when he gets a new monster who uses him for even worse slaughters, he is ordered to wear white so that people properly identify him as the one who killed Gavilar. It's an odd case where someone is forced to take on a nickname.
• In Super Minion, super-powered minions from Hellion's Henchmen gained the nickname "Boneheads" for their white, skull-like masks. They kept the name after they became powerful enough nobody could use it to make fun of them.
• In Tales of the Magic Land, the wooden soldiers are called Deadwood Oaks, after their creator's constant insults about their learning abilities. In the end, one of the soldiers called himself that, and Urfin Jus decided this is the perfect name.
• The Thinking Machine: Professor Van Dusen acquired the nickname 'The Thinking Machine' when an angry Russian chess grandmaster hurled it at him after Van Dusen had beaten him at chess despite never having played the game before by using Awesomeness by Analysis. The Russian says "You are not man; you're a brain - a machine - a thinking machine". Journalist Hutchinson Hatch picks it up and starts using it in his stories about Van Dusen. Van Dusen himself does not seem to care one way or the other about the nickname.
• In Villains by Necessity, the silent "Blackmail" accepts the nickname he is given.
• Vorkosigan Saga: The Barrayaran Vor were an aristocratic military caste. They received the name (Russian for thief) from commoners, who thought they were being stolen from. The aristocrats adopted the name, and will steal everything from any who oppose them.
• The Iberian Orcs in The Weakness of Beatrice the Level Cap Holy Swordswoman originally received the name from a human (the Sage). It was meant as a Black Comedy joke - the Iberian Orcs are pig-like (like many examples in Japanese media) and Iberian ham (or jamón ibérico) is an expensive type of ham. Much to the Sage's shock, they liked the name so much they took it as the official name of their race.
• The Forsaken in The Wheel of Time were mostly given nicknames by people in the Age of Legends to reflect their deeds, such as Ishamael (The Betrayer of Hope), Sammael (The Destroyer of Hope), Moghedian (The Spider) and so on, and by the time of the series have embraces their names to the point of almost forgetting their original names, and certainly the names of most of their fellows. The exception would be Lanfear (the Daughter of the night), who coined her new name herself.
• Galinda in Wicked (both the musical and the book) is called "Glinda" (notice the lack of an A) by her talking Goat teacher. When he is killed, she changes her name to Glinda in his memory.
• The Young Ancients: The protagonist, Tor, becomes the subject of a play in Galasia after making them water filters that saved the city, after their sewers ruptured into the drinking water. Tor includes a warning that the new magic system will last only twenty years and if they haven't fixed the sewers in that time not to bother him. With this curt note (and the young girl who wrote the play wishing to star in it) Tor becomes a troll the heroine must beg the filters from, much to the amusement of Tor's friends. Later, after a misunderstanding results in Tor's being turned away at the palace gates, Rolph adds every possible nickname, appellation and title Tor might be known as to the list of guests who are always welcome at the palace, including "The Troll of Galasia." This title sticks with everyone who copies Tor's appellations from the list, though he is still mostly known as the Wizard Tor.

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