Not Tropeworthy: Multi Ethnic Name

Note: This thread was proposed by Synchronicity.

Multi Ethnic Name describes itself as about "characters whose names are a flagrant mismatch of ethnicities and cultures". However as the description admits there are a ton of perfectly normal reasons why someone might have a multiethnic name in real life (mixed ancestry, intercultural marriage, immigration, adoption, colonization, religious influence, general globalization etcetera) and having one doesn't indicate anything specific about the character.

Sandbox.Multi Ethnic Name Wick Check done by myself, Madaboutlove 97 and Tropers/nw09 bears this out:

• Just a multi-ethnic name: 29/50 = 58%
• Multiethnic name indicates multicultural background of character/setting: 16/50 = 32%
• Multiethnic name for other reasons: 3/50 = 6%
• Other/ZCE: 2/50=4%

As seen above, 58% of the wicks just describe the origins of the character's names without any additional relevance. While this is almost certainly an intentional choice by the writer, and some cultures/settings are more homogenous than others resulting in such names being more notable, sans any other such context, it's just a list of names.

For example, is a guy named "Himesh Volkov" biracial Indian/Russian, an Indian boy adopted by a Russian family, a Russian man renaming himself after converting to Hinduism, neither Indian nor Russian but a resident of a postracial future, the alias of someone trying to sound mysterious, or just the writer neglecting to ensure their characters' names are coherent? Is his name so unusual in the setting that everyone comments on it, raises some eyebrows but people can generally assume he is multicultural in some way without asking him about it, or so common that nobody bats an eye? While some of these could be tropeworthy meanings, simply listing his name doesn't indicate one way or another. However, that's what most examples are.

Potential solutions:

• Disambiguate between Melting-Pot Nomenclature (where everyone in the setting has a multiethnic name), Interracial and Interspecies Love Index (mixed ancestry is the most common pattern found in the wick check about why someone might have one), and potentially other tropes
• Make it No Straight Examples, Please! or add restrictions to make the name more notable, such as an in-universe reaction (like the page quote) or a deliberate renaming for some benefit (such as an exotic alias or stage name)

Wick check:

50/50

Edited by GastonRabbit on Nov 14th 2023 at 4:47:39 AM

Paging ~Synchronicity and ~nw09. nw09 and Mad About Love 97 worked on the wick check, but the latter deleted their account with an active suspension and was bounced, so paging them wouldn't work.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 30th 2023 at 10:25:41 AM

So, I'm kind of wondering if the word "mismatched" in the page description was supposed to be "mishmash" instead, due to the latter being a better description of names coming from different backgrounds.

Either way, I'm in favor of disambiguating because people having names from different backgrounds is completely normal in multi-ethnic countries, so this is Chairs. I don't see anything in the wick check that would allow us to forbid straight examples without going through TLP (and I'm not sure how limiting it that way would make it any more tropeworthy); the majority of examples in the wick check look pretty Chairsy to me. I'm against the suggestion of keeping while forbidding straight examples mainly because that strikes me as something that would require TLP due to what the wick check picked up, regardless of how tropeworthy the idea would be.

Edit: I saw that at least one wick was from the But Not Too Foreign page, so that might be another thing to put on a disambiguation page alongside Melting-Pot Nomenclature and and Interracial and Interspecies Love Index.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 30th 2023 at 10:35:10 AM

for disambiguating + above suggestions

I don't agree that "having names from different backgrounds" is inherently chairs as it can be done deliberataly to reveal a character's background, but what I'm thinking of would be But Not Too Foreign. So disambiguate.

Names that reveal something important about a character's background would be a trope, but I'm still not convinced multi-ethnic names are a trope on their own. I see this as akin to the page image and caption on People Sit on Chairs, which shows that there can be meaning related to sitting on chairs, but that the act of sitting on chairs is not inherently a trope.

What a name may reveal about a character isn't always clear, as evidenced by the list of possible reasons in the OP, and it may not even be intentional as suggested by one of those reasons, which makes it not much of a trope in itself. Whatever a name reveals about a character would have to be spelled out in the work itself, making the name not all that relevant, or confirmed by Word of God or All There in the Manual. Short of that, all that's left is Epileptic Trees or Wild Mass Guessing.

I agree.

This has the same issue as the now detroped Mixed Ancestry, I think. It can mean something, but unless the meaning is made clear in the narrative, it's chairs.

Edited by Adept on Oct 31st 2023 at 3:40:46 PM

Especially as the world becomes more diverse, being mixed race or from multiple ethnic backgrounds is just becoming more and more common, and media is catching up on that. It can mean anything, and so it means nothing.

I'm good with disambiguating.

Support disambiguating. As the trope now stands, it's People Sit on Chairs.

Some tropes evolve, but some get left behind in the dust because they may not be useful anymore. So, Disambig.

Disamb

I'll agree the trope as it is is probably not tropeworthy, but I'm curious if Meaningful Multi Ethnic Name might be. Unlike the current where any multi-ethnic name counts, this would be exclusively for when the name is meaningful in some regard, for instance if a Child of Two Worlds deliberately was given one name from both cultures or their name is meant to demonstrate pride in their mixed heritage.

I'm not a huge fan of the trend of just attaching "meaningful" and "significant" to trope names because that doesn't always correlate to the examples actually being given meaning. I prefer to split into tropes with a more defined definition.

Yeah, "meaningful" can mean anything.

When kicking around solutions I wondered if "etymologies of character name perfectly reflects background so the author can reaaally make it obvious this character is mixed" was a workable concept, but I just don't think it can be saved from chairsy usage unless the work makes it clear that that was the intent. (I meant to include that in the NSEP option in the OP but forgot)

A concept that could have legs is Mysterious Multiethnic Name, where the mishmash obscures/spices up someone's background or similar, but there's not enough found usage to prop that up and it'd have to go through TLP.

Edited by Synchronicity on Nov 4th 2023 at 11:08:54 AM

Okay, transition is done, so we got 556 wicks.

Went ahead and did some dewicking. Just a question, does "two ethnic names" sound good as a replacement, cause I replaced some of the in-line wicks with it, but I'm not sure that sounds grammatically correct.

No, that's not correct because it implies "two things, each of which is an ethnic name". You would have to say "two names of different ethnicities" or similar.

Duly noted!

Edit: Replaced the "two ethnic names" phrase with the one you suggested.

Edited by Ayumi-chan on Nov 12th 2023 at 8:44:38 PM

391 wicks left.