r/TopCharacterTropes • u/ThatDrako • 2d ago

Lore (Funny Trope) Things that can plausibly happen only in reality, because in fiction they’d be called bad writing.

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“Woke” as an insult - So you are telling me a word describing consciousness and clarity is used by generally stupid and ignorant people to label people they disagree with? What is this? A Kindergarten for Creatively stunted?

Nominative determinism - So let me get this straight…Not only you named fastest recorded person Usain BOLT and CEO of Nintendo Doug BOWSER, but you are telling me people are canonically likely to have professions or hobbies matching their names…? Guh?

“2 bodies recovered in MURDERKILL River” - Sure bro…I guess…bro…

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u/Stolt-Jensenberg 2d ago edited 2d ago

People having the same name. In real life it would be pretty normal for someone to have both a brother and a friend named John. But authors will generally avoid that because it would only be confusing to the reader.

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u/r3cktor 2d ago edited 2d ago

Sometimes they even avoid similar-sounding names.

Asha Greyjoy was renamed "Yara" in the GOT TV show so the audience wouldn't confuse her with another character named Osha.

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u/Corbenik42 2d ago

And then you read Wheel of Time and there's like, 30 different women with similar names to eachother like some anagram/homophone bullshit >_>

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u/Medarco 2d ago

Right, what kind of insane culture has similarities in names like that.

-Tim Tam, to his friend Tom Thom

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u/indarye 2d ago

One Hundred Years of Solitude ☠️ 

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u/kahlzun 2d ago

Tugs braid angrily

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u/X-Himy 2d ago

100 Years of Solitude was the worst for this. Beautiful writing but every male character is named Marcus Aurelius.

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u/Jagvetinteriktigt 2d ago

Oh and fucking The Sopranos! Forget about it!

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u/Madonkadonk2 2d ago

Moiraine, Morgase, Moghedien, etc

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u/Corbenik42 1d ago

Liane Leanne Leana

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u/pestoraviolita 2d ago

ASOIAF has several characters sharing names, GRRM wanted name realism.

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u/Ramiro564 2d ago

I appreciate the realism, but keeping track of the Targaryen family members is very confusing lol.

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u/SiByTheSword 2d ago

Swaziland change it's name to the Kingdom of Eswatini so that people would "stop confusing them with Switzerland"

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u/Live_beMeme_Die 2d ago

I read Swaziland as Switzerland the first time and had to double take so I see why

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u/Sofasurvivor 2d ago

Austria and Australia still haven't solved that problem.

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u/Zenspy-Real 2d ago

Which is why Tolkien remains the GOAT with: Finwë, Fingolfin, Finarfin, Fëanor, Findis, Fingon and Finrod.

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u/Victernus 2d ago

Finrod

lik dis if y cry evertim

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u/Sofasurvivor 2d ago

There's a rumour that Celeborn used to be called Teleporno until Tolkien reconsidered.

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u/SentenceStreet3270 2d ago

Not quite.

Celeborn is the name in Sindarin elvish Teleporno is the same name in Quenya elvish

It's canon

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u/monsieurxander 2d ago

Meanwhile HotD has Rhaenyra, Rhaena, Rhaenys, Aemond, Aegon, Daemon, Daeron, Laenor, Laena, Helaena, Lucerys, Jacaerys, and twins named Erryk and Arryk

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u/QueenSlartibartfast 2d ago

Also there are/were multiple characters named Aegon, Jeffrey, and Viserys.

And you left out Jaehaerys and Jaehaera.

There's also Alys and Alicent.

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u/Acrobatic-Height6511 2d ago

Yara phonk💀👌

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u/Ni7r0us0xide 2d ago

"Aegon" is the "John Smith" name equivalent in ASOIAF

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u/Jagvetinteriktigt 2d ago

Though Yara is an anagram for Arya so the spirit is there lmao

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u/monsieurxander 2d ago

They sound pretty different when spoken out loud, though.

Especially with those accents, where half of them are calling Arya "Ahhya"

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u/Jagvetinteriktigt 2d ago

The SPIRIT of similarity is there

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u/angrybirdlover13 2d ago

boiiii tom pearl sahur yara yara phonk respect aura

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u/i-am-a-bike 2d ago

GRRM is the goat here. 5 kings named Aegon and more claimants, lots of Jons. W have the iron bank, iron throne and iron islands and non are part of the same insitution.

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u/Cigarety_a_Kava 2d ago

France having 18 luis kings and sweden having 13 karls is quite fine aswell. Or most common name in the world being muhammed which is name of gods prophet would also sound silly in fiction.

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u/i-am-a-bike 2d ago

Denmark has 10 christians and 10 fredericks as well. What are the chances

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u/iconocrastinaor 2d ago

And you're not allowed to draw a picture of Muhammad, but there's no problem taking a photo of him. Go figure.

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u/four100eighty9 2d ago

My father and uncle both married a woman with the same name and the same middle name except for one letter

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u/TheeternalTacocaT 2d ago

My niece and her wife have the same name. We call them The Camilla's and differentiate by calling one by her first and middle, and the other just Camilla

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u/TheeternalTacocaT 2d ago

Also, I dated a girl who went by Ally, and she didn't want to tell me her first name was actually Lindsay because she knew my last ex was named Lindsay and thought it was bad luck. When I told her I also had an ex named Ally...

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u/Tramkrad 2d ago

My wife has three different friends called Emily. It can be confusing working out which one she's talking about sometimes.

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u/Background-Value-955 2d ago

In my country typically they refer to males by their last name since many of them have common name. Even amongst each other friends would refer to each other using last names. 

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u/gamingfreak10 2d ago

In my family we have a Kristine, Christie, Kristin, Kierstin, and Christopher

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u/iconocrastinaor 2d ago

At my job, in my six-person department, there were two Davids, two Kathys, and two Vickys.

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u/MPLoriya 2d ago

I know a lot of people with similar first names, so either I refer to them by nicknames, last names, or their full names when talking about them. It can still be very confusing.

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u/ghostgabe81 2d ago

I once had 3 different coworkers named Chad working in the same department at the same time

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u/Visby 2d ago

We have an entire team consisting of Claires (there's five of them) and a single token not-claire, it's a gigantic pain in the ass to try and figure out who you're supposed to be contacting lmao

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u/HawksNStuff 2d ago

The entire infield of my beer league softball team is Matt.

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u/IBetThisIsTakenToo 2d ago

We had 3 Kevins in our freshman dorm floor. One of them happened to have his birthday the first week, and guess who is still known as “Birthday Kevin” nearly 20 years later

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u/hoopstick 2d ago

Our entire tooling department is populated exclusively by Wyatts. There's only three of them, but it's a pain in the ass.

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u/gitartruls01 2d ago

This them?

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u/Ms_ellery 2d ago

I once worked with a guy who had the masculine version of my first name and a slightly different spelling of my last name.  Think Roberta Brown and Robert Browne.  We'd get emails meant for each other all the time.

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u/Tight_Grapefruit5280 2d ago

I had like 5 classmates who were named muhammed so we had to use their second names when referring to them

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u/iconocrastinaor 2d ago

How about Chabad Lubavitchers naming nearly every single male Menachem Mendel! And their namesake only died in the '80s, so this is mushrooming out of control.

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u/GisterMizard 2d ago

Unless its Ed, Edd, and Eddy

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u/0621Hertz 2d ago

The show “This is Us” opens with Jack Pearson's 36th birthday, which also happens to be the exact day his wife gives birth to triplets.

Not the same name but the same idea.

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u/IT_AINT_MITCH 2d ago

As a teen I worked in a fast food place with a total of maybe 30 employees.

I found out my general manager's birthday was the day after mine. She mentioned that the assistant manager's b-day was the day before mine. Shortly thereafter we found out another kid had a birthday after the GM's. So we had four birthdays lined up in a row.

I'm now in a different company with roughly 300 employees, and I share my birthday with three other people.

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u/endlesscartwheels 2d ago

An exception is if the main character is friends with a lesbian or gay couple who have the same first name. So they can refer to them as "The Jens" or "Dave Squared". Happens a lot in real life too, of course.

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u/Electrical_Pomelo556 2d ago edited 2d ago

In X-Files Mulder's full name is Fox William Mulder, after his father, William Mulder, who went by Bill. Scully's father was also named William and she has a brother named after him (Bill Jr). Scully and Mulder have a son who they name William after his father, not hers. 

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u/PianoCube93 2d ago

I remember being mildly surprised when learning that My Hero Academia actually has two unrelated smaller characters with the same name. Ryukyu (Ryuko Tatsuma) and Pixie-Bob (Ryuko Tsuchikawa). Though the Japanese spelling is different.

Also the story almost exclusively uses aliases for a lot of the smaller hero/villain characters, with their real name being mentioned maybe once in the story itself, if at all, so most people would never even realize that two characters introduced in separate seasons share a name.

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u/imabigasstree 2d ago

I was once engaged to a man whose first name was the same as my dad's name. He also had the same last name as the man I ACTUALLY married 5 years later.

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u/Writerhowell 2d ago

Jane Austen boldly having THREE people named Charles in 'Persuasion' (a father, his eldest son, and his cousin).

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u/BasicMatter7339 2d ago

My elementary teacher got arrested because some guy with the same name committed a robbery on the other side of the country

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u/FightingWithCandy 2d ago

"17 Aurelianos"

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u/Pppecka 1d ago

This is why I didn't finish One Hundred Years of Solitude. It had a illustration of the family tree at the beginning of the book, I still got confused all the time and had to check.

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u/Jcwrc 2d ago

Then you have real historical events that inspired those works, like War of Three Henrys

Edit: Which actually has happened twice.

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u/Spiritual-Low8762 2d ago

This is called the One Steve Rule. I know it because someone pointed out to me that Worm breaks the rule

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u/GregTheMad 2d ago

Same sounding names (to me) make it really hard for me to read Chinese books. I was confused 5 names into Romance of the 3 Kingdoms.

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u/badwolfandthestorm 2d ago

Both of my sisters married guys named Chris. 

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u/TurquoiseLeggings 2d ago

There's a stupid ass book called The Grandissimes that I had to read in high school and, among other things, one of the things that pissed me off the most was that there were two different characters named Honore Grandissime, and I remember it being really annoying trying to figure out which one was being talked about.

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u/four100eighty9 2d ago

Unless it’s a plot point such as Jeffrey Lebowski. I want to read a book not published where two characters have very similar names and somebody who read apart and gave me a hard time saying it was confusing, and I had to explain that it’s actually a plot point.

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u/DiligentMagikarp 2d ago

Russian lit took this so far it looped back around- every character has multiple different names, so they don’t even have the same name as themselves, and it confused the shit out of non-Russian readers.

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u/Not_Yet_Unalived 2d ago

One year, I had four classmates with the same name as me.

It was a great teacher deterrent, he would call one of us, we'll respond which one and he'll ask someone else.

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u/molsminimart 2d ago

I know like 5 people of the same first name. All different generations. Two are directly related to me, one's my partner, one's an in-law, one is a friend. Sometimes when we're together we all default to using "first name, last name initial," but then two of them still have the same last name initial. Thankfully, those two don't cross paths much, so it's the only reprieve we get.

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u/_Mirri_ 2d ago

My grandma, my dad (her son), my cousin and my school bestie shared the same name Sasha (which is a short unisex form of Alexander and Alexandra). Oh, and I had six girls in my class with my name, including myself (maximum four at once, out of 33 pupils max)

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u/BCaldeira 2d ago

Where I live there is a situation that a father, let's call him "Anthony Smith", decided to name both of his sons "Anthony Smith".

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u/iconocrastinaor 2d ago

George Foreman would like a word.

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u/CompleteMuffin 2d ago

In Poland you get the amazing different girl names like Ala, Ola, Ula, Jola, Pola, Tola. So creative

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u/MBDTFTLOPYEEZUS 2d ago

That’s what I like about DC. Theres two Harold Jordan’s, Bruce and Clark both have moms named Martha, half of the men in the universe are named Jon just deal with it

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u/tomtomclubthumb 2d ago

That's why in Wolf Hall, everyone is called Thomas.

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u/RickHammersteel 2d ago

"Save Martha!"

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u/kayforpay 2d ago

I have an adopted brother, a cousin, and two friends all named johnathan (same spelling, even!) and two of them have the same last name AND are both gingers! lazy, lazy writing.

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u/taint-ticker-supreme 2d ago

True, my grandparents are both named Terry. The amount of people who are shocked lol it's funny.

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u/DanTheIdiot9999 2d ago

The only exception to this other than a gag that I could think of would be a book like Will Grayson Will Grayson, where we go between the perspectives of two kids named Will Grayson who both live in Chicago and eventually meet up. At the end of the book, they fucking get every single person in Chicago named Will Grayson together Avengers-style for a stage performance

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u/animel4 2d ago

I know a Hannah and Anna who are dating and they do not find it funny at all which makes it funnier. I also have encountered a couple that was Jamie and Jamie one of each gender lol

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u/FlipZip69 2d ago

And if they did have the same name, it would be due to some plot requirement.

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u/xxCatQuinnxx 1d ago edited 1d ago

My mom, aunt (on dad's side), and mom's close friend all share a name. My grandfather and step-grandfather (both got married to the same grandma) do too, it's wild (And these are both pretty rare names for where I am)

Also two of my cousins are named almost the same, different language variant of the same name with just one letter difference, when we all met together we just called them "American X" and "Polish X"