When you learn of the protagonist name , what is your first impression or prejudice about the character. When I hear a character has a name Tanaka I first think that he or she is an idiot.
I barely pay attention to the character names and I genuinely couldn't care less about them. I make my own names usually on whims or by using fantasynamegenerator, I bet most authors do the same. I judge a story based on a lot of whimsical factors, but character names isn't one of them.
After reading too much, I assign descriptions instead of names to characters to make it easier to remember. But I always feel annoyed when a character has a mouthful name. Like is that really necessary?
I actually take quite a while naming my characters, some which come spontaneously and some which don't but names are names I guess. I don't judge characters by their names
Whenever I come across names like Jason Chen or Emily Yu in Chinese novels, I get this irresistible urge to drop them...
My names are usually like... First name: Some random RL name that I could think of, anything works for as long as it sounds nice. Surname: Merge two words together. Rockfell, Cloudymoon, Evenstar, Greystone... Whatever it is that you feel like putting there will surely work out~ That's how I do things almost every time. Sometimes I struggle with place names a bit though, which is where fantasynamegenerator comes to rescue~
hmmm I think of naming my characters like my children (not that I have any) ....Sometimes I spend hours or days just trying to figure out their names. Or other times, a name just pops up in my head and it sounds nice, and I'm like "hey this is you from now on!"
I like stories that names has a significant meatning that relate to the story either as ironic,prophetic or apt. Perfect example are Haibane Renmei. Their name has possible two meaning depending on if they succeed.
I mostly read Chinese novels, and, because of how it's transliterated, I often don't know the actual characters or tones in the name, so I sometimes end up pronouncing it wrong in my head. The only prejudice I can think of is when the character's name can be interpreted as meaning something else--as soon as I saw the name "Si Wuya" in the synopsis of My Disciples Are All Villains, I could not stop calling him 死乌鸦 (dead crow) in my head, even though I know his surname is probably 司, which is a different tone...actually, this isn't really prejudice, is it... I also see a lot of people getting annoyed at CN novel character names, because it's not uncommon for names to be literally one letter off in the English transliteration. I don't really have this problem with CN names to be honest, they're fairly easy for me to remember if the characters are distinct enough and the pronunciation is also distinct. In terms of English/Western fantasy names, I lean towards characters with short and easy-to-say names, so I can easily say it in my head. Long names are excusable so long as the author gives them an appropriately short nickname. Overly flamboyant fantasy names earn some prejudice from me, though. I prefer MCs to have less flashy names, but I can't really tell if a name is flashy in other languages, unless it's Long Aotian or something. In terms of Japanese & Korean names, it's all good as long as it's not too long or similar to other characters' names.
You of course need to think carefully about names if you're gonna use something involving them, but I'm not the kind of person that likes prophecies and 99% of the things you can do with names involve prophecies, so... >.>
Tanaka like our guy from Haikyu!! ? XD As for names... if there's a poem behind the name, I instantly think: this chara's amazing, love~! <3