My husband is a huge fan of 80s cartoons. I have watched him watch Transformers. GI Joe. Voltron.
All this time, my lone assessment has been this: 80s cartoons have the best character names.
Lady J! Bumblebee. The Baroness. Hunk and Princess Alora. So cheesy it’s good. I agonize over the names of my characters. In my head I am puzzling out my next mainstream fiction story, even as I’m only halfway through this one (I know, I know - not jumping the gun so much as it’s there, why not?) and the main character is not your average and she refuses to have a name to match. No Janey, no Lydia. No Sylvie, no Aurelie, nothing. I suspect in her history she will have had a name like Emily, and chosen to legally change it to something when she hit eighteen. Something like Gaga. She is already shaping up to be a pain to work with.
So I’m taking a cue from the 80s. If she wants to go by Jem, by all means. I’m going to list outlandish names and shoot darts if I have to. If you hear me talking about Zarkona, it very well may be my new heroine.