Names to Trust Immediately

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

The opposite of Names to Run Away From Really Fast, this is for clearly heroic sounding names. It seems to be played straight less frequently than the evil version.

See also: Meaningful Name, Steven Ulysses Perhero, Ironic Name (what all the subversions are), Fluffy the Terrible (a frequent subversion).

Examples of Names to Trust Immediately include:

Adjectives

Film

Literature

  • Tod Friendly in Time's Arrow. Played straight as he is a great guy in his old age, then subverted as he is revealed to have been a concentration camp doctor. Also, his real last name is Unverdorben: "unspoilt" in German. (While we're at it, "Tod" -- pronounced with a long o -- just happens to be the German word for "death". Make of that what you will.)

Live-Action TV

Theatre

  • Very common in Renaissance and Restoration drama which often gave meaningful names to characters. For instance, the hero of The Plain Dealer is named Manly, and The Recruiting Officer has a Worthy as protagonist.
  • The Zeroth Law of Trope Examples: When there's a Malvolio running around, it's usually a safe bet that the local Benvolio is a nicer person.

Video Games

  • Tales of Symphonia has Regal Bryant, both of whose names mean 'noble'. He's a double subversion, since he's an enemy the first couple times you meet him, but it wasn't really by his own choice, and he soon winds up joining the party and being one of the nicest people around.

Western Animation

Real Life

  • Fred Friendly, President of CBS News during the '60s (during which time he and Edward R. Murrow produced a series of reports that are credited for helping bring down Joe McCarthy), later one of the founders of what would become Public Television. He is generally regarded as a symbol of journalistic integrity.

Animals and Plants

Also common in Victorian melodrama and subject to much parody.

Literature

Theatre

  • Several of the character in the Gilbert and Sullivan work Ruddigore count as parodies; the heroine is Rosa Maybudd, and the male characters are Robin Oakapple and his servant Adam Goodheart, and Richard Dauntless - the first two male characters lead to a subversion as Robin is actually the stereotypically evilly named Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd from a family of Dastardly Whiplash types and an earlier draft had Adam changing his name to Gideon Crawle to match his master's forced Face Heel Turn.

Emotion

Film

Live-Action TV

Video Games

  • Pokémon's Nurse Joy.
  • The Joy was the The Boss's old special forces name in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. She is a hero of the United States and Naked Snake's mentor of 10 years. Subverted because she defects to the enemy's side shortly after the game begins. Double subverted because she's a double agent and has to sacrifice herself when things don't go as planned for the U.S.

Real Life

  • The case which made inter-racial marriage legal across all of the United States? Loving v. Virginia

Family Title

Literature

  • Big Brother in 1984 uses this for manipulative purposes.

Video Games

Good

Anime and Manga

Literature

  • A more modern example is Archie Goodwin from the Nero Wolfe novels - the archetypal good guy who always wins.
  • In the children's book The Fire Cat, Pickles is looked after by a cat loving woman named Mrs. Goodenkind.

Western Animation

Heart

Literature

Newspaper Comics

Video Games

  • Final Fantasy VIII‍'‍s female protagonist is named Rinoa Heartilly, and indeed she is a friendly and trustworthy character. As long as she isn't possessed by the main antagonist, that is.
    • Also, uh, Squall Leonhart. The animal motif makes the connotation more one of courage than anything else, but the association remains a positive one.
  • Heart Aino from Arcana Heart.

Western Animation

Heaven/Religion/Mythology related

Anime and Manga

  • Luna, Artemis, and Diana, the "mooncats" from Sailor Moon, always give good advice to the humans.

Comic Books

Film

Literature

Live-Action TV

  • Angel, though before he got his soul, it was a subversion, as he was Angelus (Latin for angel), the demon with the angelic face.
  • Angel Martin of The Rockford Files is notably less than angelic. Instead he is a slimy, greedy, dishonest Dirty Coward.
  • Anubis "Doggie" Cruger, the heroes' mentor in Power Rangers SPD. He is named after the Egyptian jackal god of the dead and Judge of the Dead, whom he resembles in appearance, and he's an Action Hero in his own right.

Oral Tradition, folklore, Myths and Legends

  • Athena and her Roman counterpart Minerva are two more examples of "tough" feminine names. Both are generally on the side of good.
  • And another pair of "tough" feminine names: Artemis and Diana.

Video Games

Western Animation

Jobs

Anime and Manga

  • Chaplain of Dominion Tank Police is generally regarded well by his colleagues (he's a cop, but got his sobriquet due to his religious beliefs, though is seen as naive by the same token.

Live-Action TV

  • The Doctor from Doctor Who. Generally plays this straight, but many in universe hears this name and get an immediate Oh Crap reaction. This includes villains and non villains.

The Doctor: Trust me, I'm the Doctor.

  • Lampshaded in "A Good Man Goes to War"; toward the end, River Song revealed that many planets (including possibly Earth) have taken the word 'Doctor' into their language as a word for 'healer' or 'learned person', because of The Doctor's influence. But many other planets use the word 'Doctor' to mean 'warrior', for much the same reason.

"Shepherd": Animal Jobs

Any character named 'Shepherd'. Plenty of them in the military, for some reason. May be a nod to 'The Good Shepherd'.

Comic Books

  • In part of his back-story in the pages of X-Men, Professor Xavier served as a soldier during The Korean War. In one story, it was revealed that he was known among his fellow soldiers as "The Good Shepherd", because he went to great lengths to bring the men under his command safely home.

Film

Live-Action TV

Video Games

  • Command & Conquer: General Sheppard.
  • Half Life: Opposing Force: Corporal Shepherd
  • Mass Effect: Commander Shepard (played straight with Paragon Shepard, who tries to solve disputes with diplomacy and uses violence as a last resort; subverted with Renegade Shepard, who prefers to solve disputes with violence and uses diplomacy as a last resort. Both are more or less MagneticHeroes to go along with the name regardless.)
  • Modern Warfare: General Shepherd although that's a subversion, since he betrays you.

Real Life

Verbs

Western Animation

Heroes (as in, named after other famous heroes)

Multiple Examples

  • Roland was a Frankish military leader under Charlemagne who became one of the principal figures in the literary cycle known as The Matter of France. His name is used several times in fiction for heroic characters, including:
    • The fairy tale Childe Rowland, the most popular version being by Joseph Jacobs in his English Folk and Fairy Tales, published in 1892.
    • English poet Robert Browning's epic poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came; the title of which comes from a line in William Shakespeare's play King Lear.
    • The protagonist of Stephen King's The Dark Tower.
    • King Roland II from Sofia the First.
    • Roland from Borderlands, the first Vault Hunter to open the vault on Pandora and later the founder and leader of the Crimson Raiders.
    • Several heroic characters in Fire Emblem are named after characters from The Matter of France, including Roland.

Fan Works

  • The Teraverse has the Order of Sainte Jeanne d'Arc, a community of Catholic nuns founded (and named) by a superheroine.

Literature

Live-Action TV

Bideo Games

Web Original

  • In the Whateley Universe, Elizabeth Carson's first superhero name was Miss Champion, when she was one of two teen sidekicks to Champion. Her second superhero name was Lady Champion. On the other hand, it also gets subverted: Captain Courage is mainly known for the huge number of paternity suits and failures to pay child support.

Light

Anime and Manga

  • Death Note's Light Yagami. Although Light Is Not Good applies in a almost literal sense, this is ambiguous. His personal name is Light (written with the character for 'moon'), but Yagami means 'God of Night'. Certainly a name to run away from.
    • It's also a possible allusion to Christian belief of the angel Lucifer (whose name means "bearer of light") and whose pride made him try and take the place of God. Describes Light rather well, if you ask me. It also doesn't help that his given name is written with four strokes.

Comic Books

Literature

  • The main character's daughter Glory Goldie Sunnycastle in The Emperor of Portugallia. First played straight as the young Glory Goldie is a Friend to All Living Things, then subverted as she leaves for the city and becomes a prostitute.
  • Thud!: The coming leader of the trolls, "Mr. Shine, him diamond!"

Video Games

Virtues

Literature

  • In the X-Wing Rogue Squadron series, the two Alderaanian war frigates that survived when Alderaan adopted pacifism, and were still hanging around the system after the planet was destroyed, were named Another Chance and Valiant. Another Chance was found some time before the books, and Valiant came up out of the Graveyard to dramatically save the Rogues because one of them had taken Another Chance's IFF tag.
  • Robin Hobb plays with this interestingly in her FitzChivalry series (the Farseer trilogy): all of the princes are given names like this as part of magic which is supposed to install a corresponding personality in them. It doesn't work perfectly though- the hero is the illegitimate son of Chivalry, demonstrating an ironic application of his name, and Regal is The Evil Prince. Chivalry was otherwise highly regarded, however, and Verity plays this trope absolutely straight.
  • Codex Alera 's Fidelias, whose case is complicated and may be a subversion. He knows the political climate of his country is nearing civil war and feels that the king isn't doing enough to prevent this. So he betrays the king out of loyalty to the kingdom.

Live-Action TV

Theatre

  • Older Than Steam: Something similar to Codex Alera happened with Jean-Baptiste Poquelin alias Moliere's play Tartuffe (1664) and the disloyal bailiff Monsieur Loyal.
  • Parodied in Anything Goes, where Reno's four angels are named Purity, Chastity, Charity, and Virtue. They are all sleeping with the crew of the ship.

Parodies

Literature

  • Parodied in Discworld with Adora Belle Dearheart, who is in fact a snarky, badass, chain-smoking Broken Bird. (And what else could she be with a name like that?)
    • She was nicknamed Killer by her brother.
    • Also parodied by the Carter family of Lancre, whose parents didn't quite get how this was supposed to work. All of the girls ended up named after virtues: Hope, Prudence, Chastity, and Charity. The boys, on the other hand, were all named after vices: Anger, Jealousy, Covetousness, and Bestiality. Ironically, all the kids ended up as inversions of their name, so Chastity for example ended up as a "seamstress" in Ankh-Morpork, while Bestiality Carter was always very kind to animals. Covetousness Carter is described as "generous to a fault."

Radio

  • Parodying this trope and Charles Dickens' use of it, the villain of Bleak Expectations is named Mr Gently Benevolent. The cast also includes love interests Ripley Fecund and Sweetly Delightful.

Web Comics

Video Games

  • 'Mechquest used Hugh Munn as the name of one of the students in Advanced Mecha Theory.

Western Animation

Compound names (exhibit two or more of the above)

Comic Books

Literature

Video Games

  • Bayonetta features enemy angels, with a variety of nice-sounding names like "Beloved," "Dear & Decorations," "Cheer," "Fortitude," and so on and so forth; the major bosses of the game are even named after cardinal virtues.
  • Ace Attorney:
    • Who wouldn't trust a guy named Apollo Justice?
    • Or Phoenix Wright? Because he's always right!

Western Animation

  • Trevor Goodchild, the self-appointed ruler with a varying morality, from Æon Flux.
  • The Lovejoy family from The Simpsons is a clear parody/pastiche of this. Reverend Lovejoy is a nice guy mostly, but he's also prone to the same Jerkass behavior as the rest of the town and is occasionally too obsessed with the church (though a few episodes show him sympathetically). His wife is the leader of the town's out-of-touch Moral Guardians who often cry "Think of the Children!" Their daughter is manipulative and even downright cruel.
  • Many of the characters in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic have a Meaningful Name that doubles as this. Who wouldn't happily leave their kids with a teacher named "Cheerilee", expect someone named "Fluttershy" to be a sweetheart, or imagine good things about a "Princess Celestia"?