With Spring anime almost over it’s time to look at the Summer cour offerings. So then I learned about Oosuki Mamako and her son, Oosuki Masato, from the light-novel-turn-anime title Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? In Japanese it’s 通常攻撃が全体攻撃で二回攻撃のお母さんは好きですか? I think both names give me the same kind of headache. I should say all 4 names, eh.

This Spring season is featuring two series with interesting names. And let’s be clear, anime with interesting names for characters are not unusual. There are usually at least one per cour. In Bocchi, the characters are all plays on their character archetypes. They go in as far as making them not just jokes themselves but also deep introspective points.

In Joshikausei, the main character is named Futo Momoko. I was going to crown this one winner of lol names category in Year In Review 2019 already.

Well, names of the characters are really important for anyone writing fiction. This is a kinda-universal thing that I learned, from classic British lit to folklore in China to light novel and video games. I don’t think you can put too much emphasis on how things are named, even though at times they aren’t significant either.

The joke names, though, reflects an attitude of these narrative. They are comedies. And we need more comedies in our lives, especially ones based on fiction. It feels mainstream entertainment tend to veer nonfiction for humor and fiction for the serious. Anime feels a strong buckling of this trend. Like, Bocchi deals with some serious issues and is generally a very sincere story, but it’s a comedy.

Sometimes, the name of the character is like the opening animation for the anime. You get it even in the opening animation, even. It’s what you see first about somebody. It help sets the viewer’s or reader’s expectation. And sometimes you really wonder what to expect from a title and characters like those from Okasuki [#お母好き].