The original post: /r/television by /u/AporiaParadox on 2024-10-10 12:26:11.
I’d recently started watching a new season of a series after a year since I saw the last one. But while watching I realized that I had forgotten nearly every character’s name. I still remembered the characters of the ensemble cast, what they looked liked, their personalities, and their individual stories, but in my mind they were just “main character”, “kid character”, “that one asshole”, etc. And even after having seen a few of the new episodes, I still can’t remember most of their names, even though I enjoyed the episodes. I’ve noticed that in sitcoms with small casts I can easily remember most characters, but in dramas with larger casts my brain doesn’t bother retaining that information unless they say the names of characters a lot.
It’s actually harder for me to remember names of characters if they just have normal Western names, for fantasy and sci-fi settings with weird names it’s somehow easier for me to remember, but not Anime because Japanese names are hard for me and there’s just so many.
What shows do you have a hard time remembering the names of characters? What makes names of characters on TV shows memorable? Is there a correlation between quality and how memorable names are?