Now, naming characters is hard, I'm gonna admit that, but hopefully this is an article on how to help you with that.

1. Relevance to Nationality and the Era they Were Born in

What nationality is your character? (If your character doesn't have a nationality, just ignore this) Are they Chinese, English, American? What names are more likely to be used in these areas? When were they born? What were the popular names of the time?

And easy answer to all these questions is research, and research is fun, there are plenty of baby naming sites, and records of popular names throughout time.

2. Random Words make Shitty Names Sometimes

There are exceptions to this rule, but most of the time, giving your character a random word for a name is, well, bland.

If you're thinking of typing a random word into Japanese and making that your character's name, please stop and say the translated word out loud, because 90% of the time, it's in almost english. [And this is generally an overused technique anyway]

3. Surnames

Again, this is gonna be roughly the same advice as the first question, research, research and research, what's your character's nationality, ect. ect. ect.

4. Long names

Anything longer than a first name, a middle name and a surname, unless for ironic purposes, is stretching it. If you go past 5 then you need to stop friend.

[b]5. Abnormal names for abnormal beings

This is tricky. What counts as abnormal naming and what counts as just plain dumb?

Well, let's say you've based your character off a certain element, now you could turn to mythology for some elemental god name or find a name that either sounds like or means that element.

For instance, I have a small nod to Japanese mythology with Lyssa, Alyss and Xavier, but their names do not conform to such things, that's because they want to blend in with their surroundings, Alyss can't exactly go around calling herself Amaterasu, can she?

But then, if your abnormal character is an experiment, for instance my long forgotten moon experiment series, we have TSUKIKO and AKIRA

Tsukiko means child of the moon

and Akira means light (I think, don't quote me on this, it was a long time ago)

So basically, as long as it's not too ridiculous, you can either go covert name or totally slap-in-the-face obvious name.

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Well that's just my opinions uwu;

please don't yell at me ;u;