Asklemmy

43614 readers

1357 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

It is true that reusing names from a previous work in a new one is bad? (fedia.io)

submitted 1 day ago by ryujin470@fedia.io to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Reusing names of characters, locations, etc is allowed because they are not subject to copyright (only trademark, and in very specific cases). But it is bad on unfair to do so?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 23 points 1 day ago

It depends. Names for people and locations get reused all the time, both in real life and in fiction and of course it's fine to do so. At this point, it's probably impossible to be 100% original all the time with the amount of books, games etc that are out there. However there are some names that are so iconic that people will immediately connect them with a certain work. For example I wouldn't write a fantasy novel and name a city "Minas Tirith", as everyone will just think of LOTR. But calling a city, say, "Dragonstone" is just fine IMO, even though it's a place in ASOIAF (and probably more than a few older fantasy books).