Help naming characters

[Voboy]

Had the misfortune of listening to an otherwise good audio book where the VA pronounced the names completely differently than how I did.
Then they changed VAs mid series and the new guy pronounced several names in an all new way.

Very frustrating.

I was quaking in fear when Jackson made LOTR, because Tolkien was kind enough to leave pronunciation notes in his appendices and the Bakshi animated film seemed to ignore many of them. I was hoping Jackson would follow them, and to his credit? He did.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I was quaking in fear when Jackson made LOTR, because Tolkien was kind enough to leave pronunciation notes in his appendices and the Bakshi animated film seemed to ignore many of them. I was hoping Jackson would follow them, and to his credit? He did.

It was a labor of love for Jackson.

 

[BeautyInTheStruggle]

I struggle with this, and for me an unnamed or poorly named main character doesn't work for me - I simply cannot fall in love with them like that.

On searching this topic myself some time ago I found two sites that help me.

Fantasy Name Generator- self explanatory I think.

Find A Grave - so you have live people, but all live people end up dead people, if you want names common to an area, and in a certain time use those to set the graves you want to look for!

Third method I've recently employed for a fantasy series and fantasy names is mashing up old latin translations that literally describe the characters. It remains to be seen how well this will be taken, but I'm happy enough with the names I produced.

 

[big_cane_sugar]

I've found a few names and started using them over and over. I don't need the universes of different stories to be consistent.

 

[SkyBubble]

hi everyone.
I have long struggled with naming fictional characters. I just never seem to be able to come up with names that seem natural. Sometimes I decide on the age of the character and look up what the most popular baby names were that year but I find that kind of limiting.
Does anyone have any tips about the best way to name your characters? Where do you draw inspiration from? How does one come up with believable, natural-sounding names for characters of varying ages and ethnic backgrounds?
I would appreciate any tips people have.
thank you!

Most of the time, my ideas come with the character names. (I even have one story where one character and her boyfriend have rhyming names. That was a detail that was there when the idea came into my head.

The main character thinks this is cute.