: Why are names in fantasy novels often "original"? In the vast majority of fantasy novels, the characters' names are somewhat original (Bilbo, Kvothe, Daenerys, Pug and so on). Some authors use

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As others have said, most fantasy is set in a different environment, where the non-English-speaking inhabitants have different cultural and linguistic norms. So it's only natural to want to convey that.

But I think there's another reason. If I name my characters "Bob" or "Pocahantus" or "Chun Li", you form associations -- you see those characters a certain way because of your own cultural context. Since that's probably not the context of my world, that makes my job harder -- you, the reader, now have certain assumptions that I need to overcome. If I name my characters "Xilg" or "Z'lin" or "Loohrun97", you don't have those assumptions. I might have other problems (names shouldn't look like I just mashed the keyboard; what's the linguistic basis for them?), but at least you probably won't make Earth-based assumptions.

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I don't think it's necessarily motivated by a desire to have "charismatic" or "exotic" sounding names, as much as a desire to avoid having names that sound incongruous with the fantastic environment.

Much fantasy is set in a different universe from our own. The culture depicted is usually at least somewhat different from any real-life culture. And we expect people in different cultures to have different names. When we translate a text describing something that happened in another culture, we usually don't translate names, we just transliterate or transcribe them.

The same applies to historical fiction like "The Clan of the Cave Bear". We know that names like "Henry" and "Alice" are associated with particular modern real-world cultures, so it would be weird to encounter them in Paleolithic Europe.

That said, some fantasy has cultures that are very obviously modeled on real-life cultures, and in that case using real-life names is not that jarring. You mentioned "Daenerys", but George R. R. Martin actually uses a lot of names that are clearly based on real-life European names like "Eddard", "Catelyn", "Brandon" etc. This works since the culture they live in is clearly based on medieval European cultures. Martin seems to like to use unusual spellings, but I don't think this is really necessary.

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I think "striving for originality" is a key reason, but to that end it's fair to say that 99% of fantasy novels aren't set in this world (earth and it's various countries) they're set in their own mythical, fantastical world and thus, along with religion(s), commerce and monetary systems, social hierarchy and class structure, geography, weather, clothing, traditions and much more, the naming conventions for people and places would be different from our own.

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