: Re: Does the protagonist need a name? Does the main character in a short story need a name? My story gives lots of other details about the character.

@Kaufman555

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Presently, the most talked about television show is the Star Wars series "The Mandolorian" which is about a member of the Mandolorian Culture and his adventures with a young member of the species to which Jedi Master Yoda belongs to. At time of writing, four episodes have been released and neither character has been named on screen and no allusion to a real name existing for future revalation has been named. Fans have taken to calling the titular character "Mando" when refering to him. Even more bizarre is that, because George Lucas has refused to give much details on Yoda's species (still unnamed) and the fact that the young member of his race represents the first major development of the race in 20 years (the last being the revalation of a female member Yaddle in 1999's Phantom Menace) fans are refering to the child partner of Mando as "Baby Yoda" as a short hand for "Unnamed baby of the unnamed race of people Yoda comes from".

Of course, "The Mandolorian" was sold as a Space Western (the producers actually call it a "Space Samurai" film, more on this later) and with the Dollars Trilogy being a main source of inspiration. The trilogy is a series of three movies portraying Clint Eastwood's character known to film fans as "The man with no name" as he was never given a real name in the three films.

The first entry of the Dollars Trilogy ("A Fistful of Dollars") was an adaptation of the Kurosawa Japanese Period Piece (Jidi Geki) "Yojimbo" which featured a similar plot only with Samurai instead of Cowboys. The character that inspired "The Man with No Name" was Toshiro Mifune's "The Ronin with No Name". This isn't uncommon. Many tropes and archtype characters in Samurai films have a similar Western counterpart and many Hollywood fans of Kurosawa felt this was the best way to share these stories with Americans. The Magnificent Seven was similarly adapted from the Seven Samurai. That said, one Hollywood director bucked this trend and decided to make an adaptation of a Kurasawa film "The Hidden Fortress" (about a Princess and her General leading an epic fight against Imperial forces... from the point of view of the comic relief) into a little sci-fi film called "Star Wars" (In case you were wondering why R2-D2 and C-3P0 were so prominent in the opening of "A New Hope" or where in the world Lucas got the word "Jedi" from).

These aren't the only works with similar names. X-File's persistent foes, the group known as The Syndicate, never had their real names revealed, save for the leader. The members were only known by descritive names such as "The Well Manicured Man", "The First Elder," "The Second Elder," and the personal foe of Mulder, "The Cigerette Smoking Man" (aka Cancer Man aka Morely Man(prefered fiction brand "Morely" of his trade mark addiction. The name comes from a prop shop that specializes in prop generic name packaging that looks like real products). Additionally, there were two informants to Mulder in the series from within the Syndicate known only by false names they gave to Mulder, Deepthroat and Mr. X (the former was derrived from the real life informant on the Watergate scandle and the later was named for the X shape of Duct tape Mulder would tape to his window when he needed to contact Mr. X). There is some argument of main character status, but one episode of titled "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man" purports to be the (mostly true, but we don't know where the fictional parts occur) back story of the titular character... and never once uses his real name in the course of the story (we do learn he wrote a novel about his life, with his fictional self named Jack Collette and his pen name as Roman A. Clef. The former is definitely not his name as the later is a pun on "Roman à clef" which is a fictional character who represents a real person. CSM uses the Roman à clef Roman A. Clef to write about Jack Collette who is a Roman à clef of Roman A. Clef... which is a Roman à clef for whoever the CSM really is.")

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