Pop culture and mythology names

Naming an animal after a character is a small act of quotation, and it is worth knowing what you are quoting. Every name in this section is recorded against something specific: Simba against The Lion King, Fenrir against the wolf of Ragnarok, Pikachu against Pokemon.

Ordinary given names that happen to appear on screen are deliberately not tagged — Phoebe and Dexter were removed for that reason. A name counts as a reference only when the reference is why people use it.

Recording the referent is what keeps the section honest. Most lists of this kind grow by feel: a name looks like it belongs to the genre, so it goes on, and the next list copies it as a fact. There is no mechanism in that chain that can ever remove an error.

The cost is that these lists stay short. A name joins one only when somebody wrote down which film, which god, which language — so the pages below are a narrow answer to a precise question rather than a survey of everything that sounds the part.