This is one of the few reasons I support villains renaming themselves on occasion. Parents rarely name their kids things like Midnight Deathbringer or Adolph Stalin, but you just can't conquer the world with a name like Bob. But I think reasonable villains won't need to go so far as to call themselves Dr. Evil McEvilson. Even a normal-ish name with a little more punch would do. (Lex Luthor is plausible enough real name which sounds scarier than Bob or Rodney, for one. And that's a comic book. Why don't more villains change their names to things like Lex Luthor?) Plus, while a guy going around calling himself Doom Master is obviously bad news, a guy with a powerful-sounding but normal name can probably get a lot more done before someone thinks to look into his background.
Come to think of it, the Malfoys are actually pretty well set in this department. Iirc, Malpas ("bad step") is a real surname that real, non-evil people have, so Malfoi/Malfoy could be as well without having to invoke the author as the only way a family of bad apples could have a bad guy name. Maybe Tom should have taken that as his model.
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Date: 2012-06-06 10:05 pm (UTC)Come to think of it, the Malfoys are actually pretty well set in this department. Iirc, Malpas ("bad step") is a real surname that real, non-evil people have, so Malfoi/Malfoy could be as well without having to invoke the author as the only way a family of bad apples could have a bad guy name. Maybe Tom should have taken that as his model.