Raisedbywolves von Wolflike
There is a character in the Harry Potter novels named Remus Lupin, a name so eye-rollingly obvious that it ruined a major plot point for me.
If you haven’t read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , and the implications of the name “Remus Lupin” are not obvious to you, consider not reading any further.
I mean, I don’t think I have a way to hide spoilers. So I hope your eyes don’t unthinkingly scan ahead. Anyway, on with the spoiling, so I can get on to the actual point….
Remus was the brother of Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome, and both were raised by a she-wolf. So Remus connotes “raised by a wolf.”
Lupin may or may not be a real surname, but it’s similar in form to “lupine,” which denotes “having the nature or qualities of a wolf” (quoting the Oxford English Dictionary).
The internet tells me this particular Harry Potter novel is aimed at readers age nine and up. I would have been 24 when it came out. I can imagine that the mythical founding of Rome, and the vocabulary word “lupine,” might not be familiar to all readers, let alone those closer to the nine-year-old end of that age range.
But they’re not at all esoteric. A good fraction of the audience thought “that dude’s a werewolf” the second his name was mentioned.
But here’s my actual point: think about this from an in-universe perspective.
There’s this pair, Lyall Lupin and Hope Howell (I’m looking up these names on Wikipedia). They’re not werewolves; they’re just a couple of people; he’s a wizard, she’s a muggle. And then they have a kid.
Now, maybe Lyall and Hope are urbane readers of the Wizarding World equivalent of the New Yorker. They come up with this clever idea: they are the Lupins (we will assume Hope took Lyall’s surname), so their kid was going to be raised by wolves!
Ho ho ho, how droll. Let us name him after another famous scamp who was raised by wolves.
It’s so funny it could be a New Yorker cartoon. Or Wizarding World equivalent. Nobody would laugh; this is not a laughing sort of joke. It’s a dry chuckle sort of joke. Just the kind they like.
And they sit around drily chuckling every night, until tragedy strikes: an actual werewolf bites little Remus.
Of course, their first thoughts would be medical care for little Remus, and helping him come to terms with a life of lycanthropy. Maybe they’d ring the house with silver bullets and wolfsbane or something.
But the real tragedy for these two would be realizing that, from then on, people would think they’d given their son that name because he was a werewolf. Their brittle joke, intended for the delectation of the over-educated, had suddenly dropped several tiers of sophistication.
My heart is with them.