Her first last name—yes, I gave her two last names to be extra—is Celestine. Celestine means 'heavenly' in Latin and, again sees heavy usage in France. This is, again, to hammer in the Biblical theme in her arc.
Her final last name is Morales. Morales is the first and only Spanish name I've given to my characters and it means 'mulberry bush'. It was also a topographical name, meaning that it was given to someone based on where they lived. The last name, Morales, was given to somebody who lived near a mulberry bush. Surprisingly, the unripe fruit of a mulberry bush can actually simulate a drug high and cause you to hallucinate.
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I hope from that you can get that names can sound objectively good and also have deeper meanings whether that meaning is personal to you or connected to a language.
Now, onto the elephant in the room.
That elephant is the Japanese language and its three primary writing systems: kanji, katakana and hiragana. Many of us, myself included, who are writing fanfiction do not have a clue about the Japanese language and when naming characters, struggle to come up with a meaningful name using totally foreign systems.
For now, I'll be focusing solely on the kanji writing system since that is what most My Hero Academia characters are named with.
First of all, you need to know what kanji are ideograms. They are symbols—no different from traffic signs or the following: !"£$%^&*~#—and they come together to create a word. In that regard, they're like letters except that there are thousands of them and each kanji symbol means something.
For example, this '赤' means red whilst, in English, we'd used the three letters: r, e and d to form the word red. It gets even more confusing as that symbol is, from what I can understand, pronounced as 'aka' in Japanese. Of course, there are different ways a word can be pronounced, but I'm just going with the most common pronunciation.
Wiktionary is a life-saving deal when forming words out of kanji symbols. You're gonna want to start by thinking of some words that symbolize your character. This can include a reference to their Quirk or personality or appearance. As an example, I'll be creating a brand new character who'll serve as our guinea pig throughout this book.
He'll be having a shielding Quirk to protect against some of the things we'll be throwing at him. This Quirk will be called 'Bubble' and he'll be able to generate a protective bubble around him and whomever he's formed an emotional link with. Personality-wise, he'll be an optimist who has a fondness for pickels and is protective over loved ones as a result of his Quirk. A pretty basic character.
Let's first find the kanji for 'bubble'. You can do this by Googling 'kanji for bubble', oddly enough. The result is this kanji symbol: 泡. Now, go on Wiktionary and check its meaning. This symbol has various meanings connected to water, but is mostly associated with bubbles or bubble-like substances. Now, if you scroll down or press ctrl+f and type 'readings' you'll find that the most common pronunciation is 'Awa'.
Now, find the kanji for 'shield' which is this: 盾. On Wiktionary, we find that it does means shield or a weapon used to block attacks, which is a more complicated way of saying a shield. It's pronounced 'Tate'.
Fusing these two symbols together, we get 泡盾 or Awatate, which is our protagonist's first name.
For his last name, we'll find the kanji for 'protect' which is: 保. This time, we'll go with its rarer pronunciation of 'Hō' and we'll pair it with the kanji for 'optimism' which is the combined symbols of: 楽観 and is pronounced 'rakkan'.
Combined, it makes 保楽観 or Hōrakkan.
So, in finality, we have 泡盾 保楽観 or Awatate Hōrakkan, our example character for this novel.
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a/n: I hope this was able to help in any way and wasn't too confusing. Kanji is such a beautiful yet confusing writing system with over a thousand characters to learn from, it really makes creating names a challenging yet rewarding endeavour. Any Japanese speakers can feel free to give their input as I am thoroughly out of my depth when it comes to anything Japanese, much less the language.
