Which TV and Anime Character Names Did Parents Actually Use?
Every big show gets a "parents are naming babies after it" headline. We wanted to see how often that is true, so we took the 463 characters in StashGrid's Character Name Generator, across 36 TV, film and anime universes. We checked each first name against the US Social Security Administration's baby-name records, which cover every year from 1880 to 2025.
The short version: a few character names really did take off, and some are still climbing years later. Most never made it onto a birth certificate in measurable numbers, including names from some of the biggest shows.
How we did it
- The names. We used the first name a parent would actually give: Arya from Arya Stark, Luffy from Monkey D. Luffy. We skipped titles, nicknames that aren't names (All Might, Homelander) and single letters (L). Characters whose sex the tool lists as unknown were checked as both boys' and girls' names. That gives 466 name-and-sex pairs.
- The data. The Social Security Administration publishes how many babies of each sex got each name every year. It leaves out any name given to fewer than 5 babies in a year, to protect privacy. So "not in the data" means fewer than 5 a year, not zero.
- Before and after. For each name we compared the average number of births in the 3 years before the show's US premiere with the 3 years after. For characters introduced later, we used their own debut year instead: Kylo Ren in 2015, not Star Wars in 1977.
- What this can't show. A name rising after a premiere doesn't prove the show caused it. Names like Luna, Emilia and Maeve were already climbing for other reasons. The clearest cases are names that barely existed before the character did.
The full method, the name list, the results table and the script are in the data folder below. Anyone can re-run it against the same public file.
The names that took off
Kylo is the standout. In 2014, 8 baby boys were named Kylo. The Force Awakens arrived in December 2015, and by 2016 the figure was 238. It kept rising after the films ended, reaching 870 in 2024 and 797 in 2025, when it ranked 402nd among boys' names. Parents chose the name of a villain who kills his own father, and they kept choosing it.
Arya shows the long build. The name was already in use (273 girls in 2010), but after Game of Thrones premiered in 2011 it rose every single year to a peak of 3,051 in 2019, the year the show ended. It has settled at 1,858 in 2025, still a top-200 girls' name (158th).
Kayce is the clearest current example. Before Yellowstone (2018), about two dozen boys a year got the name. It reached 488 in 2022 and 843 in 2025 (375th), and it hasn't peaked yet. The same show took Rip from no recorded births in 2018 to a peak of 111 in 2021.
Daenerys didn't exist in the records before the show. It first appears in 2012 with 21 girls, peaks at 166 in 2018, and was still given to 115 girls in 2025.
Arwen and Hermione are the early-2000s versions. Arwen went from 12 girls in 2001 to 166 in 2004, after The Fellowship of the Ring. Hermione went from too few to count in 2000 to 59 in 2003. Both are still in use today: 158 and 95 in 2025.
Names that appeared from nowhere
61 of the names had never been recorded for boys or girls before the year their character debuted. Most stay small, but they are real birth records:
- Anime and animation: Nezuko (first recorded 2021, 33 girls in 2023), Mikasa (2018), Azula (2010, now 121 a year), Zuko, Iroh, Winry (140 in 2025, its highest year yet), Jiraiya (357 boys in 2023), Goku, Luffy, Sasuke and Naruto.
- Fantasy and sci-fi: Ahsoka (first recorded 2014), Daenerys, Sansa, Olenna, Oberyn, Théoden (104 boys in 2025, also its highest year yet) and Samwise.
Big shows, tiny name effect
Eleven is the best counter-example. Stranger Things was one of the most-watched shows of its era, and the name appears from 2017. It never went above 12 girls in a year, and it was 7 in 2025.
Many anime favourites never reach 5 births in any year at all. These include Izuku, Shoto, Inosuke, Denji, Makima and Yor, and from older universes Frodo, Chewbacca and Grogu. Popularity of a show and popularity of a name are clearly not the same thing.
What makes a character name catch on
Looking across the names that worked, a pattern shows up. They sound like names people could already imagine on a child: Arya next to Aria, Kylo next to Kyle and Milo, Kayce next to Casey. A name that is a number (Eleven), a title, or very tied to one fictional world (Frodo, Grogu) stays on screen.
If you're looking for character names yourself, for a baby, a pet or a story, the Character Name Generator lets you search all 36 universes by sex and age group.
Data and method
- Source: US Social Security Administration, "Beyond the Top 1000 Names: National data" (names.zip), 1880-2025, downloaded 18 October 2026.
- Character list: StashGrid /characters/ database, 36 universes, 489 entries. 463 had a usable given name.
- Premiere and debut years: the US screen premiere (TV or film), with character-level debuts where a character arrived later. All years are listed in sources.md.
- Files: analyze.py (the analysis), chart.py (the chart), results.csv (every name, with first year, peak, the before/after averages and the 2025 rank), characters_db.json (the character list), franchises.json, char_debut.json, name_overrides.json.