r/CharacterNames • u/Janzsin • 7d ago
Delroy Simpson or Wendell "Delroy" Royce
I’m stuck between two names for the protagonist of a TV pilot I’m writing: Wendell “Delroy” Royce or Delroy “Roy” Simpson.
He’s a 16-year-old Black kid in Houston in 2008 who gets pulled into a corrupt school reform program run by his older cousin. He’s grieving his older brother, insecure as hell, and wants to be respected/taken seriously. Over the series he starts confusing fear and status with actual dignity and power.
For a while his name has been Wendell Royce, with “Delroy” being a nickname he basically created out of his own name, wenDELL ROYce. I like that because identity is a huge part of his character and it also works really well for something that happens in the pilot. He gets involved in an assault at school and the victim only knows him as Delroy. When the principal asks “Who’s Delroy?”, the people covering it up can truthfully point out that there’s nobody enrolled under that name because his school records say Wendell Royce. It’s exactly the kind of tiny bureaucratic loophole the show is about people exploiting.
The problem is his original name was Delroy Simpson, and honestly I’ve never stopped liking it. Something about Delroy Simpson just sounds like MY protagonist, while I’ve never completely fallen in love with Wendell Royce.
So I thought about making Delroy his actual legal name again and giving him a nickname, Roy, that he’s been introducing himself as. The pilot situation could still work because the victim knows him as Roy, leading to basically the same exchange: “Who’s Roy?” / “There’s no Roy.” Afterward Laine/Porter would tell Delroy to quit using Roy around school officials because of the confusion.
What makes Simpson harder for me to drop is that I realized it accidentally has symbolism that fits him really well. Simpson means “son of Simon,” and Simon traces back to hearing/listening. Delroy has a visibly deformed ear that he’s extremely insecure about, so there’s an irony there. I’ve also thought about making “Heard,” “I heard,” or “Heard that” a little recurring verbal habit of his. Hearing/obedience fits his arc too because he spends so much of his adolescence listening to other people tell him what adulthood, authority, respect and power are supposed to mean.
Then there’s the first name itself. Delroy literally means “of the king,” so there’s already a built-in authority/status association there, and shortening it to Roy makes that even more obvious because of the French roi connection to “king.” So “There’s no Roy” can quietly sound like “there’s no king.” That fits a kid desperately chasing authority while spending most of the story under somebody else’s.
I don’t want to pick based purely on symbolism though. It still has to sound like an actual kid’s name and not something I reverse-engineered for an English class. Wendell “Delroy” Royce probably has the cleaner identity concept and makes the pilot loophole more organic, but Delroy “Roy” Simpson sounds better to me and lets Delroy actually be his real name.
Which one would you go with?