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I Know Your True Name: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
[[File:Death of L(LL).png|link=Death Note|250px|thumb|<div style="text-align: center;">{{spoiler|Just as planned}}</
{{quote|"The name is the thing, and the true name is the true thing. To speak the name is to control the thing."
|''The Rule of Names'', [[Ursula K. Le Guin]]}}
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* In ''[[Yu Yu Hakusho]]'', Roto is able to escape almost certain death by saying "[[I Have Your Wife|I own your mother's life]]... Shuichi Minamino", and revealing that he has a demon able to kill Shiori Minamino if he so commands.
* [[Played for Laughs]] in ''[[Houshin Engi]]'' during a battle where the enemy's [[Improbable Weapon User|Paopei was a megaphone]] that could freeze a person in place by shouting them to do so, as long as the user knew his target's real name. [[Obfuscating Stupidity|Tai]][[Combat Pragmatist|koubou]] has fun with this.
* In ''[[Our Home's Fox Deity.]]'', Kuugen tells Noboru and Toru his/her true name as a sign of trust. Other youkai need to have their True Names forced out of them, usually on pain of death, but once Kuugen has those True Names, he/she can force the youkai to follow orders.
== Comic Books ==
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* Used several times in the [[Dresden Files]] fic ''[[Fair Vote]]''. Exploited spectacularly so near the end.
* In ''[[Drunkard's Walk]]'', all the many and varied gods and demons of every pantheon in every world are essentially "roleplaying characters" for a group of [[Eldritch Abomination|cosmically powerful 12-dimensional beings]] -- none of whom use their real names with any of the masks they wear in the many universes. That said, Doug admits that he knows the True Name of his commanding officer, one of these beings who incarnated ''all of itself'' as a mortal, in order to understand what it was like to live as one. Averted, though, in that knowing this does not seem to give him any power over her, but instead testifies to their respect and affection for each other.
* This is a [[Discussed Trope]] in ''[[My Apartment Manager is not an Isekai Character]]'', when one of the [[Author Avatar]]s explains the English-magic Law of Names to a Japanese [[Magical Girl]] to justify not introducing themselves.
== Film ==
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** Like the word "God" itself, those are simply just titles, the Tetragrammaton is the actual name. To illustrate the difference, in Bibles that use the Tetragrammaton, it is left as Yahweh, Jehovah, or something similar; whereas all the titles are translated into the native language.
** The Jewish legend that changing the name of a gravely ill person can hide him from the Angel of Death.
** Shemyaza, one of the Grigori/Watchers (the angels who were enamoured by human women and came down to earth to take them as their wives) was seduced by Istahar into revealing God's true name. [[My God, What Have I Done?|He regretted it later]], and threw himself into the constellation Orion.
* In Homer's ''[[Odyssey|The Odyssey]]'', Polyphemus the Cyclops is tricked by Odysseus/Ulysses. Odysseus claims his name is "no man," causing the Cyclops to be thought insane or cursed when he says that "no man" blinded him. However, Odysseus seals his fate after escaping when hubris prompts him to announce his True Name, allowing Poseidon, the Cyclops' father, to take revenge by sending a storm to destroy Odysseus' ships.
* In [[Norse Mythology]], specifically some re-tellings of the story of Sigurd, telling a dying person (and particularly a dying Dragon) is a bad idea, because if a dying person (or Dragon) curses you by name, that curse is guaranteed to be carried out.
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== Real Life ==
* Used in bizarre fashion in the British [[British Political System|House of Commons]], where members are only referred to by one of a variety of titles. Only the Speaker uses the name (always the Full Name) of the members, and explicitly "naming" someone is either an insult, a reprimand, an enormous faux pas, or is calling for them to speak - depending entirely on context.
** In the United States Senate, only the presiding officer may be directly addressed in speeches; other Members must be referred to in the third person. In most cases, senators do not refer to each other by name, but by state, using forms such as "the senior senator from Virginia" or "the junior senator from California."
* Thanks to the Internet, putting a real name to a screen name or e-mail address can lead to all sorts of unpleasantness coming to light.
** Unless your name is exceptionally generic such that there are twelve people in your home country alone with your exact combination and spelling of first name and last name ("Robert Smith" in the United States for instance). But if they also have a general location...
** On [[Myspace]], there is an option you can enable that requires people adding you to know your last name or e-mail address.
** [[Encyclopedia Dramatica]], for all its moral ambiguity, doesn't allow you [[Unusual Euphemism|to show them your pokemans]] either.
** General consensus is that the best way to make a troll stop is to call them out by their full name. more thorough retaliation involves phone numbers, addresses, class schedules, friends and relatives, and photos. Collectively these are known as "dox" and to release this information is to known as "dropping dox."
* Whether a type of organism is assigned its own species-level taxonomic name or not can be the deciding factor in whether it is entitled to protection under the Endangered Species Act. The future of the North American red wolf grew far less secure when it was mistakenly suspected to be a hybrid of timber wolf and coyote, hence not necessarily an endangered "species" in its own right.
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* If you call someone by their name, they will usually stop for a moment to hear what else you have to say. However, if this power is abused, it will become less effective.
* Because religious intolerance has and still exists, part of Gerald Gardner's "Old Laws" for Wicca touches upon persecution and the need for secrecy and the usage of names at rites. ''"And while there, none shall say whence they come, or give their true names."''
* In programming, if you know the full name of any object, you can force it do whatever you want that's within its power. What's more, if you know the full name of a class, you can extend it or create a subclass of it to give it the power to do whatever you want, create an object, and - using the full name of the object you've created - force it to do whatever you want that's within the power that you've given it.{{context|reason=In which programming languages?}}
{{reflist}}
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