Thoughts on localized character names in translations? + coming up with Norwegian names for Touhou characters

Star Butterfly in the Norwegian dub of Star vs. the Forces of Evil is called Sara Sommerfugl ("Sarah Butterfly"), and Pony Head is translated literally as Ponnihode. The Swedish dub of Sailor Moon also has some interesting character name changes which you can read here. Though I think character name localizations in anime and other cartoons are probably most associated with DiC and 4kids type stuff what with the Dorie Goodwyn for Doremi Harukaze, Serena for Usagi Tsukino, Sakura Avalon for Sakura Kinomoto, et cetera.

Ultimately, I think character name adaptations exist on a spectrum, and how you "should" localize a character name depends on what your translation is trying to do. Like a big part of why people react to Dorie Goodwyn type names is because those sorts of localizations seem to come from a really patronizing and xenophobic attitude where kids "can't" like a cartoon from another culture, so any traces of that culture has to be erased; or they "can't" pronounce a name as simple as Harukaze because it's not an Anglo name. But that isn't really the same philosophy as that behind a localization like Star Butterfly → Sara Sommerfugl, is it?

But yeah, I've just been thinking about this stuff because I've been very slowly working on a Norwegian-language fandub script for Touhou Gensou Mangekyou: The Memories of Phantasm, and that means thinking about how to render the names of Touhou characters in Norwegian. The plainest approach would simply be to use the English names already familiar to most Norwegian Touhou fans, but I still find myself drawn to the idea of localizing some of the character names.

As follows:

Any other characters for the time being could just as well be referred to by their English names with a Norwegian accent. I'm not sure if all of these characters I've come up with new names for are even namedropped in the scripts I'm translating, I haven't read through all of them yet. Whether I'm even qualified to write a fandub for Memories of Phantasm is questionable, but I'm doing it for fun and will leave my translations publicly available, anyways.