naming normal characters: takes 500 years. impossible to actually find something that feels in-tone and in-character. i have opened rhymezone for some reason and nothing feels right
naming mecha pilots: vestigial myriad. helipad rigel. miracle century-notation. neon afterglow. i can do this all day how fucking many do you need
my trick is that fantasy is when one of the names isn't a word and sci-fi is when both of them are
I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment, which is why I went and made a tool for generating fake names/words.
I've used this to great effect for creating fantasy names. It takes two single-syllable words (that I tried to make sure were nouns) and combines them into a new word. For now, it's only two syllables long, but observablehq lets you click open the Javascript editor for any cell in the notebook and modify it to your heart's content, so you or some friend of yours (or me, eventually!) could probably make it arbitrary lengths.
Anyway, that new word I make is more-or-less guaranteed to be pronounceable, and I make sure it's not in the list that I started with so it's probably a made up word.
