>Why the HELL is it so hard to remember them?
because
>They’re just words [...] with no meaning behind them

most norms arent good at remembering names either. the tricks to memorize names are the same as for memorizing anything else. maybe your memory is especially leaky.

Names have power dawg. They are a link between the subject and meaning. A name can have so much contextual information packed into it that they literally are worth a thousand words. And it's not just physical descriptions either, names can also carry emotion with them. Perhaps why you forget names is because those names lack the presence to remain in memory, they lack sufficient context and become some of the first things to fall out.

When the blue haired girl from that one anime is all the contextual information that remains then their actual name has no meaning, because that description becomes the name. They could have many defining traits but do those traits actually mean anything when a dozen other characters share those same attributes? How long will your recollection of those traits last? The walmart cashier who told you her name is immediately forgotten about because it means less than her job as that walmart cashier, she failed to imprint any meaning upon their name. Hell, try to remember any seasonal distinctly and return a name for it, so many have left no lasting impression and all blend together. It's not your fault you can't remember them.

Family has heaps of context, there's so much emotion and memory packed into their names that you remember them easily, and often times they come to mind when you see their name out of context. 2hus are easy to remember because you've likely spent a lot of time immersing yourself in Touhou, their distinctive appearance, dialogue, personality, and music themes all pack into their name, and above all you probably felt something from that collection of concepts.

That's why names are so fickle. Thank you for listening to my TED talk.

I generally need about 20 episodes of a show before the names start to stick, so that means I can't remember most character names.
I think the main thing about memory is you need to subconsciously feel that the information will be useful in the future, and for the most part names in fiction won't be brought up again unless you're an avid fan of discussing it many times. Just going by hair color is functional enough so my brain can't justify the neuron rewiring to attribute names to it.
Personally, my memory is heavily tuned towards stuff that's interesting or novel to me, and names just don't fit that pattern.

Not sure if it's true or not, but I've heard people can only really keep track of like ~200 names. The hypothesis being that's roughly the size of your complete extended family (or clan) back during early human history when people congregated into tribes.

You have to remember that a name, as a label, is a mix between a socially convened shortcut and a mnemonic device. As >>141773 said, if you can get away with calling a shab "blue" because that's her most striking characteristic and everyone understands, then there's no real need to remember her actual name, in the same way that you can get away with casually calling someone "dude" as a vocative. But if you want to call out to him while in the middle of a crowd, yeah, you'll need to ask his name, and likewise if you're spending time discussing and thinking about a person or character you'll come to learn theirs by heart.
In terms of personal names and their value (or lack thereof), the Romans had a pretty interesting system: they only regularly used some twenty or so first names, called praenomen, and several of them were literally ordinal numberals devoid of deeper meaning, so there were a lot of Quintus and Sextus and Octavius going around. (Like Ichirou, Jirou, Saburou, or Gorou.) If you wanted to refer to a specific person and disambiguate them from the tens of thousands with the same name you'd need to use their nomen and cognomen as well, sometimes even their nickname, approaching something closer to the "Jack son-of-Mike from-Greenwood" that a lot of naming conventions have used throughout history. Look up Arabic naming conventions.
>>141773
>They are a link between the subject and meaning.
An interesting topic in philosophy is the nature of names assigned to things that do not exist, the standard example being Pegasus. Not necessarily a winged horse but the winged horse. If nobody has seen Pegasus, if its name points towards toward a certain subject that not only doesn't exist but never existed, and yet we can still perfectly communicate information about it, what does that imply for language and knowledge as a whole? There's a lot to it:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonexistent-objects/
>>141784
I believe you are referring to Dunbar's number, which is about the amount of social relations you max out at. It's related, though a different topic.

I just don't remember people's names deliberately. There are people I've worked with who I could not possibly tell you their name. It almost never comes up that I actually need to refer to anyone by name.

that being said, I can name most of the Precure girls, but they absolutely matter more than most of the people around me lol
sometimes it's hard to remember their civilian name though and I feel like I'm an old man when I spend like ten seconds trying to remember it

I think it's mostly to do with how important you feel the name is. When someone introduces themselves who I expect to never meet again the name goes in one ear and out the other. Why bother remembering a name of a stranger?