Tailoring a child's name to the proclivities of cruel and stupid children seems obviously unwarranted to me. The problem isn't the name. The problem is the cruel and stupid children. Tailoring a name to the common biases of normal adults is less obviously so, but since there is no real reason why we shouldn't have a high-powered businesswoman or a politician or whatever named Candy, I'm inclined to think that that's also a bad reason. Of course, I'm in favor of supplying middle names that are pretty run-of-the-mill for emergency backup; I know several people who go by their middle names, as a cheaper and simpler alternative to actually going through with a name change. If Candy doesn't like being Candy, she can grow up and call herself C. Eleanor or something.

There are so many parenting choices that would be ruled out by a strategy of denying bullies ammunition that it doesn't seem like a practical priority, even if it were one I agreed with. Should I choose a white spouse (or adopt white children), so my kids will be white and unlikely to be the target of race-based bullying? Should I wait until I'm willing and able to supply my offspring with expensive designer clothes, lest they otherwise be subject to the sneers of the better-dressed? Should I grit my teeth and raise my children Episcopalian so they have a nice mainstream inoffensive belief system that people are unlikely to tease them about? Or, for more easily implemented choices - should I feed them meat, in case the carnivore children next door think tofu is silly? Should I discourage them from acting well-informed in public because knowledge is often mocked? Should I get a TV and have it babysit them so they'll enter the world with an arsenal of popular culture trivia?

Data point: I have a very ordinary name. It's boring. I don't hate it enough to change it, but I wish my parents had named me something cooler.

A child is not a vanity plate.

Well said. Yes, they should have put VANYEL on their vanity plate, not their kid.

The child having a positive outcome in the world (meaning the real world of the present, not the world that should be) [...]

Any talk about positive outcomes refers to a world which should be; positive is in your utility function, not in the territory. There is much more to life than happiness and popularity. For myself, I would rather be unhappy and an outcast than bludgeoned into conformity. Maybe Vanyel cherishes his name and his history, and would despise his counterfactual analogue who had been named Mike. You can't say it would be doing a service to Vanyel to have named him Mike, for if the child had been named Mike, he would have a different childhood and our Vanyel wouldn't exist. The most you can say is that it's better to create a Mike than a Vanyel, because Mike is likely to be happier.

All parents try to raise their children with their values. All parents implicitly make some sort of statement by how they raise their children: if we're going to be talking about statements, then "Christian" is far more egregious than "Vanyel." The question is not whether the parents are going to send a message, the question is whether mainstream messages and unusual messages are of equal moral legitimacy. If you're going to say "No, because children whose parents are sending unusual messages are more likely to be unhappy, and I don't want children to be unhappy, even if it means crushing minority subcultures," fine. Give in to the bullies honestly and explicitly, but don't pretend that sneers about vanity plates don't apply just as well to Christian's parents.