@monorail @aescling there aren’t any regulations on names (except maybe on which characters you can use) so people can pick basically any characters and give them basically any pronunciation which obviously makes things difficult; many names have large numbers of valid spellings, for example Wikipedia gives 始, 治, 初, 一, 元, 肇, 創, 甫, 基, 哉, 啓, 本, 源, 東, 大, 孟, or 祝 as possible spellings for “Hajime”

because Light is an English word normally it would be written ライト. but if you write it like that it looks like a foreign name, so Light’s mom could have spelled it in hiragana, like らいと. but hiragana names are feminine-coded and informal, so she decided to just pick a kanji for it. she could have used 光, which is the japanese word for light (hikari, also a given name), but she wanted to be more symbolic about it. so she picked the character for moon, 月 (tsuki, which is ALSO used as a female given name).

of course she could have just not named her kid an english word… but…