So, I agree that real names are not necessarily bipartite with a first and last.
In real-world systems, this is often best resolved by having different ‘forms’ of a name; a “formal name” and “name to address by” that can be any string and do not need to be unique, and then an arbitrary string to uniquely identify the records of the person in question that need not be parseable by any human.
On Wolfery, we have the problem that we need to show something human-readable to uniquely identify a character.
Some similar systems handle this by making names just one string. That runs into a problem where the first person to try for a ‘popular’ name - “John”, say - gets it, while anyone who comes after has to try workarounds like “JohnSmith” or “Johnn” or so on.
Wolfery is attempting to resolve this issue by having two name fields, one that will be shown under most circumstances and one that can provide disambiguation when necessary. We might be able to communicate that more clearly, so it doesn’t seem like we expect surnames are always a thing!
While it would be technically possible to allow a character to not have a secondary disambiguator on their name, I would be very hesitant to do so, because I think it would encourage people to race for the ‘bare’ version of their preferred names as a way of bragging that they were here first.