Unoriginal thoughts

You know that thing where a story is written in tight third person limited — we’re meant to be inside someone’s head, seeing the world through their thoughts — and then suddenly the narration says “the blond frowned” or “the shorter woman sighed” about a person the POV character knows really well?

That’s called antonomasia — using a descriptive label instead of a name. And it’s fine when we’re talking about strangers: “the cashier handed her the receipt,” “the tall guy blocked the door.” The POV character doesn’t know their names, and we just need a quick way to tell people apart.

But the moment it’s used for someone the POV character already knows, it breaks immersion. Because that’s not how our minds work. We don’t think “the older man smiled at me.” We think “Mark smiled.” Or maybe “my boss” if that relationship matters in the moment.

Third person limited means the narration sits inside someone’s perception. Their inner monologue is the story’s voice. So when you switch from “Mark smiled” to “the blond smiled,” you’ve pulled the camera away from their mind and turned it into an outside shot.

If you want to create distance or irritation, you can do it on purpose —

“The idiot from accounting emailed again.”

That’s character voice. That’s judgment. That works.

But otherwise?

As soon as your POV character knows someone’s name, use it. While we do tend to worry about repetitions, names rarely register as such to the readers.

If you need variety for rhythm, use relational or emotional identifiers that make sense in their head: her friend, his partner, their teacher, the person they loved.

Because inside someone’s thoughts, there are no “blonds” or “brunettes.”

You do not have to avoid repetition of names and short speech tags. In fact, when you are in the first rough draft, you should be putting zero mental effort into worrying about fleshing out your dialog, but when you do, later, most of your substitutions for "said" should be things that show actions and descriptions of the characters' tone, added like spice, not flour. The second draft is when they usually go from standing in a blank void without moving, unless it's really flowing easily in the first. If you're having anxiety about whether you've used their names too much or "said" too much, you're slowing yourself down completely unnecessarily. I'd much rather have a repetition than try to remember who is older and who is taller especially when those things might be variable between iterations of canon. (Book Lan Wangji is taller than Wei Wuxian, show actors reverse that. We know when their birthdays are from non canon sources but not who is actually older (literally wwx tells lwj to call him gege but then calls lwj er gege and he's being playful both times so in neither case do we actually know.)

So "the older man" sows confusion in the vast majority of cases with those characters.

If you've got a tight pov character the names should be consistent for how they think of the character unless it's in speech from someone else who uses a different name to refer to the character.

So in mdzs, from Lan Wangji's perspective I might consistently use Wangji in speech tags (Wangji said, "...")

But I would always and only use Wei Ying for speech tags as long as we are in Lan Wangji's perspective except perhaps in their first meeting or before they use familiar names.