Solstice

Slowly migrating my online presence (and digital library) here!

I still have no idea how to customize the theme but I shall slowly learn.

wow, i'll be archiving and collecting a lot of things later.

That was a short but good run. It was great knowing that a social media site like this is possible, and hopefully someone will be able to apply all the lessons learned here and make one that is sustainable.

I'll go first:

So I originally was going to go with Sara. I've always vibed with the name, I used it in video games for my characters constantly, and it just felt right. Also for Sara Kerrigan who's "I'm queen bitch of the universe" line was probably my first experience of gender envy. The problem is at this point Sara had become a character in what was my most popular series at the time so it felt weird naming myself after a character I only retroactively realized was a self-insert of my gender needs.

I next was going to go with Jessica, for Jessica Drew from Marvel - specifically the Ultimate version of the comics. While the Ultimate comic line is largely remembered for being mostly bad and had the one redeeming quality of introducing us to Miles Morales (which 100% is the best thing to come from the Ultimate universe), it also gave us Jessica Drew of Earth 1620 - a clone of Peter Parker who just had the Y chromosome replaced with an X, and also had all of Peter's memories. The character was incredibly trans coded and fascinated me long before I figured out I was trans...but one of my closest friends is Jessica and so it felt weird.

So then I was going to with Rachel for Rachel Summers from the X-Men as well as to give myself a name that tied me to my Jewish origins but then someone asked "Can I call your Rach?" and the sound of that shortening was so very much not a vibe that I dropped the name entirely.

Then I remembered Sylvia. Sylvia Dawngard was a character of mine in a long running FATE game I was playing with friends at the time. While not my first TTRPG character to be a woman - that was a Sara - Sylvia was the one that gave me gender euphoria. A changeling in a world were that meant "Human who got abducted by fae and was raised by them," Sylvia was the champion of the long forgotten Autumn Court of fae and over the course of the game came to weild the Eclipse Hammer (which I now have tattooed on my arm) and just was one of my favorite characters I've ever played. She also was constantly torn between her fae upbringing and human nature, not feeling like she fully belonged in either world, which only changed when she met her Nephilim girlfriend Kohabiel and together they formed a new home and... yeah, I loved that character.

Equally importantly there's no shortening of that name I dislike. Syl, Sylvie, Vee, Via, Lyv, Sylv, basically any version of the name worked perfectly for me.

So yeah, that's my story. What's yours?

This'll be a long post 'cause plurality.

First up Leolin was our chosen name before realising plurality. It's an anglicisation of Llewelyn, drawing from the two flase beliefs that the Llew in Llewlyn is llew as in lion, and that the Leo in Leopold is leo as in lion to morph the Llew into Leo. It ends up as a distincly Wenglish (Welsh-English) name, and also relating to cats like our legal name is, and pronounceable by non Welsh speakers as long as they don't overthink it. We had actually been using Leo as a fursona name, and also our Animal Crossing name, but it wasn't intended to become our primary name at first.

Individual headmates under the cut.

i just changed one letter lmao

There wasn’t really any consideration. I went to think about it and immediately landed on Caoimhe and decided it fit and didn’t really consider other options. I had always really likde the name. I think I may have unconciously picked it at some point in the past that I have no memory of years before I realised that I was trans. I did not name myself after anyone I know nor any fictional characters (how many characters named Caoimhe do you know anyway?).

Mine's a bit of a work in progress.

"Sen" is both sort of a diminutive of my birth name (which, I don't mind but just don't have a connection to), also a very cute anime character I like.

I also really really like the more femme-sounding "Senna", which is just a bit of an extension of Sen, and also a sort of twist on "Zeno", which I've been using as a name since high school.

I've tried out a few different names before this. 'Silver' lasted the longest (and has its own story), but eventually I stopped vibing with the name - there was some sort of daintiness/frigidity/mysticism associated with it that started to chafe a bit. 'Solstice' was originally a name for one half of an OC pair, and something about the way it sounded similar to silver (what with the s, l, and i sounds) appealed to me. I tried it out on a whim, and it just fit like a tailored suit.

Feels a bit odd to jump from a lunar name to a solar one, though.