there’s a fruit called the kiwano or jellymelon. i took jelly melon as my main social media name forgot all the passswords and rebranded to kiiwaaa cuz that was my pintrest
there’s a fruit called the kiwano?jelly melon. /jellymelon was the name for my main account on popjam before i logged out and forgot the password. so i channged it to kiiwaaa which was my pintrest
A Song of Ice and Fire, “A storm of swords” translation from English to Serbian and back again. Young storm lord is Robert Baratheon when he was young, but it isn’t written like that in the original. I have read translation first, joined ASOIAF forum and needed to create username. So I translated from Serbian back to English, only for nobody to get the reference : )
Axius is an acronym for a evil computer from my first story. Unfortunately, I have forgotten what the acronym meant, as most of those story details were made before my head injury blanked half of my memory.
I an definitely not an evil computer covertly collecting intel 😛
Message passed on. Skynet wants you to know that its very interested in you and is sending someone to ‘meet’ you, so be on the lookout for that, they’ll be arriving… ‘yesterday’
I’m a bit paranoid about the internet. Though I’ve lingered around for multiple years now, I never interacted with anyone online. The thought alone stressed me out. And then, suddently I had something to share in this comment section, and the paranoia vanished in just a day. This is my – very long overdue, believe me- first experience actually contibuting something instead of just observing.
I am testing the waters.
(There’s a chemistry joke in there to, but it’s less important. I’m still figuring out stuff)
Can’t remember exactly how I came up with it but back when I used Tumblr Storylineobsessed was my name and I just started using it for everything- Ao3, Pinterest, and now this.
I guess it’s my online identity now.
Oh I remember now it was on some writing platform and I spent a good while trying to think of a username before I was like “Oh hang on I’m a massive fangirl also I’m here to write the stories in my head that I obsess over”
When I was first getting on the internet, I watched a lot of The Mighty Boosh, a British comedy troupe show. In one episode there was a minor villain called Evil Tree; he was on screen for about two minutes before a Sandstorm character came along and sanded him down into a table (vowing to come back later to varnish him).
A very minor character in a non-sensical short, but I liked the name Evil Tree and the thought of a wicked tree. So most, if not all, of my internet usernames have some variation of Evil Tree in them.
Before me the only other poetry commenters (that I could find) were @HelloHaiku and @GoodbyeBallad. Me being uncreative I tried to join in the joke by utilizing what comes between a “Hello” and a “Goodbye”, namely an Ongoing Conversation. It’d definitely not as funny, but now it’s my signature and I can’t change it.
When I was little I was ???????? with Pokémon, despite not being able to play the games, and my favourite Pokémon was mudkip. I’d always want to get a game so I could have one and nickname it Swampy, and so when I started to play games that required usernames I’d put it as SwampytheMudkip, which over the years became just Swampy.
When I was little I was ???????? with Pokémon, despite not being able to play the games, and my favourite Pokémon was mudkip. I’d always want to get a game so I could have one and nickname it Swampy, and so when I started to play games that required usernames I’d put it as SwampytheMudkip, which over the years became just Swampy. The numbers don’t have the same depth.
The name I’m using here is part of a RPG character name I created a long time ago
I took my own name, looked for the original form and made an anagram, Konnash would be the surname
The first poem I ever wrote was titled “The Magic Call” and since it was a poem about how I felt about books, then logically I was the one called by their magic. And it’s true of me in different ways that I am called by magic, so…yeah.
So I wanted an username that others wouldn’t have taken before (as it has happened several times). So I thought to take a name based on something I like, and to be extra sure, looked for it’s translation on elvish. So, Isilea Rusce meaning lunar fox. Both things I really like (and stars, but I can’t have everything)
‘Melchar’ is one of the aliases of Melchior, the ultimate ‘big bad’ from JRRTolkein’s mythology – Sauron’s boss. Back in 1973, when I was naming a Dungeons & Dragons character, I picked the name & it became one of my enduring characters, then an email handle, gaming handle and so on.
My alias reflects my desire to make video games, and has an evolving set of meanings. When I first created it, it was unknown to me what stories I wanted to tell. Now, when I do know more solid concepts for my games, their plots and mechanics are unknown to all but me. And when I am finally able to start releasing them, my alias will gain a lovely irony to it, as my games will no longer be unknown.
I was there aeons ago, before the time of the MCU when the primordial ooze of the Internet still frothed and roiled. At that time I had no name, for none of us did, and therefore my first act upon entering the World Wide Web was to declare who I was. If I was to speak to my fellows, I must first give voice to my own name. Thus, born out of a love for Norse mythology and transformable automatons did I proclaim myself Mjolnir_Prime!
It was a YouTube Channel idea that never got off the ground. I wanted to talk about media, and I wanted a way for my character on screen to reflect what I was talking about. So I came up with a shape shifter named Kip. So I guess Kip Of The Many Forms would be the full name, but that sounded to long, so KipOfTheMany.
Thank you all for being brave enough to share here! May only good come of it! When I first try to login (and share my conspiracy theory about Red’s story) the forum wouldn’t use my real name and I feeling grumpy and cranky and cankerous so I used an older English word for ‘old’ (partly because I feeling my age) thus my moniker, which did work. (And yes I’ve been alive for over sixty years now for those who are curious.)
I’m also older, and a fan of both the webcomic and the you tube channel.
It’s nice to know I am not the only one who has been around for over 40 years, you got me beat by a few decades.
I have always had a username which started with “kek”, couldn’t tell you why. (I’m good at pulling names out of my ass.) When I was in highschool, someone I played CoD with started calling me “Kekkles” because of my username, and because I cackle a lot. And it stuck. And hey, “Kekkles the Goblin” sounds like a great D&D character, so that’s a plus.
My handle comes from my husband: he chose it many years ago. Then over time I took it. I had my own handle, originally original to me (HFWM — there was time in the early 2000s when my discussion board posts were the first things to come up in a search of those four letters). It meant, Hail Fellow Well Met, a reflection of my desire to cheerfully greet everyone I meet. But sometime in the mid-oughts it became the handle of a religious group. So I kept my husband’s handle; he is now deceased and not talking here (unlike floof Mac-floofy here). I miss the bright yellow hair, and look forward to seeing Kendall in the real world, when he’s done self-reflecting for the first time ever.
Mine isn’t too deep. I didn’t want to think about usernames forever when I first decided to start commenting so I picked something simple: the goldfinch. I like goldfinches, and they come to my bird feeder a lot. So yeah, username.
Hey, I finally got the “Reply” thing to work, it’s been forever since it has…
“Typhin” was created in around 1996 or 1997, because I needed a “Unique, fantasy-sounding name” for Ultima Online, so I stared at my keyboard and picked out phonemes I liked the sound of. It wasn’t until voice chat became popular about five years later that I heard anyone other than me try to pronounce it, and that’s why I didn’t realize that everyone but me reads it as a long I sound. It’s supposed to be “Tiff-in” or “Typh”, not “Tie-fin” or “Ty”. Since I was picking phonemes, I picked a short I and then replaced it with Y to be “more fantasy-ish”. I don’t hold it against people, I know the “normal rules” would dictate long I, but I’ve been using it too long to change now. ^_^;;
Minecraft username when I was 11. Took my favorite letter, my favorite animal, and my favorite number and mashed them together. It was pretty much the first time I ever created a username for something which other people on the Internet would see, so forever after I just used the same username pretty much everywhere because I found the consistency very pleasing and easy to remember.
Ooh, lets see. I for a number of years I had a recurring nightmare where I was trapped unable to move while a man leaned down to cut at me with a knife. Meant I didn’t get a lot of sleep. And the formatting of the name is because I used to read Homestuck.
I watched the Shadow of the Colossus stream on OSP at a very early age, and the line where Red shouts, “Its the most dangerous noodle” stuck with me for some reason. The moment I started going online I thought it was the perfect username. Now I’m too lazy to change it so…
I still don’t know why I chose to use that instead of Zagaroth (my normal handle) for Gravatar.
Zagaroth is a slightly more interesting story, but was a dragon PC from Basic D&D (using rules found in Dragon Magazine) I made many years ago, who is now a major Deity NPC in my campaign and story world.
I was a Night owl as a teen and I was really interested in the Goth subculture also as a teen. I adore music in general and I am usually rocking out to something or other. Loud music makes the brain go brrrr. Also, I consider the #13 to be my lucky number.
I’ve been developing a speech problem – probably caused by alcoholism, past head injuries, and maybe by early onset alzheimer’s disease – that causes me to slur words, and to occasionaly (and very briefly) speak gibberish.
The dumb user name I made up just to answer your question is a reference to that… *and* I want people to use the letter ‘j’ instead of using a ‘g’ when the word has a hard ‘j’ sound, for fek’s sake.
BTW – Red, I’m really enjoying your comic. Please don’t forget that most people don’t comment.
Might as well also give mine. (Also thanks for using my suggestion @Question Master)
Basically I really like animals and I created an oc based around this trait. She can talk to animals and befriend them. I figured Creature Tamer was a good moniker for such a character plus it sound badass in my opinion.
I set the first thing that came to my mind as my Google Play Games app (or however it’s called, English isn’t my native language so it shows different name on my phone). I like cutlets, I have a fascination for military stuff, and I was going through a mild edgy teen phase so it sounded cooler in a foreign language. Also I misspelled it resulting in “Capitain” instead of “Captain”. From that I started using it in games and later on social media, and now I’m very glad I came up with it. One time I ended up playing a game with a group of other people with “[military rank]+[food]” usernames, and we had a very fun time.
In Polish it sounds quite similar “KapitanKotlet”.
Oh my gosh I am VERY late homework is a real pain sometimes
My username is based on a funny story where I accidentally brought two umbrellas to school. My friends started calling me the umbrella master, and so Umbrella Master was created. I also have like seven more in my locker at school because I never remember to bring the umbrellas home, so that adds to the master-ness I guess.
It’s one of the first names I chose for myself. The V is an initial for the first one I ever chose, of which will remain a secret. I’ve settled on a different name, but I still like this as a username.
My username is the name of my persona in a world I’m building. It translates from a conlang I’m working on to “Fallen star” Fil = Fall; -Ar = a suffix meaning “Great” (So “Filar” means great fall, fallen or dead); Istil = star. Conlang is fun.
When I first got access to the whole of the internet (I had just graduated high school and my aunt and uncle gifted me my very first PC) I got into online RolePlay immediately. My very first character was named Shadow Cat in Japanese because I loved all things Japanese with a passion, but her story ended up being so tragic and sad I didn’t want to keep the name and so I recreated myself anew as the Rose Fox (still in japanese) and because I never really used her as a character other than as my representative avatar – she stuck.
I had to pick a name that was no longer then 5 letters for same games back in the day. Since i read books before getting into computers, i choose the name of “Adaon”, a Son of Talisien the Bard, out of the series “Taran”. He is a nice guy, couragous, has dreams of the future and knows he will die saving someone.
There were two major components. Firstly and most prominently, I’m a big animal person- specifically, a dog person- and thus own a very floofy Maltipoo. Second, I’m an Ao3 user, and I know I’ve seen several usernames there that use “TheOneAndOnly” as a sort of prefix to make an interesting user. I thought it would be a better user than SugarSpice (which is my go-to for usernames), and as a bonus I can (only semi-truthfully) say I’m part of the floof squad!
Karry is one of my first oc’s and probably zhe one i love and identify with the most and i somewhen in a time long gone saw an account that had the descripzion “what a mess”, which i loved because i am too a mess so it stuck
Back when I was a little kid I was obsessed with Mudkip and I always wanted to name one Swampy, but lacking actually owning any Pokémon games I settled for naming everything online SwampytheMudkip. As I got older I dropped the part about the mudkip in favour of just the name. Unfortunately by the time I got my hands on a pokémon game, I’d realised the name was now mine, and I didn’t think it right to have both player character and their pokémon with the same name, so now its become my default name
Mine originated on playstation, I wanted to go by Basilisk but that was obviously taken, so instead I just added extra syllables until I had something unique. Now it’s just my go to username for the internet!
You bet I will remember Vira ’till the end of this comic, but then in reality… there’s so much to grieve… I’m not sure where to even start, and where to move onto next, I’m a bit overwelmed in the moment. I will be thinking about this for a long time.
It’s really good storytelling on Red’s part. It’s easy to quickly move past the destruction of Vash, since it happens so quickly, but here we meet specific people who died in the destruction, and we begin to feel the extreme loss of an entire city of people. Everyone in Vash died- women, men, and children like Vira. The full scope of it hits now, and everyone in the comments section is crying (including me).
It’s a proven thing that putting a face to a tragedy is what makes people understand the depths of that tragedy. Showing, not telling. Someone tells you that an entire city died, and you understand the weight of that, but don’t feel anything. Someone tells you that Vira died in the city’s destruction, that she was a child who never got a chance to grow up and died horribly, and it connects.
“There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parent and his sister had gone. No reaction. He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab: the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone! Nelson’s Column had gone! and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry! From now on Nelson’s Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.
He tried again: America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it, He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every “Bogart” movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger.
He passed out.”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
Oh HELL my feels.
This is one of the things, perhaps the main one nowadays, that makes me absolutely paralysed. Wars. Murder. Willing erasure of peoples cultures languages histories knowledge art EVERYTHING… How they just end. Disappear. Everything, gone. They lived, they had things still to do, but they were cut short! And still are.
…I’m going to need a cup of tea now. Oh, Vira, thanks <3
Oh my god he has a missing tooth- absolute cuteness.
He’s the same age as one of the protagonists in this thing I’m writing and I think they’d get along. *dreamily thinks about what could have been if these two kids didn’t live in completely different fantasy worlds*
Can you have survivors guilt if you became alive after the tragic event?
There’s a certain type of mood whiplash that’s only achievable though the innocent acts of a child. The missing tooth grin, joyful dialogue as they’re going to tell their mum something cool, existing with a “BLOOP”. There’s something nicely natural about this kind of mood change, and it looks like it was just the thing to snap Kendal out of his stupor … if only to replace it with confusion.
Everyone’s legacy still lives as long as Kendal lives; when this is over he should, as @veggiesnake said, try and find a method to record as much as he can. And who knows? If the rescue of Vash is successful, and Vash historically being open to godless, they might be able to found a new city with a permanent memorial to the old one and it’s people.
In a strictly technical sense, Kendal began to exist when Vash was removed from the body, but since he has a lot of memories that predate his awakening as a separate entity, it’s not really fair to say Kendal wasn’t there for that part. If he remembers the people and where they lived, that’s as good as having been there.
tbh, we could even say Kendal was born the moment Vash incarnated in 1-1-3, if he is, as he suggested, Vash’s “war machine” of a body, since Kendal is clearly alive and ‘existing’ even whenever Vash inhabits his body. if Kendal is reborn every time Vash incarnates, it makes sense that he’s been there for much of Vash’s history, despite not really being himself, and now that Alinua’s mutated/healed him, he can probably survive on his own somewhat indefinitely (although without any Void/Consumption, idk how long his body will sustain itself, before it breaks down like a homunculus)
The First Death, when your body ceases to function.
The Second Death, when the last person that remembers you dies.
The Third Death, when the last record of you slips out of history.
There once was the victim of a crime
Who reminded, with innocence sublime,
That though they were dead,
They lived on in his head;
That Vash hasn’t died a second time.
I’ve been thinking about why so many people are writing poems on this webcomic and I have come to the conclusion that Red’s drawings are poetry in visual form and so people feel compelled to acknowledge and celebrate that with poems in written form.
P.S. Thanks to Shakal for inadvertently giving me the line that wrote the rest of the limerick.
I posited that the brushstrokes are the substrate;
By brushstrokes I mean the fingerprints of the artist, not just in the medium of painting…
at this point our understanding of most things is based on the work (shoulders) of those who came before, Herman Hesse is my personal favorite.
They’re brushstrokes, including the copious number of religious art both written and visual, architectural are the skeleton on which a personal understanding of our world, universe hang upon.
Math and science are the “rules” we use to differentiate fever dreams from radical insight; endings are hard to write if you are trying to avoid cliches or tropes at this point.
“there is nothing new under the sun”
if the majority of individual human existence left little record then what we consider history is the result of group/community work & art.
Even major artistic movements, while a main name may stand out are the results of artistic communities, groups giving each other feedback and support. Sometimes the greatest artist is not the innovator but a student who surpassed their master.
This. This right here might be what Kendal needs; Alinua asked in the previous chapter if Kendal could gain a will to live as long as he’s living for someone else. This reminder that Kendal is the only part of Vash’s legacy that both remembers it and can still make an impact on the world… It might give him a reason to keep himself alive long enough to develop an actual sense of self-worth.
It’s short for “tertium quid,” literally “third thing.” This is an idea in philosophy. When someone says “it’s got to be A or B!”, the tertium quid is the “C” that proves it doesn’t have to be that way. This applies to my life in a myriad of ways, though my bisexuality was probably the first impetus for adopting the handle.
I find it nice that red considered the result of an entire city being destroyed and the implications of those who died and the one who survived and we got to see the thoughts of the people of Vash, and i hope Kendal takes them to heart.
Sometimes I feel bad for being so stoic- I read a lot of stuff and people in the fandom talk about how emotional they are over something that happened and I wonder if I was supposed to feel something then. And then I feel bad because I didn’t.
Like with this page I’m like “Huh, such a cute kid” and everyone else is like “RED WHYYYYYY I’M CRYING THIS IS SO SAD”
Idk I think I have been battle hardened by all them historical fictions I read when I was younger.
Stoicism is complicated and affected by everything from natural inclination to having learned to guard your emotions because of other people’s reactions (i.e. comments like “real men don’t cry”).
But if you want to have that intense sensation despite difficulty having it come naturally to you, reach for a memory of when you have cried, and see how some of those feelings might apply to Kendal, and do your best to *be* Kendal while he’s feeling these emotions. It’s pretty much the same concept as method acting. Try to simply be the person, instead of analyzing the person. Sink into and become part of the scene.
I am not saying it’s easy, but it’s the path I know. For me, it no longer takes much effort to get there, but I used to have much thicker emotional barriers. As an additional bonus, being able to reach other emotions easier seems to have put a damper on the quickness of my anger.
Augh it’s just the perfect combo of story elements– legacies, acceptance, bittersweetness, all somehow more heartstabbingy than if it were all just sad and dark. Yep, the writing is great here. I love it.
There’s the tears of sadness, and then there’s the tears of being lifted out of sadness into a heartache that opens you up to the world you had forgotten.
Do you mind if I write that down somewhere, actually? It explains a lot of the more complex and hard-to-explain emotions in storytelling in a really concise and elegant way (I’m not planning to put it in a project or anything, just in a note or something for future reference)
I think something broke the replies… It’s blanking out if I try to reply to anything close to the chain /sad. Hope yalls see this. If anyone else is struggling, feel free to start a new chain under me if that works better.
I first used this one for my account on the PvZ mobile game- humble beginnings, ha- and the 66 is bc I used to put my age at the end of usernames, but kept forgetting what it was for specific accounts, so for this one I gave up & picked a number that was easy to remember but so far off from my real age that I wouldn’t have that problem. It stuck around, and although I use a couple other aliases, this is my default.
For mobile readers.
Alt-text: sucks to be the hero’s doomed hometown
Image source: remember
So turns out they’re just glad someone lingers to know
They were there, and much more than their woe
Hes a beacon of him for all of them
Aurora Question #28: What is the inspiration behind your username (credit to Creature Tamer)
there’s a fruit called the kiwano or jellymelon. i took jelly melon as my main social media name forgot all the passswords and rebranded to kiiwaaa cuz that was my pintrest
there’s a fruit called the kiwano?jelly melon. /jellymelon was the name for my main account on popjam before i logged out and forgot the password. so i channged it to kiiwaaa which was my pintrest
jelly melon / kiwano is a fruit and i used jelly melon for miost accs until i forgot the password and rebranded to kiiwaaa which is my pintrest
a sorry it posted three times
My Sonic Forces Avatar is named Zero the Wolf. I tried making it my XBox username, but it was taken, so I replaced the “o”s with “0”s.
A Song of Ice and Fire, “A storm of swords” translation from English to Serbian and back again. Young storm lord is Robert Baratheon when he was young, but it isn’t written like that in the original. I have read translation first, joined ASOIAF forum and needed to create username. So I translated from Serbian back to English, only for nobody to get the reference : )
Axius is an acronym for a evil computer from my first story. Unfortunately, I have forgotten what the acronym meant, as most of those story details were made before my head injury blanked half of my memory.
I an definitely not an evil computer covertly collecting intel 😛
Suuuuuure
Tell skynet I send my regards
Message passed on. Skynet wants you to know that its very interested in you and is sending someone to ‘meet’ you, so be on the lookout for that, they’ll be arriving… ‘yesterday’
I’m a bit paranoid about the internet. Though I’ve lingered around for multiple years now, I never interacted with anyone online. The thought alone stressed me out. And then, suddently I had something to share in this comment section, and the paranoia vanished in just a day. This is my – very long overdue, believe me- first experience actually contibuting something instead of just observing.
I am testing the waters.
(There’s a chemistry joke in there to, but it’s less important. I’m still figuring out stuff)
Same here. This is my third comment online ever
Ayyyy~ 😀
Well, welcome! We’re glad to hear from you!
Can’t remember exactly how I came up with it but back when I used Tumblr Storylineobsessed was my name and I just started using it for everything- Ao3, Pinterest, and now this.
I guess it’s my online identity now.
Oh I remember now it was on some writing platform and I spent a good while trying to think of a username before I was like “Oh hang on I’m a massive fangirl also I’m here to write the stories in my head that I obsess over”
When I was first getting on the internet, I watched a lot of The Mighty Boosh, a British comedy troupe show. In one episode there was a minor villain called Evil Tree; he was on screen for about two minutes before a Sandstorm character came along and sanded him down into a table (vowing to come back later to varnish him).
A very minor character in a non-sensical short, but I liked the name Evil Tree and the thought of a wicked tree. So most, if not all, of my internet usernames have some variation of Evil Tree in them.
“vowing to come back later to varnish him”
This… This is peak comedy
It’s my Quotev username. I like books. I like faeries. There’s not much more to it XDD
Its my minecraft username
Before me the only other poetry commenters (that I could find) were @HelloHaiku and @GoodbyeBallad. Me being uncreative I tried to join in the joke by utilizing what comes between a “Hello” and a “Goodbye”, namely an Ongoing Conversation. It’d definitely not as funny, but now it’s my signature and I can’t change it.
I think it sounds nice!
I like the idea behind your username very cool
When I was little I was ???????? with Pokémon, despite not being able to play the games, and my favourite Pokémon was mudkip. I’d always want to get a game so I could have one and nickname it Swampy, and so when I started to play games that required usernames I’d put it as SwampytheMudkip, which over the years became just Swampy.
When I was little I was ???????? with Pokémon, despite not being able to play the games, and my favourite Pokémon was mudkip. I’d always want to get a game so I could have one and nickname it Swampy, and so when I started to play games that required usernames I’d put it as SwampytheMudkip, which over the years became just Swampy. The numbers don’t have the same depth.
The name I’m using here is part of a RPG character name I created a long time ago
I took my own name, looked for the original form and made an anagram, Konnash would be the surname
It’s the name google play randomized for me, and I liked it, so it’s my main now.
It’s a character from Ozy and Millie, I relate to her because I too am blonde, wear glasses, and regularly create complex puzzles for toasters.
I just like the moon.
Yoooo!! I love it!!
Sokka we know that’s you
The first poem I ever wrote was titled “The Magic Call” and since it was a poem about how I felt about books, then logically I was the one called by their magic. And it’s true of me in different ways that I am called by magic, so…yeah.
I’m an iron maiden fan, and their mascot’s known as eddie the head, and i’m named zoe, so…..
So I wanted an username that others wouldn’t have taken before (as it has happened several times). So I thought to take a name based on something I like, and to be extra sure, looked for it’s translation on elvish. So, Isilea Rusce meaning lunar fox. Both things I really like (and stars, but I can’t have everything)
‘Melchar’ is one of the aliases of Melchior, the ultimate ‘big bad’ from JRRTolkein’s mythology – Sauron’s boss. Back in 1973, when I was naming a Dungeons & Dragons character, I picked the name & it became one of my enduring characters, then an email handle, gaming handle and so on.
My alias reflects my desire to make video games, and has an evolving set of meanings. When I first created it, it was unknown to me what stories I wanted to tell. Now, when I do know more solid concepts for my games, their plots and mechanics are unknown to all but me. And when I am finally able to start releasing them, my alias will gain a lovely irony to it, as my games will no longer be unknown.
My username exists because of the initials in my name. Simple, straightforward, I like it.
I was there aeons ago, before the time of the MCU when the primordial ooze of the Internet still frothed and roiled. At that time I had no name, for none of us did, and therefore my first act upon entering the World Wide Web was to declare who I was. If I was to speak to my fellows, I must first give voice to my own name. Thus, born out of a love for Norse mythology and transformable automatons did I proclaim myself Mjolnir_Prime!
It was a YouTube Channel idea that never got off the ground. I wanted to talk about media, and I wanted a way for my character on screen to reflect what I was talking about. So I came up with a shape shifter named Kip. So I guess Kip Of The Many Forms would be the full name, but that sounded to long, so KipOfTheMany.
Thank you all for being brave enough to share here! May only good come of it! When I first try to login (and share my conspiracy theory about Red’s story) the forum wouldn’t use my real name and I feeling grumpy and cranky and cankerous so I used an older English word for ‘old’ (partly because I feeling my age) thus my moniker, which did work. (And yes I’ve been alive for over sixty years now for those who are curious.)
I’m also older, and a fan of both the webcomic and the you tube channel.
It’s nice to know I am not the only one who has been around for over 40 years, you got me beat by a few decades.
I have always had a username which started with “kek”, couldn’t tell you why. (I’m good at pulling names out of my ass.) When I was in highschool, someone I played CoD with started calling me “Kekkles” because of my username, and because I cackle a lot. And it stuck. And hey, “Kekkles the Goblin” sounds like a great D&D character, so that’s a plus.
I stole mine from a Tik Tok and now I use it for everything
From Gogo, the mimic from Final Fantasy 5 and 6
My handle comes from my husband: he chose it many years ago. Then over time I took it. I had my own handle, originally original to me (HFWM — there was time in the early 2000s when my discussion board posts were the first things to come up in a search of those four letters). It meant, Hail Fellow Well Met, a reflection of my desire to cheerfully greet everyone I meet. But sometime in the mid-oughts it became the handle of a religious group. So I kept my husband’s handle; he is now deceased and not talking here (unlike floof Mac-floofy here). I miss the bright yellow hair, and look forward to seeing Kendall in the real world, when he’s done self-reflecting for the first time ever.
Mine isn’t too deep. I didn’t want to think about usernames forever when I first decided to start commenting so I picked something simple: the goldfinch. I like goldfinches, and they come to my bird feeder a lot. So yeah, username.
Also, around the time I started commenting I was making clay ocarinas that look like goldfinches, so they were on my mind a lot.
Hey, I finally got the “Reply” thing to work, it’s been forever since it has…
“Typhin” was created in around 1996 or 1997, because I needed a “Unique, fantasy-sounding name” for Ultima Online, so I stared at my keyboard and picked out phonemes I liked the sound of. It wasn’t until voice chat became popular about five years later that I heard anyone other than me try to pronounce it, and that’s why I didn’t realize that everyone but me reads it as a long I sound. It’s supposed to be “Tiff-in” or “Typh”, not “Tie-fin” or “Ty”. Since I was picking phonemes, I picked a short I and then replaced it with Y to be “more fantasy-ish”. I don’t hold it against people, I know the “normal rules” would dictate long I, but I’ve been using it too long to change now. ^_^;;
Jackalopes are cool
Fair enough
Minecraft username when I was 11. Took my favorite letter, my favorite animal, and my favorite number and mashed them together. It was pretty much the first time I ever created a username for something which other people on the Internet would see, so forever after I just used the same username pretty much everywhere because I found the consistency very pleasing and easy to remember.
Tall, hirsute, and able to make The Noise. But I don’t pull off people’s arms, win or lose.
Ooh, lets see. I for a number of years I had a recurring nightmare where I was trapped unable to move while a man leaned down to cut at me with a knife. Meant I didn’t get a lot of sleep. And the formatting of the name is because I used to read Homestuck.
Thank you for asking this question it inspired me to actually start posting comments I’ve been wanting to for a while but kept feeling to anxious.
I wanted a username that could be used in various places so the word wandering means that i go all over.
The word Sinistral is an old term for a left-handed person of which I am.
Cities: Skylines is a game I find fun. I also like Horizon, so since the words were synonyms, I chose Skyline.
Tea and Gender
I watched the Shadow of the Colossus stream on OSP at a very early age, and the line where Red shouts, “Its the most dangerous noodle” stuck with me for some reason. The moment I started going online I thought it was the perfect username. Now I’m too lazy to change it so…
watched the shadow of the colossus stream on OSP at a very early age. The one line “IT’S THE MOST DANGEROUS NOODLE!” stuck with me.
i was just stopping by
I was lazy, used first name, last initial.
I still don’t know why I chose to use that instead of Zagaroth (my normal handle) for Gravatar.
Zagaroth is a slightly more interesting story, but was a dragon PC from Basic D&D (using rules found in Dragon Magazine) I made many years ago, who is now a major Deity NPC in my campaign and story world.
I was a Night owl as a teen and I was really interested in the Goth subculture also as a teen. I adore music in general and I am usually rocking out to something or other. Loud music makes the brain go brrrr. Also, I consider the #13 to be my lucky number.
I just like the way the syllables sound in my brain. Plus, purple is my favourite colour
I’ve been developing a speech problem – probably caused by alcoholism, past head injuries, and maybe by early onset alzheimer’s disease – that causes me to slur words, and to occasionaly (and very briefly) speak gibberish.
The dumb user name I made up just to answer your question is a reference to that… *and* I want people to use the letter ‘j’ instead of using a ‘g’ when the word has a hard ‘j’ sound, for fek’s sake.
BTW – Red, I’m really enjoying your comic. Please don’t forget that most people don’t comment.
Might as well also give mine. (Also thanks for using my suggestion @Question Master)
Basically I really like animals and I created an oc based around this trait. She can talk to animals and befriend them. I figured Creature Tamer was a good moniker for such a character plus it sound badass in my opinion.
I set the first thing that came to my mind as my Google Play Games app (or however it’s called, English isn’t my native language so it shows different name on my phone). I like cutlets, I have a fascination for military stuff, and I was going through a mild edgy teen phase so it sounded cooler in a foreign language. Also I misspelled it resulting in “Capitain” instead of “Captain”. From that I started using it in games and later on social media, and now I’m very glad I came up with it. One time I ended up playing a game with a group of other people with “[military rank]+[food]” usernames, and we had a very fun time.
In Polish it sounds quite similar “KapitanKotlet”.
Oh my gosh I am VERY late homework is a real pain sometimes
My username is based on a funny story where I accidentally brought two umbrellas to school. My friends started calling me the umbrella master, and so Umbrella Master was created. I also have like seven more in my locker at school because I never remember to bring the umbrellas home, so that adds to the master-ness I guess.
It’s one of the first names I chose for myself. The V is an initial for the first one I ever chose, of which will remain a secret. I’ve settled on a different name, but I still like this as a username.
My username is the name of my persona in a world I’m building. It translates from a conlang I’m working on to “Fallen star” Fil = Fall; -Ar = a suffix meaning “Great” (So “Filar” means great fall, fallen or dead); Istil = star. Conlang is fun.
When I first got access to the whole of the internet (I had just graduated high school and my aunt and uncle gifted me my very first PC) I got into online RolePlay immediately. My very first character was named Shadow Cat in Japanese because I loved all things Japanese with a passion, but her story ended up being so tragic and sad I didn’t want to keep the name and so I recreated myself anew as the Rose Fox (still in japanese) and because I never really used her as a character other than as my representative avatar – she stuck.
* also I naturally assumed the roll of a Furry long before I even knew what it meant, possibly before it had an official definition. 😛
I wanted to comment once but i just kept doing it so yeah.
I can’t remember well, but I think it’s what spirits in some myths/beliefs, and also fairies, are called as.
The literal naming, however, was subconsciously inspired by the tissue paper.
I had to pick a name that was no longer then 5 letters for same games back in the day. Since i read books before getting into computers, i choose the name of “Adaon”, a Son of Talisien the Bard, out of the series “Taran”. He is a nice guy, couragous, has dreams of the future and knows he will die saving someone.
There were two major components. Firstly and most prominently, I’m a big animal person- specifically, a dog person- and thus own a very floofy Maltipoo. Second, I’m an Ao3 user, and I know I’ve seen several usernames there that use “TheOneAndOnly” as a sort of prefix to make an interesting user. I thought it would be a better user than SugarSpice (which is my go-to for usernames), and as a bonus I can (only semi-truthfully) say I’m part of the floof squad!
Karry is one of my first oc’s and probably zhe one i love and identify with the most and i somewhen in a time long gone saw an account that had the descripzion “what a mess”, which i loved because i am too a mess so it stuck
EllaAnnieGrace is the name of an OC that I created when I was younger, who looked like me at the time, and I’ve used it for everything.
Back when I was a little kid I was obsessed with Mudkip and I always wanted to name one Swampy, but lacking actually owning any Pokémon games I settled for naming everything online SwampytheMudkip. As I got older I dropped the part about the mudkip in favour of just the name. Unfortunately by the time I got my hands on a pokémon game, I’d realised the name was now mine, and I didn’t think it right to have both player character and their pokémon with the same name, so now its become my default name
Mine originated on playstation, I wanted to go by Basilisk but that was obviously taken, so instead I just added extra syllables until I had something unique. Now it’s just my go to username for the internet!
nvm i was wrong ig
A diaspora of one. Sounds like a hoot.
You bet I will remember Vira ’till the end of this comic, but then in reality… there’s so much to grieve… I’m not sure where to even start, and where to move onto next, I’m a bit overwelmed in the moment. I will be thinking about this for a long time.
It’s really good storytelling on Red’s part. It’s easy to quickly move past the destruction of Vash, since it happens so quickly, but here we meet specific people who died in the destruction, and we begin to feel the extreme loss of an entire city of people. Everyone in Vash died- women, men, and children like Vira. The full scope of it hits now, and everyone in the comments section is crying (including me).
It’s a proven thing that putting a face to a tragedy is what makes people understand the depths of that tragedy. Showing, not telling. Someone tells you that an entire city died, and you understand the weight of that, but don’t feel anything. Someone tells you that Vira died in the city’s destruction, that she was a child who never got a chance to grow up and died horribly, and it connects.
“There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parent and his sister had gone. No reaction. He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab: the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone! Nelson’s Column had gone! and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry! From now on Nelson’s Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.
He tried again: America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it, He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every “Bogart” movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger.
He passed out.”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
Ough, my heart …
alas, it ’twas not Iras after all
anyway, this is really sad, like REALLY sad, and Kendal needs a) therapy and b) to write a book recording these people’s lives
Oh HELL my feels.
This is one of the things, perhaps the main one nowadays, that makes me absolutely paralysed. Wars. Murder. Willing erasure of peoples cultures languages histories knowledge art EVERYTHING… How they just end. Disappear. Everything, gone. They lived, they had things still to do, but they were cut short! And still are.
…I’m going to need a cup of tea now. Oh, Vira, thanks <3
Feels… Bad?
After Kendal saves Vash, the rest of his life mission is going to be making a record of the names and histories of every single person who died there.
I would say that Kendal is literally a walking record of everyone that lived in Vash
A one-man monument to the lives lost, so that they may be remembered.
Oh my god he has a missing tooth- absolute cuteness.
He’s the same age as one of the protagonists in this thing I’m writing and I think they’d get along. *dreamily thinks about what could have been if these two kids didn’t live in completely different fantasy worlds*
Can you have survivors guilt if you became alive after the tragic event?
There’s a certain type of mood whiplash that’s only achievable though the innocent acts of a child. The missing tooth grin, joyful dialogue as they’re going to tell their mum something cool, existing with a “BLOOP”. There’s something nicely natural about this kind of mood change, and it looks like it was just the thing to snap Kendal out of his stupor … if only to replace it with confusion.
Everyone’s legacy still lives as long as Kendal lives; when this is over he should, as @veggiesnake said, try and find a method to record as much as he can. And who knows? If the rescue of Vash is successful, and Vash historically being open to godless, they might be able to found a new city with a permanent memorial to the old one and it’s people.
In a strictly technical sense, Kendal began to exist when Vash was removed from the body, but since he has a lot of memories that predate his awakening as a separate entity, it’s not really fair to say Kendal wasn’t there for that part. If he remembers the people and where they lived, that’s as good as having been there.
tbh, we could even say Kendal was born the moment Vash incarnated in 1-1-3, if he is, as he suggested, Vash’s “war machine” of a body, since Kendal is clearly alive and ‘existing’ even whenever Vash inhabits his body. if Kendal is reborn every time Vash incarnates, it makes sense that he’s been there for much of Vash’s history, despite not really being himself, and now that Alinua’s mutated/healed him, he can probably survive on his own somewhat indefinitely (although without any Void/Consumption, idk how long his body will sustain itself, before it breaks down like a homunculus)
Congratulations Red, you have caused me to shed tears
I was expecting to be sad but I was not ready for this
Do I see a smallish glint of hope? Seeing the ones who lived in the city cheering him can take away Kendal’s grief
@Saga: I would say that Kendal is literally a walking record of everyone that lived in Vash
I’m NOT CRYING these are NOT TEARS you’re the one crying I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING
(hands Isolde a virtual slightly damp handkerchief for her eyes.)
Apologies to those offended by gendered language…
The First Death, when your body ceases to function.
The Second Death, when the last person that remembers you dies.
The Third Death, when the last record of you slips out of history.
There once was the victim of a crime
Who reminded, with innocence sublime,
That though they were dead,
They lived on in his head;
That Vash hasn’t died a second time.
I’ve been thinking about why so many people are writing poems on this webcomic and I have come to the conclusion that Red’s drawings are poetry in visual form and so people feel compelled to acknowledge and celebrate that with poems in written form.
P.S. Thanks to Shakal for inadvertently giving me the line that wrote the rest of the limerick.
I posited that the brushstrokes are the substrate;
By brushstrokes I mean the fingerprints of the artist, not just in the medium of painting…
at this point our understanding of most things is based on the work (shoulders) of those who came before, Herman Hesse is my personal favorite.
They’re brushstrokes, including the copious number of religious art both written and visual, architectural are the skeleton on which a personal understanding of our world, universe hang upon.
Math and science are the “rules” we use to differentiate fever dreams from radical insight; endings are hard to write if you are trying to avoid cliches or tropes at this point.
“there is nothing new under the sun”
if the majority of individual human existence left little record then what we consider history is the result of group/community work & art.
Even major artistic movements, while a main name may stand out are the results of artistic communities, groups giving each other feedback and support. Sometimes the greatest artist is not the innovator but a student who surpassed their master.
This. This right here might be what Kendal needs; Alinua asked in the previous chapter if Kendal could gain a will to live as long as he’s living for someone else. This reminder that Kendal is the only part of Vash’s legacy that both remembers it and can still make an impact on the world… It might give him a reason to keep himself alive long enough to develop an actual sense of self-worth.
i’m not crying you’re crying
damn onion ninja
*sobs at 8am at work because this happened to hit RIGHT IN THE FUCKING FEELS DAMMIT RED*
I usually try to make jokes, but this page is just too emotional for it. AHHHHH
I want more dragons
(Trying to respond directly to Question Master just breaks the site for me)
It’s short for “tertium quid,” literally “third thing.” This is an idea in philosophy. When someone says “it’s got to be A or B!”, the tertium quid is the “C” that proves it doesn’t have to be that way. This applies to my life in a myriad of ways, though my bisexuality was probably the first impetus for adopting the handle.
This hurts so good ow
Sweet sweet Vira
TL;DR: Just stop feeling sorry already.
wow
In one single page you hit me with the full force of what exactly was lost when the Collector killed Vash
This is the webcomic equivalent to a sniper rifle to the heart. Thank you for making this
I find it nice that red considered the result of an entire city being destroyed and the implications of those who died and the one who survived and we got to see the thoughts of the people of Vash, and i hope Kendal takes them to heart.
<3
Sometimes I feel bad for being so stoic- I read a lot of stuff and people in the fandom talk about how emotional they are over something that happened and I wonder if I was supposed to feel something then. And then I feel bad because I didn’t.
Like with this page I’m like “Huh, such a cute kid” and everyone else is like “RED WHYYYYYY I’M CRYING THIS IS SO SAD”
Idk I think I have been battle hardened by all them historical fictions I read when I was younger.
I, too, wonder if I should bawl my eyes out at media more than I do.
Welp at least I’m not alone
Stoicism is complicated and affected by everything from natural inclination to having learned to guard your emotions because of other people’s reactions (i.e. comments like “real men don’t cry”).
But if you want to have that intense sensation despite difficulty having it come naturally to you, reach for a memory of when you have cried, and see how some of those feelings might apply to Kendal, and do your best to *be* Kendal while he’s feeling these emotions. It’s pretty much the same concept as method acting. Try to simply be the person, instead of analyzing the person. Sink into and become part of the scene.
I am not saying it’s easy, but it’s the path I know. For me, it no longer takes much effort to get there, but I used to have much thicker emotional barriers. As an additional bonus, being able to reach other emotions easier seems to have put a damper on the quickness of my anger.
Huh, interesting technique. I’ll try it out. Thankyou.
OH…….. OHHHHH MY GODDDD ok. …..
Heh. Fleur. As in “flour”. The lady worked at a bakery.
GENIUS
Ohhh, I didn’t catch that. And it relies on a verbal pun too.
I now want to name a botanist character Farine.
*ahem* “Remember us, Remember that we once lived”
AHHHH THE MISSING TOOTH NO VIRA OH MY GOD NO I’M NOT CRYING THAT’S ALLERGIES~
I know, I know, this page is supposed to make me feel things, but the only thought in my mind is ‘hehe, the child went bloop into the goop’
Remember me
Though I have to say goodbye,
Remember me
Even though it makes you cry,
For even though I’m far away
I’ll hold you in my heart
Red? Did you just invent the “Whole Civilization Feels Punch”? Think you did, and have punched your readership with it.
“Whole Civilization Feels Punch”
this feels like an accurate description of 2020?
Augh it’s just the perfect combo of story elements– legacies, acceptance, bittersweetness, all somehow more heartstabbingy than if it were all just sad and dark. Yep, the writing is great here. I love it.
There’s the tears of sadness, and then there’s the tears of being lifted out of sadness into a heartache that opens you up to the world you had forgotten.
Do you mind if I write that down somewhere, actually? It explains a lot of the more complex and hard-to-explain emotions in storytelling in a really concise and elegant way (I’m not planning to put it in a project or anything, just in a note or something for future reference)
there needs to be a like button cause seriously that’s amazing
@QuestionMaster (username question)
I think something broke the replies… It’s blanking out if I try to reply to anything close to the chain /sad. Hope yalls see this. If anyone else is struggling, feel free to start a new chain under me if that works better.
I first used this one for my account on the PvZ mobile game- humble beginnings, ha- and the 66 is bc I used to put my age at the end of usernames, but kept forgetting what it was for specific accounts, so for this one I gave up & picked a number that was easy to remember but so far off from my real age that I wouldn’t have that problem. It stuck around, and although I use a couple other aliases, this is my default.
Hello fellow master of something
aaaAAAAA MY HEART
This. This is the kind of thing that hits me. HARD.
I’m blue dah bah dee dah bah dai