Meme: What's in a Name?

[white_oleander]

Oooh, oooh! Invites just came through, so I can post this, and my day is starting out with being super sick but I still have to go to work, so I'm going to just jump right on this and post a meme I've been wanting to do for a while now that I had to go all the way back to March 2014 to find the last instance of, which is crazy, because it's kind of my favorite.

Tell us about your character's journal name, what it means and how you decided on it?

I wanted to post this specifically under Astrid because hers is incredibly dumb yet makes for an effective example. Her journal name is white_oleander because...wait for it....it's the title of her canon, White Oleander. I know, my creativity astounds me sometimes.

So let's hear yours! AU journals, AU kids, NPCs, all that stuff counts, too!

Comments

[white_oleander]

Conversely, Astrid was almost "nothingwithturquoise", to be a direct counterbalance to somethingwithturquoise, because there's actually a passage in the book where she's horrified to discover the new home she'll be staying in is turquoise. "Anything but turquoise!" Apparently, she really hates turquoise.

But I decided they're just too similar, and I would end up just confusing myself constantly.

[always_someone]

Guh, I love this meeeeeme. Norman's username was taken right out of a quote from canon, near the end of the movie:

Norman: Sometimes when people get scared, they say and do terrible things. I think you got so scared that you forgot who you are. But I don't think you're a witch. Not really.

Aggie: You don't?

Norman: I think you're just a little kid with a really special gift who only ever wanted people to understand her. So we're not all that different at all.

Aggie: But what about the people who hurt you? Don't you ever want to make them suffer?

Norman: Well, yeah, but what good would that do? You think just because there's bad people that there's no good ones either? I thought the same thing for a while. But there's always someone out there for you. Somewhere.

[era_two_triangle]

I'll forever be sad that angry_pie_slice was taken over here on DW, since it's taken from a great little quote where Steven realizes that Peridot is actually really tiny without her limb enhancers and calls her an "angry little slice of pie."

BUT her current username works just as well for me, even if it isn't adorable. It's sort of a mashup of that one time Steven called her an ominous triangle, and that other more 'nother time where she explained that Era Two Peridots, that is, Peridots who were made after the great Gem War, were made with a lack of resources available and so they were made without powers that are commonplace to other Gems.

[furnaceface]

Jono's powers had once in canon been described as a bio-nuclear psionic furnace.

This name popped into my head, alliterated beautifully, and I laughed for fifteen minutes so I had to make a journal by this name, ending my forever dilemma about whether to app Jono or Angelo, another member of Generation X.

His other username back on LJ, Apocalipped, was because of... well. See icon.

[myownface]

So, the creator of Sparkle's canon, Judith Thompson, is pretty renowned for her monologues in the plays she writes. Sparkle gets all of one, after he tries to stop his only friend from hurting herself and she screams in his face that he doesn't care about anything:

"I care about whether I'm warm enough, or cool enough, or good-looking enough, or if my nails are looking raggy, or if Lewis touched me on the shoulder, or seemed to be looking at me, or if I want to get stoned, or my ass is itchy or I want to eat or if Lewis thinks I'm funny but I don't care about anything. Like when I see those black and white films on educational TV about the Nazis emptying truckloads of bodies into ditches, or Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda and those people, those ordinary people who like turned on their neighbours, and their best friends, and their sisters and brothers and even their mothers hacking off their hands and feet, shooting old women who are on their knees begging begging for the lives of their grandchildren I look at their faces and I see my own face." *He lights a sparkler and watches it burn out*

[puppy_fair]

Zack's last name is Fair, and in canon he's frequently compared to a puppy.

... Not all of my usernames have to be inspired.

[intraspective]

From good old Webster's:

Definition of Intraspective

In`tro*spec"tive (?), a. [Cf. F. introspectif.]

1. Inspecting within; seeing inwardly; capable of, or exercising, inspection; self-conscious.

Given Ino's mind powers, my own desire for a change from flowering_mind, and the the move to DW, when I found this word, I decided to use it.

[raspberryturk]

The most baseline of playing on words. Reno's hair is red. Like, BZZT, red. Like a raspberry!

Also he blows raspberries in the canonical promotional art a lot? And he's a Turk.

Boom.

[justice_undone]

As a spaceship, before she was destroyed, Breq was called Justice of Toren.

[seriesofbaddecisions]

Im terrible at usernames, and tend to go for quotes to make it easier on myself. And in the middle of the atc dealing with Sabine's backstory (see info post) when the future leader of Mandalore finds out that the superweapon was named after her sister, Sabine's reply is "It was a series of bad decisions, okay?"

And really, that series of bad decisions is why she ends up where she does and is her big motivation, even if she doesn't tell anyone, so.

[studyingfear]

Rufus' username is a play off of a quote of his from canon, where he says:

"I'll control the world with fear. It takes too much to do it like my old man. A little fear will control the minds of the common people. There's no reason to waste money on them."

Now, Rufus isn't in position to rule the world yet. So he's studying fear. XD

[1000yearstoolate]

Seivarden ended up in a supension pod after her ship was destroyed, and she was found a thousand years later, waking up to find her world changed. I tried a lot of variations of this, but 1000yearstoolate was short enough to work.

[uncertain_dume]

I'm actually kind of proud on this one because of all the levels it works on.

For a start, it's obviously a play on "Certain Doom." We all knew when the series started that, by A New Hope, for whatever reason, Kanan simply couldn't be in the picture. There would have been mention of a Jedi running around the Galaxy, playing a major role in the creation of the rebellion that Luke and company ended up joining, and there was nothing.

But why that was was still up in the air. So "Uncertain Doom." Which also works nicely because at this point in his life pretty much right up to the bitter end, Kanan is in a state of flux and confusion about his point in the Galaxy, and about who it is he's meant to be and why he, of all people, got to survive something that so many Jedi who were greater than him didn't.

Then take that 'Doom' and replace it with his actual last name, Dume, which is said exactly the same way, and the whole thing ties neatly right back to him. He's Caleb Dume turned Kanan Jarrus, who doesn't know who he's meant to be anymore and whose fate was, at the time, still uncertain.

[that_oldsaying]

Alluka is the way she is because of Nanika. And Nanika grants wishes, indiscriminately, so long as people pay her prices.

Which immediately brought to mind the whole 'Be careful what you wish for' saying.

I didn't like any permutation of that as a user name, though, so I decided to stick that in the header of her journal and have her username be a reference to it in another way. Hence, that old saying.

[crimson_sister]

Lucille and her brother are very close (very close) and their home is also called Crimson Peak because the red clay from the mine stains the ground blood red. And blood. She kills people.

[future_sandworm]

Leto is gradually turning into a sandworm. When I first created the journal back on Livejournal, he didn't know this of course. Now he's begun that transformation, but as he still look mostly human apart from weird skin patches I think it still works.

[died8yearsago]

B99 is so freaking quoteable that I had so many options to potentially choose from, but I settled on died8yearsago, which was my first choice, and I think it was a good choice, because it still makes me giggle every time I read or type it out.

Basically, it's from a scene in the first season where Rosa's trying to avoid Boyle. He just got shot in the ass to stop a bullet from hitting her, and he's on all sorts of pain killers that are making him be extremely honest and frank. Now, Boyle at this point has a huge crush on Rosa, and she's worried he's going to announce his love for her and she cannot deal with that. So she decided to hide out in a coat closet and tells Gina to keep an eye out and fend Boyle off if he comes looking for her.


Boyle: Have you seen Rosa?
Gina: Rosa died eight years ago.

There's just something so emphatic and convincing about Chelsea Peretti's delivery of that line that gets me every. single. time. Also, just the fact that her mind constructs this AU where Rosa's been dead this whole time. Not "Oh, she left a bit ago" or "Oh, you just missed her." No, Gina goes straight to Sixth Sense-level twist with it, and it's great.

[died8yearsago]

I'm just going to take this moment to mention that the parallel in their usernames involving a number+years+somethingbad is one of the many things that brings me joy whenever these two get together.

[gobrookeyourself]

Well, it means exactly what it sounds like.

I don't remember why I went with it in the first place, and I seriously thought about changing it when I brought her back, but I could t think if anything I liked and thought, "Well, brand recognition."

[thatwaslucky]

When I apped Rey, I had it written within 24 hours of seeing TFA, before we knew a ton of stuff about her or where she might go. But there's a throwaway line in the middle of the rathtar sequence where she hits the right thing and says, kinda surprise, "That was lucky!" And while there were all the complaints of her being a Mary Sue and how she shouldn't be good at all this stuff, but that's how Force sensitives tended to be described, as lucking into things or being good at stuff without knowing why. So, it fit.

She miiiight get a name change when she hits canon but I'd have to come up with one first.

[throughaphase]

Because you can't play Kitty Pryde without a username that plays on the word "phase." It's just too perfect.

[1000yearstoolate]

Yes! I hadn't thought about that. I love them together too. And I had actually thought about asking about Rosa's username, since her canon didn't seem like the kind where people did die and come back after eight years. I might be wrong though?

[somethingwithturquoise]

somethingwithturquoise was my ultimate top number one username for Summer, but when I was going to app her, the game was still over at LJ, thus it was much too long.

But wait! What's this? It's actually been decided that the game is going to move to Dreamwidth just as I'm bringing her in, where the username limit is...longer?

S E R E N D I P I T Y!

If I needed a sign to know it was a good time to come back, that seemed like a pretty good.

It's from a scene in an episode where Summer and her parents are using a machine that Rick brings in that allows them to look into their lives in other dimensions, because you know that's always a good, healthy thing to do. In most of them, Summer doesn't even exist, having never been born while her parents aren't together and off succeeding in life, and the ones where she was born, they're just sitting around doing boring things like playing Parcheesi and Scrabble. Not a exactly a great thing for an impressionable teenager's self-esteem. So she goes into a little bit of a spiral, since obviously her parents' lives would be better if she was never born, and decides to run away "to the southwest" to "I don't know! Do something with turquoise!"

And voila. A username is born.

Other top contenders included being held "verbally hostage" and "Summer for the win"

[notconflicted]

This one is from Nick, because again, I suck at this, and he brought up a conversation Sia has in canon with her terrible boyfriend, who's got conflicted loyalties between her and his duty and orders, and she tells him she does t have that problem. And she really does t. She wants a very different life for herself than what she has but there's no question that she'll stick with it, and if she decides on something, she doesn't waste time second guessing herself. So.

[heroic_jawline]

In the Avengers' commentary track, Joss is talking through the sequence where Tony and Steve are meeting for the first time and makes a joke about Chris Evan's jaw clench, calling it his "heroic jawline" and it was just too perfect.

Plus by the time I was playing Cap, all the really easy usernames were taken.