Aerinravage's GamerCard

Monday, January 1, 2007

About the Name

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, so keep up. Back in the BBS days, I created a couple of aliases. The one that stuck was Aerin Ravage. When I first created it 20+ years ago, I wasn't paying attention to the spelling so much as I thought it was a cool sounding name. When I met fellow BBSers at any of the annual board parties, most simply accepted the name. Mine was far less interesting than most and besides, most boarders were very tolerant and open-minded.

I did eventually get teased for the gender confusion the name caused non-BBSers I told. But, by then, it was too late and I kept it. Besides, I was paving the way for guys everywhere: MMORPG really means Mostly Men Online Role-Playing Girls, right?

Two years later (still 2 decades ago), Aerin got a middle name. The initial is H., and I don't know you all well enough to share it. Besides, Fhox would probably tease me mercilessly about it. But I chose the middle name in honor of a close female friend.

As for what Aerin "looks" like in my mind, she's gone through a number of changes, but spending most of the time as a formless character personality. It wasn't until I loaded up FFXI and played around with the character generator that I needed to pull that persona out of the file cabinet of my mind. I read up on the stat balances for the jobs I was most interested, RDM and WHM, and I went Mithra because Humes are boring.

I think I experimented with variations of Aerin, H, and Ravage abandoning most because only the first letter is capped and you can't use any kind of spacing or symbol to break up the name. I think I had to pass on Aerin since it was in use and so Aerinravage it was. Putting in my chosen name and submitting was a tense process as I figured I'd be too late and have to keep tweaking, but it was accepted.

Since I've been online for 18 months now, I think Aerin is now permanently linked to a white-haired Mithra of medium size. If I ever have to switch MMOs I don't know if the name would follow or not, but hopefully that day is long off.

What I haven't done yet is write a good backstory for my furry friend. I may never, since I don't know enough about the canonical Mithran history to set the context well enough. But there are times I want Aer to be a little deeper.

Plus, it would probably annoy Fhox if I posted some elaborate historical thing about his favorite WHM Amateur. If we ever have an RDB meetup in real life, I wonder how Fhox (or the others) would react... Especially if I'm ever able to afford a good cosplay outfit ^^