What's the story behind your screen name?

[Kasei]

I don't know if this topic has been broached before or not (or if all of you already know each other's stories/reasons) but I am curious....what is the story behind your screen name, if any? Also, how do you pronounce it? It is sometimes funny to find that the way I have been pronouncing people's online handles in my mind has been wrong for years.


Mine is not that exciting and reveals exactly how incredibly (un)creative I am: My real name is Kasey. I just swapped the y with an i, ta-da! *crickets* This amazing idea was cultivated by my 7th grade self in my attempt to make a DBZ fan character version of myself. x3 Lame, I know. I have always pronounced it just like my real name, though I have heard that others have said it "Kah-say" or some similar effect.

I doubt anyone is old enough to remember me from this long ago (especially since I was such a lurker) but when I first joined the archive my full username was Kasei_Tomodatchi because that was my fan character's full name. Her last name is the japanese word for "friend" with a letter t added because, as a 13 year old, I decided that it would seem more like a real last name if it were just similar to a real word but spelled different. Because that makes sense. e_e Also I found out later that Kasei actually means Mars in Japanese....which is cool because I have always wanted to be the first person to live on Mars, so yay! It must be a sign! Better fill out my Mars One application....x3

Your turn!

[Azerane]

I'm way off on your name then! I remember your original archive name, but have always pronounced Kasei as Kaz-eye

Will type up mine when I'm not on a phone and have laptop access again.

[nathalie]

Rarely I use my own name on boards, because I hate it when people I don't know shorten it.

For some reason I did use my real name here. And I do prefer to have the TH sound in my name when speaking english then just the T.

[Sombolia]

This kind of stuff is really interesting!
Um, my username here is the name of the first TLK fan character I made, when I was about 10 or 11. I literally just made it up, haha, I wanted something that sounded TLK-ish. If you google it's mostly me, but it seems there's also a couple other people with the name Sombolia on the internet, which is weird. I don't think it means anything in any kind of language, so it must be a coincidence.
Anyway, the character used to be my fursona, but I don't really use her anymore. I just use the name because it's what people know me by.
It's pronounced pretty much how it looks: som-BOL-ee-uh.

[TommyP32891]

Mine is very simple, my first name, the first letter of my last then my birthday.

[KanuTGL]

Hehe, I always like these threads!

I'm just gonna copy-paste a post I made on the same subject on another forum, because it's too long

"Kanu" was a word I got off a Lion King fan site in 2002 that listed some random African words and their meanings (so people could use them for their characters, I guess). Kanu supposedly meant "wild cat" and I thought that that had the best meaning. Thus I chose that name for my persona lioness even though I didn't think it sounded that cool, or particularly feminine for that matter, to begin with. (And to this day I haven't seen many other female Kanus... I don't think there are any others I know of in the TLK community.) But I found the name's meaning, rather than how it sounded, to be the most important so I stuck with it and now I could never let it go, haha.

I made my full username "Kanu, the golden lioness", but after about a year I grew too tired of typing out the full name all the time (it is soo loong), so then I ended up with "KanuTGL" and that is the way it has remained since then. Kanu is ten years old now...! I wish I could find out the exact day she was created, but alas, that e-mail history is long gone. I never questioned the name meaning until a couple of years ago either... Turns out that the word "kanu" in Swahili means "genet", not "wild cat" (genets are really cool animals, but still... xD) and that the name Kanu is a male name from India and can mean either "handsome" or something related to some thunder god... Uhm, whoops. But, like I said, I could never let go of it now I don't really know how it's pronounced, but I tend to say "KAH-nu".

[Simbaspirit]

Mine was just the creation of a 12 year old mine.. It's pretty straightforward, just the spirit of simba, how he's in my life, the forum etc. When I signed up I was the only one with that name, but there is now a deviantart user with the name simbaspirit... makes me wonder if they saw my user name on the various websites I'm registered on and liked the name

[Lweek]

My nickname is actually 10 years old. Invented by my dear friend Tabbiefox. Some friends used to call me "lvik", which is cute form for word "lion" in czech language. He drew a picture for me and put title "lw33k" on it just make "lvik" more cooler. I like the fact that if an english speaking person read "lweek" he make sounds very close to how "lvik" sounds in original. So I have began using this nick and I still like it.

[Dare]

I've had many online screen names, but "Dare" is the one I always wind up coming back to and the one that most online folks associate with me. I've been using it since I joined the TLK.forum in '99, but it originally stems from an old offline nickname I got when I did some pretty stupid physical stunts as a tot. You know what scene where Banzai lands in the giant thorn bush and gets turned into a pincushion? That actually happened to me once (before the movie came out, though).

Anyway, I decided to go with "Dare" because it was short, easy to remember, and unique on a forum full of names inspired by TLK (I used to keep a chart of how many ___Kiaras there were on the forum, so I wouldn't get anyone mixed up), Balto, Pokemon and/or other Anime. The way it's pronounced, though, varies on the context - "Dare" doubles as an RP character. As an RP character, her name is pronounced "Day-reh". When it's me (hullo!), it's the plain ol' mono-syllabic English-pronunciation of "dare".

[Juniper]

I used to play paintball.

[Kasei]

These are really interesting! Especially yours pntbll248. xD No but really, I do like reading these. Dare, I never thought to pronounce your fursona's name differently than the way I say your screen name, good to know! And Lvik, that's really cool about your language. Out of curiosity, how do you say Lion in Czech?

(Tommy, do you go by another screen name on Lilymud or somewhere else? I feel like I saw you some other place before...or maybe I'm just crazy.

[Azerane]

Ok, I managed to steal Pat's computer for a few minutes while he's napping

I've had the name Azerane since 2001, one of my best friends at school was writing a story and she was going to include me as a dragon character, so I had to come up with a name for myself. Azerane is completely original since I assembled it from letters in my first and last names. The first time I used it online was in late 2002 when I joined TLKFAA. So I guess I've had the name for 12 years now, crazy.

[Leorgathar]

Very interesting origins y'all

As for my username, Leorgathar was a character I created once for a story I started writing about 8 years ago. You can see a couple of sketches of him here and here.
I drew this character back in 2005. In the beginning he was just "Leor", then I wanted to give him a name with more syllables, but I still wanted it to start with Leor-. Later on, I just came up with the rest of the name naturally, and since it didn't show any results when I googled it, I thought it was perfect and kept it xD.

I think I progressed very well on that story, but I decided to abandon it for many reasons and I ended up keeping the name for myself. Sometimes I feel tempted to return to it, but I have moved on to something else now

[King Simba]

Mine is just based on Simba when he becomes King in TLK. Very interesting and original, I know. Maybe I should have chosen a more original and exciting username, but most people know me by this username now as I've had it since 2004, so I think I'd better stick with it.

Mine is not that exciting and reveals exactly how incredibly (un)creative I am: My real name is Kasey. I just swapped the y with an i, ta-da! *crickets* This amazing idea was cultivated by my 7th grade self in my attempt to make a DBZ fan character version of myself. x3 Lame, I know. I have always pronounced it just like my real name, though I have heard that others have said it "Kah-say" or some similar effect.

I always pronounced your name as "Kah-say". And hey, at least it's more creative than mine. I probably deserve the award for the most unoriginal username here.

[Guntur]

My current name is named after Thunder in Indonesian language. I read one of the Chinese comic when I was a teenagers and thought it would be cool to put it as a nickname. It also shows my undying love and admiration on character Thor.

I have a lot of screen name, mostly I'm using my real nickname Fendi, and my no 1 alias Zack2k on the other side!

[ThiagoPE]

In my case I use my real name + the ISO code of the state i live here in brazil.

The frist time i used this name was back in 1995 when i frist had contact with internet, in IRC chats

[cleargreenwater]

Oh boy, time to trot out the Clear Green Water story, huh?

I usually like to save that one for when I'm all navel-gazey and nostalgic, the feels just aren't jiveing for it at the moment. I don't know if I should just do the tl;dr version here now, or wait a few days when I'm less frazzled and can wax more poetic.

Or split the two topics up, there used to be a "What's your personal TLK story" thread in the Lion King section that's probably the better home for most of the musing anyway, I suppose it is completely tangential to the screen name question.

...eh, I'll try to keep it slim.



"Clear Green Water" itself actually pre-dates The Lion King by a little bit, and its kind of ridiculous how much of it I remember, but it was exciting stuff at the time, lol.

It was a surprisingly hot day in early summer, and my two childhood best friends and I were playing over at the one friend's house we always congregated at, and she had a pool there. Or rather, *should* have had a pool. It was never opened for the season and after much cajoling, she managed to convince her mother and uncles to take the cover off, but it was so hot and none too driven, they went back inside to the air conditioning after they did, leaving three unattended children in the 8-to-10 range and a murky, swampy pool they weren't allowed to swim in until the adults could get fussed to do the shock chemicals.

In one of those childhood memories that leaves you wondering just how many times in the course of your youth you could have died, we decided to take matters into our own hands and the three of us raided the pool supplies storage shed, opening wide a world of unlimited, unattended access to a prodigious stock of deadly chemicals. We were very sensible, though, and on a mission, so we collected various packaging with usage instructions on it and made off with it all to the alley on the side of the house between the garage and the fence where Crissy's family kept the garbage cans, (the thought being that if some grown-up came out of the house no-one would go near the garbage cans to find us, and indeed it was a pretty savy thought, for as an adult I'm no longer so fond of them myself :P) put our heads together, and started to research how to fix the pool water.

Crissy hit the jackpot, a booklet that included a troubleshooting section in the back of common water problems, and started reading through the list of assorted poolwater ailments. When Crissy read out loud the complaint heading "clear green water", the other girl Liane, easily the most precocious bossy one of us, triggered. "Clear green water? How clear can the water be if it's green??" and grabbed it away from Crissy. At which point, while Liane puzzled over the booklet, Crissy says, "It sounds like a band name! We should make a band, Clear Green Water!"

That was it. From then on that summer, we were Clear Green Water, the world-famous (???) band. Completely disregarding the fact that none of us had any musical skills, aptitudes, real aspirations, or intentions of ever really pursuing any, naturally, in that marvelous way kids have of just accepting that they're awesome enough to be exactly like Hannah Montana, or whoever it is with kids now. Crissy called glamourous lead singer, Liane took on the quintesential rockstar guitar hero position, and I claimed drummer because, you know, the drummers are always the philosophical ones :P We obsessed over what our tour bus would look like, what our album covers would be, worked on our rockstar autograph signatures and how awesome and fun we'd be with our fans, all kinds of Clear Green Water business.

The adults eventually got the pool in order, and none of us ever did take up any instruments.

But it was the biggest shared bond of childhood, together with The Lion King when it exploded. It goes without saying we latched on to the Hyenas when it did.

Much-much later when the internet became a standard pasttime in the home, I found the online TLK fandom and took it as a personal/artist/screen name. There really was (and is) nothing else it ever COULD be for me, as much as I've occassionally done wrong by it. And it's grown with me in meaning as a person as well, as much a part of my personal story now as the layers of memories that coined it.



....So much for short! So much for anonmity in all the re-tellings, too, but the repetition wore me down

[nathalie]

That's quite the story! Hehe

Whenever I see your name, it makes me think of the band CCR.

[Sharifu]

Well, my real name, Audra, means noble strength... So I looked up what noble was in Swahili, and that is "Sharifu". So there you go. At the time I created that name, I wanted to create a fursona for myself, that was like me, but in lioness form, so that's why I tried to create a name that fit for the real me. And since most of the characters in TLK are Swahili words, that's why I used a Swahili word.

[cleargreenwater]

^ Helps that Audra is an awesome real name in the first place, too. I don't know where or how I learned your RL name but whenever I hear it I think its great. < / off-topic FYI >