We've gone by a whole lot of names! Here's my attempt at summing up a bunch of 'em.
Names for Whisper
anotherwhisper
:: handle
July 2023
We probably chose this name when registering for Discord, since that was the first place we were publicly presenting (or using Whisper as a name at all, really). Clearly "whisper" was taken, so... who was she? Well... another whisper.
This one stuck around as very essential to her. Two key moments in Whis' experience of herself are both embodied through it: one following an irremnant winter, and one in the form of a pencil drawing.
portedly
:: handle / pseudo(?)-nym
September 2023
We signed up on rateyourmusic! This website included a box to enter one's last name, and... well, Whisper didn't have one? We came up with "Portedly" on the fly, and it's a pun: Whis, per-portedly
you know?
Portedly matters to her in about the same way that Philomela did to Jade. It's nowhere near their common parlance, but there's something personally special there, you know?
Whisper uses "portedly" as her handle in any unix-y space.
Whisper's sideboob (yuri)
:: display name
July 2024
I don't actually know when we started using this name LOL
It's part of the Sonic server we're in. Lots of folk there have fun display names, so... It maybe sort-of originates from an analysis we did of (Whisper's) hands throughout the Tangle & Whisper IDW mini-series. We took note of a couple standout sideboob moments and connected those with plenty elsewhere in the comics, and vowed one decade to do a similar thread...
But in truth we have a screenshot showing she'd set her display name, at the latest, on that very day! So maybe it's from a little earlier.
The "yuri" part comes from the great war against yuri. I mean y*ri. ("Yuri" was the Banned Word of the Week for a while.) At first, of course, "y*ri" was censored - and so was "sideb**b"! But eventually we just had to have both show.
Names for Jackie-Tangle
Tangle
:: personal
September 2023
This one's somehow even harder to pin than Whisper. Like hers, it's from IDW Sonic, and it has emotional roots for us in all the same media (Flawless' fics especially, but also Differences by Marlbearo, for example). The first time we used it publicly was also in the HSMusic discord, riiiight before LOFAM5A2 released.
The in-between time is basically impossible to pin, though. We have a couple early drawings that are maybe and definitely about me (from Whis' perspective, though). Lan's notes on another nearby piece say my first signed-by-me messages are from... yeah, early-mid September too! Plus there was a dentist appointment where we sort of imagined just accepting ourselves as plural, maybe a little earlier. That was a big moment for me probably, but I dunno about the turning point for this name. Oop!
leslemur
:: handle
September 2023
I had to have some name online...
I'm not sure why I didn't pick something with my own name ("tangle") as part of it, like Whisper had, but I feel like that could have been deliberate?
"Les" is short for "lesbian", in case you were curious.
kisspangle (the lemur)
:: display name
November 2024
Mastodon! As soon as I came up with this I became really annoyed that I'm not a pornstar or world-renowned smuttist.
All Tangled Up
:: display name
December 2024
It came to me in a dream! Well, not really. This is for the Sonic server again, a few months later than Lan and Whisper... I'd been dying for my own fun name for ages, but it just took this long!
I really really don't know how I got this name. I just heard it, inside myself? And I knew it was right!
This turned out to be very immediate foreshadowing.
Jackie-Tangle
:: personal
December 2024
This name isn't the "reason" I'm writing this page - I set a freaking reminder to start it, this morning! But I don't know why! And then half a dozen hours later, this one comes to me...
This name derives from the word "jacket".
I brought a jacket (jackie for short) its fiiiineeeeee
JACKIE LOL
Me
tbh
if i did have a name besides tangle
thats a pretty good one
Then I consulted with a friend we only occasionally with, who'd just a day or two changed his own name (and we'd congratulated him on that the day before), and asked if I should use "Jackie" just for pretend.
It turned out to be less pretend? Because it felt great, immediately?
I decided to say hi in the HSMusic discord (like usual) and figured I really needed a new avatar already. I'd had the previous one for pretty much the whole frickin' year, and... I mean, I liked it... but I needed a new one! I needed it!
And I did find a new one, so it was probably fate.
Names for Surge
Surge
:: personal
September 2023
I have no idea when Surge came around, exactly... but I know when she was here, we knew she was, and she sure knew her own name. She just kept it to herself; we only heard its echo.
Surge didn't publicly write until the start of August 2024! And leading into then, late July 2024, is when she decided she was set... she'd been speaking through us - mostly through me - for a bit before. But she'd been Surge from the start.
A key bit of writing for her is A Spark That Won't Go Out. Relatively speaking, it came ages after she found her name, but this story sorta helped her find herself. It's probably not much of a coincidence that Lan drew from the previous longfic by SKOJukebox, too.
ten.tarrasques
:: handle
July 2024
The moment that finally got Surge bringing herself out was reading IDW #71! It was a pretty special issue for her, if mostly for finally, finally depicting Surge in a way that felt... well, like Surge, to her. Something clicked with how she felt.
So she needed a username. She came up with this one spur of the moment, probably like the rest of us. The pitch is as rock simple as it gets: What's scarier than meeting the legendary tarrasque? Meeting ten of 'em!
We had no idea how to actually spell "tarrasque" until figuring out her handle. We continued to struggle.
Surge!
:: display name
August 2024
Surge wanted a custom display name for the Sonic server too! It didn't feel right to improvise a joke, though... and she was wayyyy too impatient for a silly scenario to come naturally...
I'm not receiving permission to describe this one as "tacking" on an exclamation mark LOL
Anyway, an exclamation mark certainly did the job. She'd use it as her real-deal totally official name if she could. There is probably no association with P!nk?
Names for Lanolin
Lan
:: personal / nick
January 2024
Lan! She took her own name in a moment that felt spontaneous to her then and there, and started using it both in real life and online practically the very next day. It was probably clear from the start that she'd been, like, on her way, for at least a minute or two earlier, though.
For one, we'd just read (or been reading, whatever) I'm Doing This for Revenge, which immediately became an essential story for Whisper and Lan both. We also remember writing about or processing feelings about Lanolin, the character, sort of a lot. She came by pretty much after we'd written our series of whispangle, assorted, including irremnant winter / another whisper... between that and paralysis, pistillate and maybe some other writings, we'd been Thinking About Lanolin pretty deeply for a while.
Even so, Lan picked "Lan" because it felt right, and because she felt she was there. Nothing more and nothing less!
illust.lan
:: handle
January 2024
We figured this name on the fly, as usual. Lan figured it out almost the same time as she figured herself out, since she hopped on Discord just a moment or two later. The name doesn't necessarily feel like more than "just a name" to her, but she's totally always liked it. Mostly anyway!
"Illust." is secretly short for both "illustrator" and "illustrious".
Lanolin
:: personal
February 2024
Lan didn't start out as Lanolin - not as that name, anyway. It's a secret to herself in that moment, why she chose the shorter form, but we figure that even though she acknowledged her roots in Sonic and in particular stories, she might've wanted to set herself apart. She also might've looked at me and Whisper both using, well, exactly our source names, and decided... you know, why not do something different? "Why not?" was pretty much the question that drove her to show in the first place, after all.
Still, with a bit of time - we have no idea exactly how long - "Lanolin" came to be, well, who she was.
A big connective moment was seeing Adam Bryce Thomas' art of Lanolin and her mom (e621). Maybe also immediately finding a place for ABT's February 9th commission stream in a PIP video everpresent in the corner of her workspace haha, plus others of his works... I think there might've been something not weird but like, disillusory, about watching and casually hanging out in the art stream of the guy who literally designed your character. Treating "Lanolin" like a name to run from never felt right, and maybe those experiences highlighted it.
Lanolin might've first introduced herself so in February 2024. Whisper's always liked calling her by her whole name, and the first public mark of that is from March 2024.
Lan's icecream and makeouts
:: display name
July 2024
There was a circumstance or two in the Sonic server.
