A Note On Pseudonyms

[redbrunja]

 nimblnymph  was commenting about sexism in language, and it got me thinking about usernames. Specifically, (and I know I have people on my flist who do this and I don't mean to be insulting, this is totally just my opinion) how much I hate it when people use some part of a character's name in their username.

You know.

Mrs_Hatake

I_heart_hakkai.

Anything with Snape or Severus.

Even more subtle references: blooming_sakura or whatever cause me to twitch.

First, I always wonder how long you are going to like that character enough that you want them to be the most visible part of how you present yourself online. Secondly, I make the assumption that you are fourteen and feel the need to wave around your fictional boyfriend or (also fairly common) your OTP like a banner. I also (despite knowing really excellent writers who do this, and often aren't writing about the character referenced in their handle) assume that your fanfic is not worth my time.

Comments

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Yes, or non-fannish literary fiction? Because I've done that twice now -- my LJ/fannish nick here is the successor to an earlier one borrowed from a highbrow British lit-fic author, which I used pretty continuously from my early BBS days up through all my early years on the internet proper. ;)

(What can I say, I am far too easily amused by the secret-handshake aspect of having a pseud that many folks won't even realize is not my real name, unless they've read the same books...)

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

See my comment to Portia, but the short answer is: no. It doesn't count.

(Speaking personally, if I was renaming myself, I'd be really tempted to do a subtle referent to Iwaya Sumire, because I relate to her so strongly and it is a lesser known manga.)

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

*nods* It's interesting to me, some of the way I tend to look at online handles lines up with you and some doesn't. The "MRS_CHARACTER_NAME" or "XXX_OTP_4EVA!!!_XXX" type definitely make me snicker or roll my eyes a little bit and presume the user is likely either very young, or immature for their years -- but I don't really make that much of a distinction between nicks that make more obscure/artsy/non-fannish character references and ones from big, popular, fannish properties, especially if they're being used in fannish-heavy circles like the Pit or LJ or certain web forums -- I've got no way of telling if they have other online identities they use for more "real life" activities, after all, or if (on journaling sites in particular) they might have multiple pseuds for RP journals, or personal vs. fannish stuff, or even just to keep different fandom activities separate (like someone who maybe does a lot of gen in a fandom that skews young, and a lot of kinky/porny stuff in another, and doesn't want their underage fans from Fandom A accidentally stumbling across their NC17 hardcore BDSM for Fandom B...) It could be a different story if a person were using a really blatantly fannish sort of name in an inappropriately non-fannish context -- say, if someone sent me a resume and their email address was "SASUKE_IS_MY_BOYFRIEND@HOTMAIL", I'd be really suspicious that the person might have some Issues with understanding boundaries and adjusting behavior and self-presentation to be appropriate for context. But if they're using that sort of fannish handle in a more casual online setting, I won't necessarily assume that the character/fandom/pairing is the absolute center of their life -- it might just be a playful part of their leisure time activities, not the absolute center of their identity, online and/or offline. (If anything, there are certain sorts of non-fandom, RL-based online handles that get me twitchy and fighting with my own kneejerk tendency to get judgemental much more strongly than almost anything fannish, but that's another story.)

As for pre-judging fic based on the author's pseud, eh, while I do notice the author's handle, I pay much closer attention to how they write their summary or any teaser paragraphs before the cut; if it's an interesting premise and their grammar is competent, I'll give it a shot even if their username looks very giddy-tweenage-fangirl. About the only time I can think of where a pseud is a major factor in making me run screaming *away* from a fic are when both the username and the story description align to make it clear that it's going to be all about hooking up the Sue/Stu OC with a fandom character.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

See, I don't assume that a person has other ljs unless I find out about them and I do see a big different between the more noticable fannish nicknames and the ones that take a little work to figure out the reference. I certainly didn't look at your nickname and go 'Oh, that's THAT character!'

won't necessarily assume that the character/fandom/pairing is the absolute center of their life -- it might just be a playful part of their leisure time activities, not the absolute center of their identity, online and/or offline.

That is a good perspective to have - since we're given so little to go on at first meeting with most fannish interactions, I think the little things - icons, usernames - have larger weight than, say, a t-shirt or a nickname would in real life.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Heh, and there's an extra level of obscurity there, of course -- sure, the LJ userinfo/journal heading makes the punning on the source title a bit more obvious if you know the American version's translation of the source title. But if all you see is an email address or username in a comment, you're probably less likely to connect my long pseud with a character who goes by a shortened version, and only mentions her full name once in the book, IIRC, and not at all in the movie.

As for the multiple-pseud thing, hmm. I don't necessarily assume that any random person probably has multiple LJs, but I've known enough people at this point, especially fannish sorts, who had multiple journals that it doesn't surprise me in the slightest? But that may also seem like a perfectly natural way of doing things to me because of different online and fandom experiences (and offline code-switching, but again that's going into a whole other long story.)

I was first "online", in a very limited semi-private-network sort of way, and participating in text-based fannish activities, at the same time -- it was an academic network in the late 80s. There was occasional contact with folks from other schools, but pretty much 99% of the time we were just live-chatting, sending mail, or posting fic to forums whose access was limited to a couple of closely-linked schools. You didn't have any choice of login name/address, those were automatically assigned based on your name -- and we had to try to keep things on the downlow anyway as the admin staff didn't particularly approve of this small circle of nerds using network resources for something so silly. As folks graduated, changed schools, etc. and otherwise lost physical access to this network, the writing went offline, and the stories continued circulating via a print zine for a couple of years...and again there was a bit of a closeted element to it all as some of the folks involved in the zine production would sometimes end up sneaking printer or copier time at work or school, and really didn't want to have to explain to non-fannish bosses, coworkers, academic advisors, etc. that they were involved in this crazy shared-world SF/fantasy/cartoon/comic book/etc. fanfic/art circle! So right there from the get-go, I was picking up on the idea that fannish activities might need to be kept somewhat covert, and there were good reasons for keeping them separate from other areas of your personal/professional life.

The next time I got online was initially on a small local dial-up BBS in the early/mid-1990s. This wasn't a directly fannish activity, although the BBS had some sub-boards that focused on vaguely fannish things like books and movies, and some of the people involved with it had some tangential connections to that earlier VAX/print zine crowd: still, it was more just a nerdy early-adopter geek medium for general discussion on all sorts of subjects, not fandom-centric; it was fairly geographically limited (since you had to dial in), which meant a lot of the participants knew each other IRL; people generally got on it in the first place via a RL friend or acquaintance, and there were occasional meetups where you could get to know other folks face-to-face. The local culture on the board was to use pseuds for logins -- not out of any privacy concerns, but simply for the geeky fun of it -- some folks used fannish-type pseuds taken from media or mythology, some had random nicknames reflecting their real-life hobbies or interests, etc. This was the first time I got to choose an online identity, and that's where I used that first book character's name, because I identified with her a great deal and wanted to see if there were any other fans of the author floating around the boards. (And since the name was something sufficiently Western and non-dramatic that nobody would have blinked twice at seeing it in a local phone book, and the book, while critically well-regarded, wasn't the sort of thing that this predominantly nerdy-male crowd was rushing out to buy, I initially had a lot of the established regulars mansplaining to newbie-me about how I didn't have to use my real name here! That eventually stopped as I established myself as a participant and mentioned often enough that my nick was from a book.)

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

People who have multiple journals don't surprise me, but it's certainly not an automatic assumption that I make.

And since the name was something sufficiently Western and non-dramatic that nobody would have blinked twice at seeing it in a local phone book, and the book, while critically well-regarded, wasn't the sort of thing that this predominantly nerdy-male crowd was rushing out to buy, I initially had a lot of the established regulars mansplaining to newbie-me about how I didn't have to use my real name here

Ha! You know, it's really interesting to hear about fannish activity when the internet was just starting up and it was much more locally focused.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I liked that handle enough that I kept using it when I moved onto the wider internet proper a year or two later. Again, this still wasn't a primarily fannish activity for me yet -- this was the mid-1990s when websites were still relatively scarce and clunky, almost everyone was on dialup, and consumer-grade online access that wasn't geared to serious geeks was just getting started, so there weren't so many kiddies running around: the geeky crowds I was hanging out with at the time actually used to joke about September being the worst time of year, because this was when you'd see an influx of new college students getting internet access for the first time, and disrupting things for the old-timers via their cluelessness about the established social norms. Here, I was initially active on Usenet and mailing lists, and while there were already fannish groups and listservs out there, those weren't really the corners of the net where I spent the most time. But there was still a pretty broad acceptance of "fake" handles -- not everyone used them, but enough folks had come up from similar BBS cultures where they were part of the game that they were fairly common. Additionally, some of the groups I was reading were focused on issues relating to sexuality, so there were cases where folks who had reasons to be somewhat closeted about their sexual orientation, kink/poly interests, hobby erotica-writing, etc. might not want to attach their real names, or even their other online personas, to stuff posted in these areas; and Usenet in general also had enough of a reputation as a space dominated by sometimes-poorly-socialized male nerds that some women chose to use male or gender-neutral online handles to avoid harassment.

It was a little trickier to establish multiple online identities in those days, when there weren't free email/journal/webspace etc. providers around every corner, but it was still doable -- especially if you were the sort of hardcore geek who had your own domain names, and/or had friends with their own domains. So even before I got involved with anything fannish again, I had multiple email addresses, and could easily use a more jokey or pseudonymous persona in one place and a more formal, professional-looking one in another. And I knew enough folks, in the extremely geeky circles I was on the fringes of, who did exactly the same, that it was really normalized further for me: someone with a fannish or geeky handle, a jokey domain name, etc. was reflecting some of their interests, but not necessarily reflecting something that was absolutely central to their life. It really was like the t-shirt or real-life nickname analogy you make, where some of the pseuds were used in contexts that made them sort of the online equivalent of hanging out with your buddies at a bar, wearing a nerdy/fannish t-shirt and getting called by a silly nickname; that was on your own time, for fun, and didn't necessarily carry over to when you put on the business clothes and went to the office with folks who address you by the legal name on your ID...

So that's the perspective I had fairly well established, long before I started nosing around the fringes of fandom again in the late 1990s. Even before LJ or the Pit took off, there were folks using all sorts of obviously pseudonymous names when they posted to mailing lists or their own personal sites or fandom-specific web archives...and at this point it was easy enough for even the less-geeky sort of users to get a free website from someplace like Tripod or Geocities, or get a free secondary email address from the likes of Hotmail or Yahoo if they didn't want to use their main ISP/school account, that I never really assumed that some name I saw linked to a story on a random site was necessarily that person's only, or even primary, online existence. Why would I assume that, when I had years of experience at this point telling me that many people choose to compartmentalize their lives, offline and online, especially where not-quite-mainstream interests or hobbies were concerned?