Chirp! Bark! Hey!
Funny plural system made of a murder chicken, a murder dog, and just some guy talk about their life.
Funny plural system made of a murder chicken, a murder dog, and just some guy talk about their life.
Written by Machina on March 10th, 2024.
Musings on our names and our relationships with them, particularly around transitioning, OC fictive experiences, established character fictive experiences, and our reluctance to create a system name (despite doing so in the end, in an unconventional way).
So I'm transgender, and I decided to change my name, as is a common choice among trans folks! I went through several different names before settling on the ones I have for myself now - Kitson, Gray, Finch, for a few examples. I was nonbinary in my teenage years, genderfluid before my gender settled into masculinity as its new home, and I wanted a name that was kinda difficult to nail down as masculine or feminine. I played around with it for a long time, I got silly with it!
My online name is Max now, derived only a little bit from misspelling mackerelgray as maxkerelgray one time! I think it’s a name that ages well, and I really like the potential longform nicknames for it - because I like saying it's short for Maximilian, but it can also be Maximus, Maxime, Maxwell, Maxfield, Maximum, Maxilla, etc. It’s fun! The possibilities are endless!
And on February 29 (wow! a Leap Year!) I got a new addition to it! I was attending the 2024 Centaurus Festival, a three-day online convention centered around mythic and folkloric alterhumans, and it was an absolute blast, especially because of the name thing!
I was jokingly lamenting that I’d chosen a really boring name to represent myself, when surrounded by the likes of Page or Cynder or Daski, because it does look like I just chose one of the Top Ten Dog Names despite not being a dog. Everyone around me got a whiff of self-deprecation and immediately went about tearing it down, joking about how they came up with their own handles and complimenting mine, and it was honestly really nice? Like I’m not the only one who made up my name in a silly way, or feels like their name is a little underwhelming, and it felt really nice to break up the impression of Big Intimidating Community Names™ with the understanding that we’re all just weird and vibing together!
And Benry said, hey, if it were actually a top ten dog name you’d be a Fido or a Biscuit, and I said, hey, I like biscuits! I’d be a great Biscuit! And in ten minutes I’m being dubbed Max Biscuit in the general chat and giving people virtual baked goods, and honestly, it was so fun and sweet that I’m immortalizing it by putting it on my handle now. Hi fellow alterhumans, I’m Max Biscuit, I was Assigned Baked Goods at the Centaurus Festival and it was absolutely delightful.
First off, my name is technically short for Judah, and I don’t actually use that name here, for a couple reasons.
Mostly, it’s because Judah is a work name. My handler only used my full name - she wouldn’t shorten it, that’s improper, that’s not my actual designation. It’s a name that I associate with my job, with doing something for people who don’t actually care about me, and it’s not something I use with people I’m trying to get along with. My friends and siblings and partners all call me Jude in friendly contexts, but I’m Judah if it’s for something official, and that’s a signal for me to stop fucking around and do what I need to. I’ll use it as a burner name while talking to strangers, to people I don’t care about. Now that I’m in a system, I only directly talk to people who I care about getting along with, so I just cut out the middleman and introduce myself as Jude.
(There’s also definitely the fact that people see Judah and think I’m a guy, and I hate being misgendered. Jude has a more neutral association that I like better.)
That’s what I have for my first name, but I have more thoughts! About other names I have and their funny little origins, related to being an original character fictive.
See, if you’re talking about my model and serial number, I’m called RK800 476 032 660. In beta testing, before being officially given a name, I used to be called Sixty from the last couple digits. Which is really funny to me, because that’s the usual fandom nickname for the Cyberlife Tower doppelganger in Detroit: Become Human, and that was where Max got the original inspiration for my character! Listen, the moralizing machine characterization compelled them.
Max just ran with the pieces, glued them together, and wrote that guy into weirder and more canon-divergent AUs until they realized they had fully replaced every part of that man’s characterization and I was the result. They just went full Ship Of Theseus with him. So my name got changed because I was a completely different person, and I don’t identify with that name anymore, but I’m pretty fond of it. And I like Sixty in DBH fandom and fics when I see him, he’s kinda fucked up and feral and feels a lot of things and I can relate to that. He’s just a funny little bastard.
And before I walked in, Max wrote a bunch of different alternate universes with me - and honestly I adore it, I love being known and psychoanalyzed by my loved ones because I like to know what they’re thinking about me. Most of those AUs have different settings and premises - like we’re all werewolves, or selkies, or chefs, or in the Star Wars universe or something. And this usually meant that my name is different, because I need a full name, I can’t just be called Jude. So he settled on Judah Nicholas Rook, Rook from RK and Nicholas because it has a good ring to it, and I also have it as a legal name in my timeline.
It’s funny to think about my name in terms of the meta of being a fictive of an original character, because on one hand, Max went through various iterations of a character that would eventually become what I’d recognize as me, including name changes, and that’s really interesting! And on the other hand, I definitely remember talking about what to officially last-name ourselves with my brothers when we finally got the time, because I felt kinda weird about identifying myself by a model number, or worse, a serial number that people never remembered. Watsonian versus Doylist commentary on what went into making me a person, I guess! They’re both real enough, one of them just happened in my life and the other happened in Max’s brain.
My name is Gavin Zachary Reed, and I still think it’s really funny that I can just announce that without getting doxxed. Like I don’t think anyone should follow my example, but it’s fucking comedy gold that I can do it. I’m not even revealing my identity to anyone who’s familiar with the video game my source was based on, because my source is so canon divergent that the character who shares my name is fully unrecognizable to me.
If you recognize the first and last name there, yep, I’m technically an iteration of Gavin Reed from Detroit: Become Human. Unfortunately, I’m nothing like him - I look nothing like his character model, his voice is different, his only personality trait is being a dick, and he’s not even 5’2” - and I hate his stupid fucking ass, including the video game he’s from and most things related to its fandom that we’ve interacted with. This kinda sucks, because I’m not going to change my name again just because it’s associated with a character and game and fandom I dislike. I like my name, thanks.
Here’s a brief rundown on how I got my name. Gavin - I’m trans, I chose this name myself. My middle name, Zachary, I also came up with that, because it worked way better with Gavin than my old middle name, and I go by Zach in spaces where I don’t want to use my first name. And Reed is my aunts’ last name, because I moved in with them as a teenager, and I did not want anybody knowing I had ties to my famous older brother or dragging me back to my shit parents. I legally changed it all at once. My aunts were my guardians until I got my own place, and really, they’re way more like parents to me than the people who fucked over my childhood.
So I’m really attached to my name. It carries a lot of meaning for me. I’m annoyed that it’s connected to a character I hate, but I can’t exactly control that, so there’s not really a point in getting tetchy about it. I’ll readily bitch about it in private, but I genuinely like who I am and I’m not about to abandon that by letting a game dictate what I call myself.
We still don’t have a system name and don’t really care to officially make one, for a couple reasons.
First, there’s only three people here, and we have our individual names already. Addressing us by a collective system name feels like it means losing some of that individuality, because people use the system name because they don’t want to assume who’s fronting or anything, and while that’s understandable, it’s not something any of us really likes. Like, we’re very much separate people! If you wanna talk to one of us, just say it, we’ll probably show up!
On the other hand, I do understand wanting an identifier - like, there’s loads of Maxes and Judes and Gavins out there, we have really common names, there’s gotta be something to distinguish us from another group, right? Like a last name.
Honestly, looking at it like a last name makes it feel better. If you’ve read through the rest of this, you can tell we’re already experts at getting new last names, and this is just another one! So on that note, we’re not gonna call ourselves anything like The X System, but if you have to tag us as a collective, just use Machina as a funny end tag, like how people talk about Sans Undertale.
(Max Biscuit-Machina is a misnomer, since he’s not from Machina, but he came up with the title so he counts. And it’s really fucking funny.)