26: Does Your MC Have a Nickname?
“Edgedancer” is named for the MC’s deed-name – a name she’s earned by literally and figuratively “dancing on edges”: social edges, class edges, edges of legality, safety and propriety, edges of tables and walls and roofs and cliffs. She dances with blades, too – both by using swords and knives as props while dancing, and by being a skilled and deadly fighter with blades.
Although she goes by the name Darianna, Edgedancer no longer uses or answers to her birth-name. For many good reasons (some of which get explored in the story), she left that name and identity behind long ago. Whomever she once was, Darianna Edgedancer is who she is now.
In Holy Creatures To and Fro, Silk employs a self-taken name, too. She took her name from a character in her favorite book series, and – like Darianna – no longer sees herself as the person she was as a child. Every member of her pack of homeless teens, the Wolfkin, employs a self-created identity in place of the people their parents had defined for them in their past lives.
Identity is a pervasive element in my work. Most of my stories involve people who reject their birth-names in favor of names they give themselves: Genet, Silk, Echo, Dervish, Chalice, Darianna, Nikita, Porthos, Riplash, Dr. Volcano, Thunderdome, Tucker and Rol, Hyper and Scruffy, Ravenwolf Grigori, Elynne Dragonchild, Ginelli Castrava, Bobbo the Funmaster… Even the ones like Chipper, Keef, Wolfman, Heaven, Riff, Zil, and Dead Man Walker, who receive their nicknames from other people, wear those names as their identities now.
On reflection, I find it funny that the most significant creation of mine who employs her birth-name – Meghan Susan Green – made it distinctive by emphasizing her middle name and her full first name; as Genet says in Red Shoes, only Genet is allowed to call Meghan “Meg” without a fight.
Even then, Meghan has a contentious relationship with four aspects of her fragmented self: Keef, Riff, Lover-of-Shadows, and the Owl – all of whom have agendas and personalities of their own.
(It’s even funnier that two of my creations who kept their birth-names have THE SAME NAME: Kelsey. That’s one reason I cut my story “Special Guest” out of my collection Valhalla with a Twist of Lethe: Because the protagonist has the same distinct name as the antagonist in “Ravenous,” despite them being entirely different characters written almost 20 years apart.)
Some of my stories (notably “Swallowed,” “Johnny Serious,” and “Ravenous”) focus intimately on identity and the shift between the person people once defined you as, and the person you defined yourself to become. Even in ones where the protagonist doesn’t change their name, like “Keystrokes,” the characters struggle over who they want to be. Looking over my work from over 40 years of hindsight, it’s clear that changing identity has always been a primary theme of mine.
As I wrote in my essay “Me and the Gender Blues,” autism, sensory-processing conditions, physical dysphoria, and social and internal perceptions of gender have deeply influenced my view of myself and the experiences of my fictional creations. Long before I knew about any of that stuff, I related more closely with the Werewolf By Night than with the kid I saw in my mirror. Acting, writing and RPGs provided me with tools and stages to explore those feelings; it’s no mystery, then, why so many of the fictional counterparts I create are working through identity crisis themselves, and why so many stories I write about them – even the ones who, like Rachel in Dream Along the Edge, don’t change their names – deal with transformations from an externally imposed identity to a more authentic self-created one.
I’m glad that so many people in my audience can relate to those challenges, too – and can find, in my work, a safer, more empowered place to manifest themselves.
Satyros Phil Brucato 