Image Change

Spoiler: Totally Unrelated To The Topic

*flips table* Why do blogs have no Save Draft function!? Firefox crashed and I lost the whole progress of the wall I was writing!!!! >.<

Haa... Oh well, here we go again! Hopefully no crash comes this time! *deep breath*

Sometimes we look at ourselves and think... "This is bad" or "This doesn't work" or "This needs to change", it's a pretty normal line of thought I think, I mean... Who never had any qualm about themselves?

Everyone has problems, nobody is perfect, it's important to accept that, we'll never reach our ideal selves... That doesn't mean we shouldn't try though.

When should we try it though...? It's a hard to answer question. I think the answer is... When our good memories start annoying us, when they start haunting us.

Yes, haunting, that is what good memories do. Good memories are a pain actually, I hate good memories.

Bad memories are just there, you scowl at them, create a conversation on your head on how you could've done it better, maybe punch a pillow or two and... Well, that's about it, they hardly remain for long, and they hardly bother you for long.

Good memories though? Oh, those are annoying, they keep on your head for months, years even. They keep on being there saying "Hey, you think your life is bad now? Look at how great it was!" "Hey, don't you wish everything just kept the same as it was yesterday?" "Oh my, did you just get a heartbreak? I guess it's time to remember all the lovely times you had with your ex!"

Seriously! It seems good memories exist only to make you stay in bed crying all day! They are so evil! I hate them!

... And of course, I love them, they are good for a reason after all.

Good times remain with us... The bad ones? They fade away after a while... Well, I think I digressed a bit, let me go back.

The problem with changing, it that it is hard to change... Obviously it's hard to change, we wouldn't hesitate to change if it was something easily doable... We don't want to let go of the past, we don't want to let go of those good memories... But at some point, their haunting is so so strong, that you realize... That you need to change. It's easy to want to change, but needing it? That isn't something that happens with much frequency... And when it does, you need to do something, otherwise you just enter a very deep and torturing spiral of depression.


Well, this has all been phylosophic and all, but... I didn't even touch my own change, did I? Rather, it seems kinda exaggerated for an username change, doesn't it? Well... Not quite.

brasca123 is an username that I have been using for 10 years... 10 years is a truckload of time, a lot of things happen in this period.

The origin of the name is a pretty silly one actually, my brother was going to start playing an online game a friend of ours recommended, he needed to make an username and he was never very creative with it (I ain't either btw)... So, he simply took the name of a character from Final Fantasy X, that we were a bit addicted to, and used it as his account... Braska. Sure, it had a typo, no capital letter on the beginning, and a "123" to make sure the name wouldn't be taken since people apparently don't like having numbers on their users. But well, it was still a reference to that character from Final Fantasy X anyway.

This happened back when I was 11, so... We were quite young, and we didn't really think too much on long-term... Well, not like one usually needs to think long-term when you talk about gaming anyway... So, we shared accoutns. We always did, and this time was no different, we used the same brasca123 account for playing.

Hmmm... Well, so what? It's a small thing, and it might seem kinda obvious, but... Well, the acc was his after all, so brasca123 had an online male identity... I didn't have any problem with it though, I never really liked the image girls on games tend to have, so I was pretty comfortable with it.

Some years passed like this, and we kept on using the same account name for our shared accounts... I mean, we were never that creative with names anyway. So we kept like that... After a while, he created an unique username for himself and we stopped sharing, so he went with his own user, and I kept on using brasca123.

That was all fine and dandy until around... 2013? I honestly forgot the exact year, maybe 2014... It was a particular day that I was playing Adventure Quest. Adventure Quest is the very first game that we used brasca123 in, since 2007, it is a game I have a lot of memories about... Mostly good memories.

Anyway, the devs made a particularly debatable balance change on the game that really riled up the community because it was a HUGE change in standards, I saw the link to the forums on the homepage telling us to go discuss it and so I did.

The fun part is that I never even knew the forums were a thing... Sure, I knew they existed, but I only used the guides and the Encyclopedia sections, the rest I didn't even know the existence of. Until this day that is.

Why is this important? Well, one of the reasons I never cared much about the online male identity of brasca123, was because I was never active on online communities in the first place. I played games, I didn't talk about games with random online people. I'm a huge scaredycat, I have no idea who are those people, I don't know if their friendliness is fake or not and I definitely didn't want to risk it... So, I never interacted much, my online experience was mostly a solo experience.

This changed when I started using the battleon forums (the forums that I discussed Adventure Quest), I was using what was technically my brother's account, so there was no way I would use a female identity, it would be weird for him, and I had been using a male one for some 6-7 years already, so it's not like I wasn't used to it... But... Well, it was weird.

What first was just a discussion about a balance patch, became something that made me engrossed into a community. I started caring for those people, for those players, devs, artists, newbies that had no idea what was happening, veterans that helped in the Q&A... I got really into that, I was even an active member of the Game Balance Issues and became an owner of one of the biggest guides in the forum.

And I also... Entered the unofficial chatango server... Chatango is weird when compared to a game forum, the rules are lax, we don't have a particular topic to talk about other than "This is a chat for AQ (Adventure Quest) players", it was just about anything, it was more casual, more loose, more... Personal.

Personal is the problematic word... I didn't feel comfortable with admitting I was a girl, everyone there was deadset on me being a man, and I was still afraid on how they would treat me if they knew I was a girl... Would they flirt with me? Would they ask me to send nudes? Would they suddenly go and put me into some sort of pedestal because I was a girl gamer? (this last one in particular actually happened to one of the people that joined the chat, I saw her some 3 times and never again)

I was scared, and so I kept it to myself, even if my brother wasn't active on that account anymore, it was still his, and he could still want to go back to it, I wouldn't want anyone having the wrong impression... Rather, he even used it a few times on the forum. Add that to my fear, and I just never came clear with it... It... Stang. (Is stang a word? I don't know, I think it's the past of sting, I'm not in the mood to search. It doesn't feel like stinged exists... )

I kept being active anyway, I even become an administrator at that chat, and that taught me a lot on how to manage people, it was a pretty good experience I think, most of the way I handle people when trouble arises in AG came from that time. I learned how to handle people with care and how to try and make them avoid trouble... Moderating small communities is a wonderful experience, because you know everyone, and everyone knows you. You don't go being a tyrant when everyone is your friend, you go carefully prodding them, trying to make them change their habits by themselves... It's by no means an easy task, and it's only possible when everyone on the mod team has the same mindset... But still, it's a pretty nice thing to go through.

Those are the memories that kept ingrained on me... The ones that refuse to let go. I already forgot about any (did I have any? I don't even know) fight I had on that community... They already faded, I remember those, I remember those times chatting and having fun together... And I remember this particular stinging feeling that never left the back of my head.


Late 2016 came and I discovered NUF. It was the 2nd community I was becoming active in and... Differently from AQ's one, it was long after I was no longer sharing accounts, brasca123 was my name, not my brother's... So... I tried to be a bit more... Me.

I made an account with a female identity for once, and it felt... Relieving, very very relieving... I felt like I could finally be myself, and this is a feeling I don't even get IRL, so it was a really really special thing for me... NUF dragged me in with more strength than a blackhole and absolutely refused to let go.


In 1 month of NUF I had more fights than I have had in a few years on AQ forums, I guess this shows just how much more I was engrossed into this... NUF is a special place, it felt special, it was special, it is special... And special feelings came with it.

I realized I didn't need to be this fearful of online communities, so I entered more into them without the same fear I had in the past of being mistreated... Which led to my very first relationship, a long-distance one.

I became much more aware of myself than I had ever been, we didn't exchange photos, we never had a voice chat, we didn't even exchange our full names, even now I only know his first name... But still, it was a very very very important relationship for me... And one that left me devastated when it ended.

For over an year I kept with lingering feelings over this relationship, and they're not completely gone yet, I think I have finally started to take my baby steps to get over it... It's painful... It hurts... I keep remembering the wonderful times we had together and I absolutely don't want to let go of them.


... And memories... Memories are a funny thing, because you associate good things with other good things... My memories of love ended up making me remember my memories of fun chatter and moderation I had at AQ's community... But I couldn't go back to it... After becoming myself, I couldn't simply go and not be myself anymore... What was once a mild annoyance, a simple sting, now felt like a humongous wall impossible to be bypassed.

I realized I couldn't kept on like that... I couldn't keep on lingering on those feelings of a love long gone, I couldn't keep on attached to a name that was no longer my own... Or rather, it never was my own. It was my brother's all along, and it is about time I gave it back.


Getting away from brasca123 wasn't really an easy process, I have been meaning to do this for a few months already, but I have attachment to it... 10 years, 10... Years... It's a long time, and I always had the hopes (which never became true) of finding someone on a totally different community that had already seen me before and say "Hey, I remember you from [That] game!".

... It was only recently though, that this hope became fear. Fear of being recognized, fear of being associated, fear of people expecting me to be something I am not. Sure, I could just tell them "I'm actually a girl", but... I'm a scaredycat... What if they don't believe me? What if they actually start spreading word around saying he is sure I am a man? What if they go and try to use that against me?

It is scary, it is very very scary, I got scared of finding anyone that knew my past identity... And this exact same fear made me unable to go back to a community I loved.

I decided it was time to move on already... I couldn't hold it anymore... I needed to let go of this name that wasn't mine, I needed to let go of those memories of my love which did not get fulfilled, I needed to let go of that 10 years old account that I spent 700$ on, even when I earned only 100$/month.

Yesterday was a day I went back to that certain chatroom after around 1 year of inactivity, I spent a few seconds there, and then went to the staff channel to give the password of that account ot the other mods of the chat... I didn't want to simply throw it away, it was something that had been with me for too long... I figured I should give it to someone that might make good use of it... Or at least of the items I had. *giggles*


It feels relieving to let go, it feels like a fresh new start, I'll probably wait a month or two before getting back to that community, so as to not make it too obvious I quitted and then came back anew with a new account, new emojis, a new speech pattern... Well, probably, I will decide that later.

In essence, moving on is hard, and moving on needs change, changing your image is the first step towards changing yourself I think. And I need to change a lot about myself.

Alice is a name that didn't really have any thought behind it, I just like Alice, that's all there is to it. Shiki is a special surname that shouldn't be that hard to discover why I care for it, but I don't feel like saying it out anyway. It's just special, I just joined something I like with something I cared for.

I'm sorry for all the Sakura pics I received and that I haven't used as an avatar yet, I still wish to use them all, and I probably will at some point. I have around 80 images for Alice, and I will probably use them all before going back to Sakura, it can be a transitioning period of sorts...


Sakura has been my image since forever, and that is not simply because I love CCS... Sakura is special, she was part of something that changed the way I see the world, CLAMP changed how I see the world, a good amount of my morals were based on things they wrote on their own stories... And Sakura was the first of those, she still the one I associate myself with the most.

Alice on the other hand, is an interesting character... Touhou is a strange franchise because it has a very loose lore... But each character has their own story and their own convictions and reasons... Alice in particular is a character I have always liked for a variety of reasons...

The first being her design, it's cute, it's delicate, it's pretty... It's something I don't see in myself and I want for myself, it's part of the change I am aiming for... Sure, Sakura is also cute, but I think the feeling both of them give is very very different, Alice feels like a more refined type of cute, a simple, but special cuteness.

The other thing I like about her, is how she fights... Alice is a character that has never shown her full power, she measures the power of the opponent and matches her power to always stay on equal ground with them... At first it might seem like cockiness, or desire to fight like Kenpachi Zaraki, but... That's not how Alice sees it at all. Alice is a fearful person, she fears losing, she fears not being able to meet her goals... If she loses to someone, she can just say it's because she held back, she didn't go all out, so she doesn't need to worry about this.

It's escapism. I'm a fearful person, I'm a person that constantly runs from my own problems... I feel like I can very easily relate to this feeling.

... I think I should say that the part of her doing it out of fear is a fan theory, it was never confirmed by ZUN (touhou's author), but it still feels like the only thing that would make sense for her character.

I also like the fact that she fights with dolls... Not because she manipulates things to fight, I hate manipulating people in general tyvm. I like it because... She doesn't fight herself, she makes something fight for her... Why doesn't she go there herself? Is it fear of getting hurt? Fear of exposing herself? I have those fears and I projecy myself into the character... It's part of the beauty of the lack of details touhou has, that you can put your own ideals on the characters that are not yours.

The other thing I like on her fight, are her dolls... I personally loooooove dolls, and I never had dolls. I have 2 older brothers, and almost all of my toys as a kid were their toys... It's strange, because I never felt I would like having dolls... Why would I want to dress them up when I could save the world with action figures!? The later seemed so much more fun... And after I went past the toys age, I basically just got games or money as gifts, so dolls were something I never grew up with.

My love for dolls came only on my teen years, but I never felt I should use my precious gaming money on dolls that I would do nothing with... I kinda want them now though, a lot more than I want games I have no time to play, but now I have no money to buy them...

Having dolls that I would make myself, that I would've gone through the whole process and ironed out every single detail of it? I would really really love to do that, especially dolls as pretty as Shangai. But I'm terrible with handworks and the sort, so this will never happen... Still, it's a wish I have, it's something I love, and it's something I like in Alice. It's something I envy her somewhat I guess.

Envy is an important word on this, I envy many people, I envy many people for many reasons, and I envy fictional characters too, because I want something they have. Sakura being a magical girl that goes out there to save the world from the Clow Cards? Sign me up, let me risk my life for that, I'm totally willing to!

It's not that different with Alice... I envy parts of her, and I think I want to display them as a part of me, so I put her as my avi... I still have a bigger resonance with Sakura though, so... I think I already said this on this post, but I will go back to Sakura once I'm out of Alice pics. It's a temporary change.



Overall, this name change was mainly a change for myself, to help me move, to help me let go... I think I made a huge huge wall of text that had tons of unnecessary things, and tons of things that, at least for me, were too personal and that I probably shouldn't share... But well, they are there anyway.

Thanks for reading to whoever had the patience to go through it! ^^)/