I'll go first:
So I originally was going to go with Sara. I've always vibed with the name, I used it in video games for my characters constantly, and it just felt right. Also for Sara Kerrigan who's "I'm queen bitch of the universe" line was probably my first experience of gender envy. The problem is at this point Sara had become a character in what was my most popular series at the time so it felt weird naming myself after a character I only retroactively realized was a self-insert of my gender needs.
I next was going to go with Jessica, for Jessica Drew from Marvel - specifically the Ultimate version of the comics. While the Ultimate comic line is largely remembered for being mostly bad and had the one redeeming quality of introducing us to Miles Morales (which 100% is the best thing to come from the Ultimate universe), it also gave us Jessica Drew of Earth 1620 - a clone of Peter Parker who just had the Y chromosome replaced with an X, and also had all of Peter's memories. The character was incredibly trans coded and fascinated me long before I figured out I was trans...but one of my closest friends is Jessica and so it felt weird.
So then I was going to with Rachel for Rachel Summers from the X-Men as well as to give myself a name that tied me to my Jewish origins but then someone asked "Can I call your Rach?" and the sound of that shortening was so very much not a vibe that I dropped the name entirely.
Then I remembered Sylvia. Sylvia Dawngard was a character of mine in a long running FATE game I was playing with friends at the time. While not my first TTRPG character to be a woman - that was a Sara - Sylvia was the one that gave me gender euphoria. A changeling in a world were that meant "Human who got abducted by fae and was raised by them," Sylvia was the champion of the long forgotten Autumn Court of fae and over the course of the game came to weild the Eclipse Hammer (which I now have tattooed on my arm) and just was one of my favorite characters I've ever played. She also was constantly torn between her fae upbringing and human nature, not feeling like she fully belonged in either world, which only changed when she met her Nephilim girlfriend Kohabiel and together they formed a new home and... yeah, I loved that character.
Equally importantly there's no shortening of that name I dislike. Syl, Sylvie, Vee, Via, Lyv, Sylv, basically any version of the name worked perfectly for me.
So yeah, that's my story. What's yours?
This'll be a long post 'cause plurality.
First up Leolin was our chosen name before realising plurality. It's an anglicisation of Llewelyn, drawing from the two flase beliefs that the Llew in Llewlyn is llew as in lion, and that the Leo in Leopold is leo as in lion to morph the Llew into Leo. It ends up as a distincly Wenglish (Welsh-English) name, and also relating to cats like our legal name is, and pronounceable by non Welsh speakers as long as they don't overthink it. We had actually been using Leo as a fursona name, and also our Animal Crossing name, but it wasn't intended to become our primary name at first.
Individual headmates under the cut.
Oh, some things that slipped my mind 'cause I wrote this at 3 a.m.:
- Luna completely forgot Luna is a normal human name. When I say the moon is her favourite rock, I mean she used the latin word for her favourite rock as her name.
- Later, after recognising that Luna is in fact a name, she picked up Llun as a Welsh variant. We haven't seen it attested outside the day of the week (Dydd Llun = Monday), but it does translate to Luna.
- As for my name, I literally showed up going "I'm Sparkles!" which I learned is a great way to confuse your headmate who thinks they're a singlet. I do not remember doing this, only recieving this from me, because memory's weird like that.