Before Riona, I was briefly Mew, and then 'Darkmew' or 'Evil Mew of Darkness'. Since I settled on Riona (while creating my fanfiction.net account in late 2001), though, I've never really thought about changing it. I knew I wanted a handle that sounded namelike, rather than e.g. a string of words or numbers; I went with 'Riona' because I initially misread Rinoa's name in Final Fantasy VIII and thought my misreading sounded pretty.
As 'riona' was already taken on Livejournal, I added 'leonhart', and I'm happy with that as well; Squall Leonhart is still one of my favourite characters of all time, all these years later. (Although, as my username consists of the intentionally misspelled first name of a Final Fantasy VIII character and the surname of another Final Fantasy VIII character, I did unintentionally make myself look like a Squall/Rinoa shipper who can't spell.)
For creating accounts I don't necessarily want to be traced too easily back to my 'main' Riona identity, I'll use other usernames. For example, I was nervous at first about making a Tumblr because of the fandom purity culture there, so I signed up under the name rixareth (formed by creating an anagram of my first name and adding an 'x', in Kingdom Hearts fashion), although eventually I relaxed and started promoting my fanfiction there. I'm also rixareth on Reddit, and I have a Something Awful account under the name Rith, which I occasionally use for the Let's Play forums. But I still think of Riona as my 'true' online name.
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Before Riona, I was briefly Mew, and then 'Darkmew' or 'Evil Mew of Darkness'. Since I settled on Riona (while creating my fanfiction.net account in late 2001), though, I've never really thought about changing it. I knew I wanted a handle that sounded namelike, rather than e.g. a string of words or numbers; I went with 'Riona' because I initially misread Rinoa's name in Final Fantasy VIII and thought my misreading sounded pretty.
As 'riona' was already taken on Livejournal, I added 'leonhart', and I'm happy with that as well; Squall Leonhart is still one of my favourite characters of all time, all these years later. (Although, as my username consists of the intentionally misspelled first name of a Final Fantasy VIII character and the surname of another Final Fantasy VIII character, I did unintentionally make myself look like a Squall/Rinoa shipper who can't spell.)
For creating accounts I don't necessarily want to be traced too easily back to my 'main' Riona identity, I'll use other usernames. For example, I was nervous at first about making a Tumblr because of the fandom purity culture there, so I signed up under the name