Commission for @nemophilisty of the gorgeous Roemi Everschade: a forest-dwelling miqo'te and career white mage who also specializes in botany/herbalism~! I loved working on this commission thank you so much!
Full size non-cut version
Just popping in to say hello and wish everyone well as we near the end of this very...intense year. I might be around for a bit here and there, but as of the last couple years I’m not a heavily active ffxiv player/tumblr user any more (because no matter how much I might be around sometimes I will probably, inevitably, still fall off the face of the earth). I continue to love my characters and this tumblr though.
I also have a small update (for anyone who still follows me/cares lol) regarding Roemi, who I have renamed “Frey”. As for why, it’s a little uncomfortable (and long) for me to explain, but I want to avoid confusion if possible so...read on if you like!
I’ve changed my main character/name a few times as she’s evolved over the last decade of my involvement in FFXIV, and I would feel her previous names no longer suited her in some way, but I was not interested in simply discarding her to make something new. I still loved her core identity and themes, and just wanted to make a few tweaks from time to time.
The name she initially became well(ish)-known with on tumblr was Sera Everschade. I discarded this name in the aftermath of the harassment issues, wanting to distance myself from them and the anxiety of it all as much as possible without completely surrendering this character/her presence in the community, however small it is.
I didn’t really have a solid replacement for her name, though. I had been fairly happy with Sera, and everything else I could think of just didn’t really feel as good. I came up with Roemi eventually after days of struggling to find/think of something different (I was also trying to think of something more unique, since having a “common” name was one of the things people tried to use against me).
Roemi was just an amalgamation of some sounds or letters I usually find appealing in a name (”roh”, “eh/e/i”, “m”, etc.) and after clumsily forming those into “Roemi” I thought the nickname Roe was cute because of her deer/fawn theme. Not many people really liked this name though when I changed it, and while I liked it I didn’t necessarily love it, and was mostly just really desperate to find something I didn’t hate.
Several people who knew me before naming myself Roemi would continue to call me Sera though, most just out of habit at first, but some (it felt like) to make a point that they were either an older/more long-term friend or didn’t want to acknowledge the new name because they didn’t like it (this applies mostly to people who will presently, more than 6 years later, still call me “Sera” even though this bothers me and I do not like it).
Fast forward to now/this past year. I play a lot of games outside of XIV, mostly single-player, and on a lot of game/social platforms (including this one) my handle is typically “nemophilisty” (unless it’s already in use), but this year I started calling myself some variant of “Frey” in most of those spaces/typically name my various game characters Frey.
This is just a name I thought about one day that doesn’t really have a concrete meaning. It comes in part from my casual fondness of numerous mythological stories/figures, such as Freyja/Freyr in Norse mythology (my irl partner’s heritage), but it also has no connection there beyond that. I also enjoy the word play of fray, a “battle/skirmish” or “to come undone/unravel/fall apart”, and its slight homonym with fae (as in fairies/fae folk).
Now that I’m meandering around XIV again a little, I thought of changing Roe’s name to Frey and immediately went for it. I love that it’s a name that (for me) is both very well-suited to her character but also one that I love to use outside of XIV/as a personal reference.
So, while I understand changes like these can be annoying or difficult to remember, especially with people/characters who have been around for a while and seem pretty established, we would like to request that everyone start calling us Frey. :) It’s not going to irritate me though (the way Sera does) to be called Roemi still for a while, especially since I know many people won’t see this and it takes time to pick up on changes to blog titles etc.
