Wait, this is actually such a cool idea! Buckle up, ladies and gentlemen, cause this is a long story.
Cast your minds back, if you will, to a little over a decade, to little 8/9 year old Ashlley playing make believe with her best friend (of the time). We were playing superheros, and as little girls do, we wanted it to be realistic. So we each did a Buzzfeed quiz for what our powers would be.
Are you with me so far? Good, cause this is where it gets a little wild.
Now, I am not the best at coming up with names. "But Ashlley! You're a writer! You should be great!" FALSE! I have entire Pinterest boards filled with names I can warp when I need to name someone new. However, this was before the time of Pinterest, and I needed a name for my character in the game. I had to think quick. Luckily, I have a master's in bs'ing and a PhD in nonsense. Here was my thought process:
2. Name related to ash -> Ashley.
3. Ashley is boring, double the l (was this some subconscious part of my brain deciding, if people are gonna misspell my real name, they may as well misspell my fake name? Perhaps.) -> Ashlley.
4. Make up a surname related to lava -> Lavira.
From there, I was Ashlley Lavira in every game, every daydream and every self insert. When I started going online via Pinterest and YouTube, my name was always some variation of Lady Lavira.
And then. The year that changed so many things for so many people. 2020.
This was the year I finally caved and let my sister sit me down to watch Marvel, and my second ever hyper-obsession was born (first was Harry Potter, third is Life Series/Hermitcraft).
I responded to Harry Potter by learning every fact there was to learn, to the point where I came this close to winning a Harry Potter trivia quiz just a couple of months ago. I've responded to the mcyt by writing angst and developing my short story skills and getting Tumblr so I could be active in a fandom for the first time. I responded to Marvel in an equally sane way: self-insert fanfic.
The problem came when it stopped being self-insert. It very quickly became clear Ashlley was developing her own personality apart from me, and with it her own backstory. She grew and developed almost by herself. I spent a good two years figuring out her 15-year plot, and as she became more and more her own person, she outgrew the name "Lavira" and became Ashlley Allen instead, at the same time changing her lava powers to fire. Like a snake shedding its skin, she abandoned the name Lady Lavira and took on the mantel of Fire Queen instead.
Naturally, I had to follow suit. I changed my names on accounts already created, and when I made new ones, I always went straight for FireQueenOfficial. (Except on minecraft, which threw a temper tantrum over letter count and forced me to shorten it to TheFireQueen instead lol)
There ya go! The full story xD. This was a lot of fun. People are always like, "Oh, it's cool that you shorten your name to Ash and then your thing is fire," and I just go, "....Yeah, the fire came first (in the form of lava but still lol)."
