Behind That Other Username – A Look at Retvik
Some of you with a keen eye might have noticed that I only really use the name Medic here on the Daily SPUF. These days, I don’t play Team Fortress 2 any more and I’ve become ill-fitting of such a username as I spend more and more time doing anything but healing people in video games. On Steam and Discord, where you can have any username you want, I use the name Arkay, based on the protagonist of the Phoviverse. Old accounts made before I became known as Medic are often called Phovos. But nowadays, I’ve been using the name Retvik occasionally, wherever the previous names are unavailable.
But what IS Retvik as a username? Who is Retvik? Even if you knew nothing about me, a bit of googling might suggest that Arkay is an Elder Scrolls reference (it’s not, but there is a deity called Arkay in the Elder Scrolls), Phovos is a bastardization of the word Φόβος meaning fear and Medic is, well, Medic. A google search for Retvik brings up an artist and a bunch of results for random people, including an article about a baby called Retvik who has thalassemia. A search on DuckDuckGo (the search engine we should all be using) brings up the same artist from Wikipedia and has a Daily SPUF article as the third result. Both search engines asked me if I meant something else.
My Retvik is none of those things. Okay, it’s one of those things. The name of my Warframe account. Really, the Warframe account started it all off, as Retvik is now a MR27 Gold Sage. But really, Retvik is a lot more.
You see, Retvik is my second oldest original character, after Phovos the Raptor herself.
Okay, technically Retvik isn’t quite as old as Arkay, Teekay and the rest of the ‘old K-Class’, but those six characters are actually named after the Bohrok-Kal, based on their initials. Pahrak-Kal and Kohrak-Kal became Veekay and Arkay because Peekay and Kaykay sounded retarded. Retvik on the other hand was initially an antagonist, a threat to Teekay and his group of miscreant Vohra (which was what I originally called their race).
Retvik (full name Retvik Rethianos) was a huge, menacing but eerily calm monster, a formerly highly decorated general who had become an assassin for the Rethavok military government. His job was to capture Teekay in particular because Teekay, who was the protagonist of early Phoviverse stuff, had Anime Pikachu levels of untapped potential. Being a sentient being with five brothers all of whom had insane powers, Retvik never actually managed to do this, but more because he never wanted to do it in the first place.
When things shifted into a more coherent story line in the MK2 Phoviverse, Retvik was in a similar position, trying to catch Teekay, although this time it was for political and personal reasons. The Rethavok believed that the Threavok (the new name for Teekay’s race) would become a threat if they were recognised as a separate society and Retvik had been given the task to capture political leaders like Teekay, but was doing so as a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of Rethavok society. He didn’t want the job at all, but never got the chance to go through with it after he got roped into a time-traveling adventure to stop a scheme to destroy the universe.
Going into newer Phoviverse iterations, Retvik’s image was cleared up. He was still a general but he was no longer trying to kidnap people. He was the leader of a squad of Rethans who had defended multiple cities from various threats, before getting kidnapped and teleported away into that same old adventure where he and three others save the universe from destruction. Somewhere along the line though, Retvik got married (to a formerly minor character called Gath Tsoriou) and has wanted kids for a while. Can’t have any though for a large variety of reasons, but mostly because he is a responsible adult who knows he can’t balance being a mother, working a full-time job and being dragged on interplanetary adventures all at the same time.
Personality-wise though, Retvik has never changed. He is a strong, powerful leader, wise beyond comprehension, a physical powerhouse and an all-round nice guy. He may seem tough and menacing but he has a heart of gold. All Retvik wants to do is to help others and do what’s best for everyone else, but is strong enough to understand that sometimes others will get hurt and you can’t do everything. He is still somewhat eerily calm, never seeming to truly panic unless things are really, really wrong. Retvik also has telepathy but if you ask him about it, he’ll deny it every single time.
After all these years though, I have no idea what inspired Retvik’s name. I don’t live anywhere where Retvik would even be a common or uncommon name. He just… popped up one day as I was playing with my Bionicles. I actually still have Retvik in his (vastly upgraded) Bionicle form, having gone through far more iterations than his Phoviverse equivalent has but still being somewhat the same. The same old red and gold look, although I don’t have the pieces and parts to make Retvik look exactly how I want him to look.
An amusing thing to finish this off. I looked up Retvik under image searches. Most of what came up was that aforementioned artist’s stuff but there were a LOT of Daily SPUF screenshots, a couple of screenshots and streams where I’d been in them (mostly just in the chat) and, weirdly, a lot of images of rivens.
Anyway, that’s where the name Retvik comes from. Not that any of you needed to know.