A Strange Twist of Naming Fate

If there’s one difference between aabicus and I, it’s that we’ve had vastly different usernames. Aabicus has been aabicus for decades now. Meanwhile, I’ve jumped through a myriad of usernames. I started off being Phovos the Raptor, I shortened that name to Phovos, then, when I REALLY got into TF2, I started calling myself Medic. When I slowly stopped playing TF2 and after SPUF died, I moved away from that name and began to call myself Retvik, since my desired username, Arkay, wasn’t available. That was until I had a breakdown in December of 2023 and decided to start calling myself Arkay whenever I could anyway. After spending 200 platinum on a name change in Warframe, I decided to make the name Arkay permanent, even if I still call myself Medic here and Phovos on my own website.

These days though, some people still call me Medic. I hate it, it’s not my username most of the time. I haven’t been called Medic on Steam OR Discord (outside of the Daily SPUF server) for over 5 years. If you call me Medic on the Daily SPUF Discord server, that’s fine, but if my display name calls me “Arkay” or “Retvik”, then please use those names. It’s 5 or 6 letters, it’s not that hard.

But I didn’t always call myself Medic. There was a short period of time where I called myself Engineer. I wasn’t a Medic main, I hardly touched the class at first. No, I was an Engineer main. And I was a pretty alright Engineer main.

Like, I knew all the good spots. I could wrangler-jump. Playing on BLU wasn’t even a problem because I had good shotgun aim and would use my mini-sentry as bait while I shot people in the back. In fact, I loved playing as Gunslinger Engineer, making sure my team had forward teleporters and dispensers up front while I made annoying traps for people. Sticking my mini-sentry somewhere annoying was a ton of fun while I leveled up my teleporters. And if my mini-sentry died? Who cared? I’d just make a new one.

For a while, I had barely a few hours in Medic, but Engineer raced to the top of my most-used class list. My main class was Engineer, with a hint of Pyro and Soldier. Medic was nowhere to be seen at first.

Honestly, I don’t even remember what caused me to switch to Medic. I like to think it was when I met Bacxaber on a dark 2fort arena server, but I think, back then, I had gone back to awkwardly switching between Medic, Engineer, Soldier and Heavy, and also changing my name to whatever class I was playing as. And, funnily enough, Bacxaber was a Spy main back then, not the Heavy God he is today. But something made me switch to Medic and I stuck to it.

What I wonder though is what would have happened if I had stuck to the name Engineer? After all, I joined SPUF not that long after I chose to stay as a Medic main, but the name The Engineer was available when I created my SPUF account. In fact, the name The Engineer was available for so long that I claimed the account in 2016 for some reason. I probably wanted to use it for a Binding of Medic spin off or something.

I do think I wouldn’t have been as popular, nor would I have made the same friends I have today. After all, the reason aabicus and I became friends was because I leaned hard into the Medic persona and started collecting every type of Medic weapon possible. Aabicus had an uncraftable Amputator which I wanted, and we remained friends afterwards. Medic is just a much more meme-able and amusing character and I built a persona around it.

I mean, I probably still would have made friends and stuff, but I wonder if I’d even have started posting or running the Daily SPUF. I’m not sure.

At least I can take solace in the fact that there’s a parallel universe out there somewhere where I DID remain an Engineer main. Thanks, multiversal theory and multiple dimensions.