What's in a Name?

It should come as a shock to exactly none of my readers that Arcee Mann isn't my birth name. So, where did it come from, and why did I choose it? Read on to find out.

First, a little background. I said way back in my first post that I was a big Transformers fan as a kid. A good friend of mine collected GI-Joe figures as well, since they both kind of inhabited similar universes and their comics (and cartoons, I think) occasionally crossed over with each other. The thing is, though? I never liked GI-Joes. Like, absolutely no interest at all. So thinking about it now, it occurs to me that there must have been something else about the heroic Autobots and nefarious Decepticons that appealed to me, beyond the whole struggle between two paramilitary groups and the big guns and such.

Thinking about other toys I collected, the other major group that comes to mind is my Star Wars toys. Like Transformers, the Star Wars movies were about this epic struggle of good versus evil, and there were certainly blasters and lightsabers and so forth, but it wasn't the violence itself that appealed to me: instead, it was the richness of the worlds that were created! Indeed, as I grew older, I became fascinated with science fiction and fantasy stories, to the exclusion of almost everything else — because it wasn't the conflict inherent in fiction that caught my attention, it was that ability to escape into a whole new world, so unlike the one outside my window!

Please understand that I had a happy childhood (for the most part). My family loved me, I had a few good friends, and I could pretty much ignore the kids that teased and made fun of me (which was most of them, including most of the kids in my ward at church). But still, there was something really magical about these stories that could take me away to worlds where good would always stand up to evil in whatever form it took, and though sometimes there would be cliffhangers, good would always triumph in the end.

Anyway, that's way more analysis than I had intended to put into explaining my Transformers love, and it was all leading up introducing this particular Autobot. Meet Arcee:

That's right, Arcee is a Transformer. Originally the only female Transformer, to be exact. Eventually the creators added other female robots, but for that first generation of stories, she was the Autobot Smurfette. I never owned her toy, but nevertheless, I always knew of her, and she carries a special significance in my heart.

Sometime I'll tell the story of where my last name comes from, but that story's pretty interesting in its own right, so I'd better leave it for another day.