hug me tight milky way: our system name

Hello, we are the Milky Way Collective! So, as you can imagine, we have many, many feelings about space. So! For this Writing Wednesday, I’ll be explaining the origin of our system name: our connection to space!

So! I am Narancia/Nanashi. I have… numerous fictionkin lives where space was an important aspect of who I was as a person. The most important connection to me was to my boyfriend in my life as Nanashi. Sora Kamui was a guy who lived in his family’s planetarium. He didn’t go outside much, not really caring for the world. Well, we were in a similar situation! I was a shut-in myself, until I was forced out of my home during the plot of the game. The two of us started out viewing projections of space on the ceiling of the planetarium. He didn’t really like me much, at first. He had never been the most social person, and was pretty closed off, especially due to his negative relationship with his family. Still, over time, he warmed up to me, and the two of us began hanging out more and more. We exchanged contacts over our bitphones, his being shaped like a planet, and I managed to convince him to leave the planetarium to see the stars in real life. We had to travel a bit, as we lived in a city, but our nightly adventures were the highlight of both of our days. Sora… is probably one of the most important people to me. I love him more than I can put into words. I miss him every day. So, I thought it was only natural that I honor him in part of our system name. At first, I was going to call us the Spica System, after the name of his planetarium, but I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t fair naming it so specifically after something related to myself.

Though, of course, my life as Nanashi is not my only connection to space. I am also GOD 707! Master hacker! Lover of space! Known for wanting to get married on a space station! Of course, none of this came true for me. I longed for space. I loved space. But my love never amounted to anything. I ended up dying the same way I lived, alone. In a chair. In my high tech apartment. I was pretty young, and wasted my entire life hacking for an admittedly really shady organization. Naming our system after space felt like being a little closer to something I loved back then.

Of course, I’m not the only one with a strong relationship to space in my system. After all, it would kind of be really really rude to name our entire system only after myself. There are many other members of my system with space associations. One of our alters, an android, is named after the Andromeda galaxy. Ben is, of course, linked to the moon, due to Majora’s Mask. All of Fling Posse, referring to Dai, Lambda, and Eri, have connections to space through their song Stella. Stella is, of course, a very important song, both to their lore and to them as people now. Dromi is Murr from Mahoyaku, a character known for falling in love with the moon. And, of course, he’s Meowth from Pokemon. As we all know, Meowth is from Team Rocket. Leo is obsessed with aliens! He has multiple fictionkin lives where he has just… loved. aliens. He also has a Chiaki Morisawa hearttype. This applies to Dromi as well, as he is kin with Tetora Nagumo. The two of them are from an idol unit called Ryuseitai, which translates to Shooting Star/Meteor Squad. They have a number of space themed songs. Lucio, as Belphegor, was known for loving space. And, of course, King. King… is in love with Kaito Momota. He’d deny it, but he loves that man. Kaito is an astronaut, and King has truly come to love space because of him. We’re in similar situations, the two of us. When we came up with the name for our system, we were very small. The system consisted of Myself, Yoh, Leo, Dell, Andromeda, and King. Not all of us were very active. We were still kind of suppressing our systemhood a lot. So, King and I got to thinking. We had… many… many names that we tried out. Yes, Leo really wanted us to be called “Dumb Bitch Squad”. Eventually, the two of us started thinking about our connection to space. We loved people, and we loved what they loved. Listening to people talk about their interests and get excited over them was something we loved to do. So… why not name our system after something related to the people we valued most?

So! We’re the Milky Way Collective! Been this way since 2022, and I can’t imagine us being anyone different!