what’s in a “tag”?

i started competing in super smash brothers melee tournaments when i was 12 years old after watching documentary known as “the smash brothers.” i learned that, apparently “tags” are a pretty big deal, and it’s very common to just refer to people by their tag rather than their real name.

tags are an opportunity to express yourself and, to some degree, separate your competitor persona from your real life. some people go with silly tags that are simply funny to make people have to call-out out-loud (like Dr. PeePee, now PPMD), some people just use their actual names, and while some people also pick something that might just sound “cool” or “edgy,” it’s more broadly applicable to say that tags serve as a sort of reinvention of your image.

i don’t exactly see “tafaar” as a different persona from “aaron,” and that’s probably partially because a lot of people tend to think it’s my actual name. fair enough; it sounds like a real name, and sometimes that leads to funny interactions. either way, i’ve probably heard the name “tafaar” more often than i’ve heard my actual name since at least 2020 after graduating high school, and i think that’s an indicator that i picked a pretty good name, especially since people don’t think twice about calling tafaar in public.

i just used to be “taf”

i’ve never put much thought into the names i choose for things, including my stardew valley animals and my actual real cat poncho. in those cases, i just pick the first word or object that comes to mind a lot of the time. for some reason, i thought it would be fun for my competitor tag to be chosen by a couple of my online friends.

one suggested “aar” as a sort of mysterious name (that also is obviously the first 3 letters of my name), and the other suggested “taf,” because this goofball thought it would be funny to make my name “fat” but backwards. i don’t think i even caught what he was doing there, but i liked the sound of “taf,” so that’s actually what i was known as first.

taf was great; it was short, to the point, and catchy. plus, it had some significance to me being chosen this way, which is more thought than i’d given my previous online usernames like “SuperNinten64” for example… but even that was just for my minecraft username.

username already taken

welp. as much as i liked the name “taf,” it was usually already claimed on most websites since it is just a 3 letter name… probably. like i said, i don’t put that much thought into the names of things, so after the first name conflict i kind of just adopted this new tag for what would become the indefinite future: “tafaar,” a simple combination of the two names i was suggested before.

unfortunately, i have to credit the origin of the name to league of legends, where my tag also used to be capitalized until i decided on “tafaar” with a lower case t at some point later on. (if you’re curious, i played ADC primarily and my favorite champs were kalista and twitch.)

i am not middle-eastern

this comes as a surprise to people pretty often, but no, i am not middle-eastern, or really even anything close to it. i’m not persian, turkish, arab, etc., and i’m only mentioning this because people often assume that, haha.

one funny moment that’s come from this was when i was hanging out with a local smash player that i’d known for probably at least a year or two at that point. we were walking around corvallis (a college town in oregon) and they, being arab, made a joke about how arabs are always late to things and that “tafaar probably knows a lot about that.”

in that moment, i had to break their heart and inform them that tafaar is not my real name, and i am not arab.

i don’t take offense to being misidentified at all, because after all, i am very, very ethnically ambiguous and mixed with all sorts of things; just not the most common ones that people suspect like latino, middle eastern, or indian.