Why 'NavelColt'? The Not-So-Great-Mystery Explored! · 3:50pm Apr 10th, 2022

Here we are, at the last planned info blog before Babs, and with the easiest question by far: Why that username?

When I joined the horse fandom in 12’ it was under the name ~Chaotic Discord~. This was through the still-very-active message board, MLP Forums. I spent most of my time there and ended up joining the staff as a global moderator and then community admin. At the time, I was still DarkSuperTails over on DeviantART—an aged account from the mid 2000’s chock-full of my Sonic nerd phase. I collected and commissioned MLP art but the account itself hadn’t changed much.

Fast forward to 15’. My fuel for helping to run MLP Forums ran dry. Still a very young adult with too much free time, I decided to double down on DeviantART, which was in the prime years of its immensely popular Groups feature. DeviantART Groups, for those who aren't savvy with the site, were pages where users could create guilds of sorts around ideas, shows, or certain characters.

By paying a premium of $60 per year, your Groups became Super Groups, and you gained levels of customization that made it seem like you were designing your own website on DeviantART. Add to this, community-sourced coding that could be plugged into custom boxes to make them have unique backgrounds and you got an accessible, fun way to create websites without the moderate to advanced coding knowledge.

I created a group based around a fandom trend that had been floating around for a while, and that I myself had enjoyed promoting through commission work a fair bit: ponies being drawn with (human-esque) belly buttons. Much like how ponies wearing socks was a thing for a while, this was as well, and so I took it upon myself to create a group page around this concept to promote it even further and collect the free real estate.

Art by StillFire. They’ve since deactivated their account so, no links today.

And so collect the free real estate I did. By the end of the group’s active lifespan almost two years later, it had reached a whopping 2.5k Members. During its prime I was interviewed about the group by Bernd01 of the Cutie Art Crusaders, who had a strong DeviantART presence at the time. We even commemorated it by getting a cute artwork of our OC characters discussing this curious trend.

Artwork by January3rd

The group still exists, but with no other staff running it, and the Super Groups feature long removed, the page is a hollow shell of what it used to be. Feels bad man.

(For those wishing to check it out, just keep in mind that a lot of the artwork there ranges from wholesome to suggestive or even lewd depending on what folders you look at, so just bear this in mind if this sort of thing bothers you.)

Anyway, all of this was the inspiration for why I changed my name from ~Chaotic Discord~ here or DarkSuperTails there to NavelColt across all my fandom-related sites. Nowadays I focus my online presence on FIMFiction for writing, Discord for socializing, and Twitter for art commissioning and fandom news/interaction. DeviantART used to carry all three of these honors back in the day but it just isn’t what it used to be.

I never cared to think of another name to replace this one, and now we're entering sunken cost fallacy levels of brand recognition, so here we are. I am forever the belly button horse.

If you made it through this rant, have a cookie!

If you made it through all three of these rant blogs, have two!

Thanks for reading! Have another Zipp/Pipp sisterfic on the way, plus the collab with LevelDasher, so keep an eye out!

If you'd care to see my photo experiences at BabsCon, or just want platonic relationship serotonin injected into your veins at regular intervals between stories, follow me on Twitter!

Report NavelColt · 291 views · #NavelColt #belly buttons #peculiar horse trends

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