Why Sombra Glaze?
(Photo of name tags by Jon Tyson from Unsplash)
I didn't know I was trans back when I made the username, my actual name made me uncomfortable, and the reason it made me uncomfortable was gender dysphoria, but I didn't know anything about transness at all so I didn't put 2 and 2 together. I wanted a replacement for my deadname because I wanted to make friends online and I needed something else they could call me other than my actual name at the time. That's why it's "Sombra Glaze" it's literally meant to be formatted as "first-name last-name" as silly as that is.
I picked Sombra because it seemed kind of gender neutral to me (in MLP:FiM it's used for a male character, in Overwatch it's used for a woman) and having my gender be ambiguous made me feel good, I had never heard of gender euphoria before but I think that might've been one of the first times I felt it, being perceived as anything other than a man was such a breath of fresh air for me and I had no idea why at the time. Even after I figured out I'm a woman the name still works because Sombra is a feminine noun in Spanish (it means "shadow") so it feels pretty feminine to me now, which is nice.
And I picked Glaze because one of my favorite MLP fan songs back when I was an edgy kid was Awoken by H8 Seed and WoodenToaster, and it turns out that WoodenToaster also goes by Glaze, so I just... stole that part of his username, because why not I guess, it didn't feel gendered to me so it didn't give me any dysphoria and I thought it was really cool, didn't even bother to look up what the word Glaze meant, I just yoinked it.
So yeah, the name basically comes from me being a brony and a huge egg... goofy ass name, I do like it but I gotta admit it is goofy.
At first a part of me wished I could replace the "Glaze" in my username because 1: The whole “first-name last-name” thing feels a bit silly to me now, and 2: I barely listened to any other songs by Glaze, I was just obsessed with Awoken, but it felt too much like a part of my identity for me to change it so I just left it the way it was.
More recently though I've been feeling a lot happier with it because one of my close friends likes to rhyme it with random words to make silly jokes (saying stuff like "you were in a sombra daze" when I tell her I've been distracted) and honestly that's really endearing, "Glaze" rhymes with a decent amount of words so you know what? I like it now, glad I picked it.
It's also nice to have a part of my username that differentiates me from other Sombras online, I've met a couple other Sombras, and I guess last names are meant to disambiguate between people with the same name, so uhh... I guess Glaze is just my last name now, please refer to me only as "Miss Glaze" from now on (kidding lol).