A very brief sloppy history of soulbonding
Okay, so I started wandering out, trying to see when the word ‘soulbonding’ came into use. So far, the earliest reference I can find is from 7/9/01, in Souls and Bonds and Ourselves on a (surprise!) multi website… in fact, it’s good ol’ Pavilion Hall, the group me and Zyfron used to joke was all about multi inactivism back in the day. The way terminology is slung around makes it sound like the community and the slang were already there then. (So don’t worry, old fogeys, the word soulbonding is now old enough to drive, practically.)
The soulbonding comm on LJ was created at the very, very start of 2002, January 3rd to be exact. And Laura Gilkey seems to have helped spawn people’s favorite definitions and quotables; she wrote a story about soulbonding, called The Trinity, and put it on Fictionpress on April 22nd, 2002. Pavilion Hall has a handful of other articles on soulbonding that date from this time, including transcriptions from the autobiographies of Edith Warton and Robert E. Howard (the Conan guy). Ha, there are even articles on how plurals and soulbonders could get along better! Yes, we’ve been having the same damn turf wars in fifteen years.
In the Edith Warton article, Astraea notes, “Of course, [Edith Warton] didn’t call it soulbonding. No one did until a small internet anime fanfiction writers’ group started using that word.” According to this InsaneJournal entry, it’s from 1996. If that’s true, congratulations, the term ‘soulbond’ is old enough to drive, vote, and gamble. Soon it’ll be old enough to drink!
It LOOKS like that anime fanfiction writer’s group might’ve been involved with Child of Mana, but link rot has long since set in so I can’t date that, or even know for sure.
EDIT: foolish me! Child of Mana’s soulbonding site was first archived on 6/26/2001, so predates the Pavilion Hall article. And IT references this article, do you believe in soulbonding at first sight? which was written in 1999. Annnnnnd shibooski! This article answers!
Q: Who coined the term “SoulBonding”? And how come it’s capitalized that way?
A: Amanda Flowers, a member of the JFW, coined the term “SoulBonding”, and I believe that in one discussion relating to the subject, she said that the inspiration for the term being capitalized like that was the title of the RPG “SoulBlazer”. Basically, she just thought it looked cool. ^_^
JFW was the “Just for Writers” mailing list, which was for Final Fantasy rather than Child of Mana. It seems to have been an informal thing, so no official website, just an invite-only mailing list.
So anyway, I can’t prove it’s from 1996, but I can at least place it back to 1999, and it’d spread into pretty common online parlance by 2001. (Since one blogger references it on 6/4/2001 with “my friend Amanda Flowers (the actual coiner of the term ‘soulbond’ that everyone likes to bandy about these days)“)
Soooo there you go. Until I put more work into it, the word for soulbonding is at least from ‘99.
EDIT AGAIN: Okay, a little more digging helped me find this article, which claims Flowers coined the term in ‘98. So now I’ve got three different citations: ‘96, ‘98, and 2000, none of which has any back up. I know it can’t be 2000, because “do you believe in soulbonding at first sight?” was from 1999 and the term and slang was already in place by then. So yeah, ‘98 or ‘96, but seeing the nature of the email list, it’s unlikely an exact date is available, for me anyway. But yeah, the term was indeed invented by teenage Final Fantasy III fans, far as I can tell, and is now old enough to be able to vote.
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