The Dragonheart Collective (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
monsterqueers) wrote2022-09-28 11:40 am
monsterqueers) wrote2022-09-28 11:40 am
Entry tags:
[Chatter] Updates and such
Aaaaaaa this took forever to happen. Life got in the way and such but lots of updates:
Website updates:
General updates:
Fandom Updates:
Website updates:
- RSS feed has been enabled on the website! Now you can get notifications as we update!
- Document "Should I Tell My Friends/Doctors/Parents/etc about being Plural?" posted
- Essay An Open Letter To The Rest Of The Inclusive Plural Community posted
- Essay Xeno As In Nonhuman - Gender Essay posted
- Fawn's Werecard posted
- Added a bunch more sites and reorganized the essays and papers pages a bit
General updates:
- Currently playing SMTV, that will be the next thing for the plural media blog its just slow going because Actually Playing it and not watching a cutscene movie and running x_x Its VERY fun though. Good vibes.
- Still working on a driving license hhhh
- Maybe this time is the trick and will be more active here.
Fandom Updates:
- Uuuuuh nothing much really? Dont remember lol.
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that open letter is like the only sensical thing we've read in all of syscourse in the past like six months (i am not being literal but god that's what it FEELS LIKE). covers a LOT of stuff we've privately complained about to partners and friends but basically 10000% agree cosigned etc
(in particular lol'ed at "The community has a huge telephone game problem where people learn of being plural being a thing from a mutual who explains it poorly and they never get pointed to any resource collection besides a term hoard wiki." bc ohhh my god the r/plural subreddit and people recommending pluralpedia to complete newbies trying to figure out if they're even plural and maybe haven't even heard of plurality at all beyind stereotypes of MPD/DID. NO!!!!! pet peeve!!!!!!! pluralpedia has value as an archive of community terms imo but it is also the kind of resource that is. more confusing to questioning folks than anything else. like idk if someone is trying to figure out the grammar of a language they're just starting with, you don't just give them a monolingual dictionary and be like "this will help! i'm sure you'll figure it out :)" ..... you actually help them understand how the language works and give them basic words long before you give them lists of specialised vocab to memorise.... anyway when we see that happening we'll usually quietly drop a link to your "Am I Plural?" page if no one else has, because 1. its good and thank you for making it btw, and 2. it's one of the only "am I plural?" resources we've seen that acknowledges that there's a BUNCH of possibilities for plurality that aren't either "all plurality is dissociative disorders you must fit in the medical framework" or "lol dissociation what's this there's nothing to watch out DID/OSDD systems are only The Bad Sysmeds" (sad but we've seen that.....) and i think that level of nuance is Beneficial, and 3. a guide like this so much more likely to actually help compared to just like. endless lists of terms, most of which are pretty niche?? like i would love more focus on experience and self/ves-determination instead of like. the current emphasis on trying to figure out which box you fit and/or making new boxes and then being Isolated because you cannot have stuff in common with folks who don't share boxes with you..... OTL)
anyway this is a bit rambly and kind of preaching to the choir here but tl;dr love your plural resources thank you for them we're definitely subscribing to the rss feed
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We have years of frustration pent up in that essay with how some spaces are run and the introduction a lot of people get to plurality being the way it is there.
We are DEEPLY salty about people sending pluralpedia to newbies instead of like morethanone.info or literally any other basic resource. Its for term archival work and is NOT a basic dictionary. Just 100% yeah, you help people understand the basics before you hand them an advanced dictionary.
Also glad you like our 'Am I plural' list! It genuinely got made because we got tired of copypasting the same list of things over and over and over due to no one resoruce to link already existing (...most of our documents are for that reason) when people leave questions places like reddit/tumblr/etc.
And YEAH, its only ever 'dissociative disorder is never the answer!' or 'dissociative disorder is the ONLY answer' on a lot of questioning resources that are actual examples of experiences so it makes it hard.
The focus on experience is something we REALLY think would be more helpful than the term lists. A Lot of people have different ideas of what words mean, so the only way we can communicate is by being *specific* about what we mean. Talking about experience also helps people understand and relate. If different kinds of systems talked more freely about their experiences maybe we would all see that we arent so different after all lol.
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Unfortunately, many plural spaces are NOT receptive to the notion that one’s understanding of their origin can change over time.
UGH THIS HONKS ME OFF SO BADLY. You are basically BOUND to get something wrong at some point! That's natural and normal! Requiring people to sign in blood the moment they enter the room, "everything I say is correct and true until forever and ever," is doomed to make people miserable! LET FOLKS BE WRONG! Let them and their understanding change and grow! Imagine if the first time you ever said, "I want to be X when I grow up!" became the career path you were assigned for the rest of eternity! Yech!
As for micro-labels, I am still mad and bitter that I now get strangers coming up to me at con tables asking if I'm an "endo." Because I am working, I can not make the face I would like and say, "Now, now, sweetheart, you haven't bought me dinner yet." Instead, I have to keep my professional face on and explain that they are asking a caveman if he is Catholic or Protestant: I predate that whole thing, I was not converted, thus those words are irrelevant to me, and anyway, do they wanna buy a book or not? This is Comic Con, not microlabel speed-dating. (Maybe that should be my flippant answer: "Buy my books and find out!" Yes, that will be my answer from here on out.)
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Yeah we have seen very few full integration resources that arent pretty vague personal anecdotes, or aggressive 'and everything is perfect forever now and EVERYONE needs to do this' things. From anecdotes of people who have fused that we know of, most of them speak of part of the process being about intentionally trying to 'force' the perspective of everyone being one person until it sticks once trauma is dealt with and memory sharing is pretty good and thats about as specific as we have seen. Of course, we havent been directly looking for it because its very much not something we want to pursue, so better guides might exist somewhere.
Yes! People on the internet hate when people are wrong about anything. No one is allowed to make mistakes and it sucks! With the way the community makes being mistaken about origins a Discourse Point it further heightens the whole thing.
Someone was bold enough to ask yall that to your FACE??? The entitlement people have nowadays to incredibly personal information nowadays and the assumptions they use the same words they do is just bananas.
Thats a fantastic way to make nosy people leave you alone, though!
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We've been in this rolling flaming trash barrel of a community for fifteen godforsaken years, and we STILL don't know our origins fully. We have our best guesses, but there are plenty of headmates where we still don't know for sure where they came from. And we very well may never know! It was a long time ago, and having DID means amnesia!
MULTIPLE people have asked to our face. One of them was a minor, so I assume it was youth and never having been in places where that wasn't normal; the other seemed to have been steeped pretty deeply in "anti-endo" sentiment and told me things about plural history that were just plain not true. (And because I was working, it wasn't like I could say, "That's bullshit. Empowered multiples and endogenic multiples are not the same thing, and the Entropy System are factually incorrect jerks.")
I'm somewhat used to people testing me at cons, but I remember that honked me off. I guess I'd naively assumed that it was an online-only pissing contest, and having to deal with it in person while working was just... eye-opening. I was like, "Oh shit. I am Caveman Ogg, and I am now trapped in the Protestant Reformation."
Fortunately, I have also been able to have conversations with folks at cons about how poisonous "syscourse" is, even though that term still feels new to me. But yeah, it's spreading! I never had folks talking to me about that kind of thing at cons until late 2018.
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MULTIPLE people???? Yeesh.
Yeah 2018 is about when The Discourse reached critical mass and really became inescapable if you are up to date in the community, wasnt it? That sounds about right.
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Haha, yeah, after somersaulting through soulbonder, natural multi, and DID labels over the course of a decade and learning that all were sorta-yes sorta-no, not the full story, we kinda gave into the reality of "it's complicated."
Rogan
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Yeah, like any effort to try to properly explain origin theories we have at this point is going to involve at least three paragraphs of 'can we really know anything?' musing so its not a 'quick label' sort of thing. Sure theres 'Origin Agnostic' as an option, but thats tied up with that one system uuuuh Panopticon/Cassandra Oakdown so it makes it hard to use it without that shadow over it.
It just... doesnt seem like information thats useful in so many circumstances for describing a system in comparison to describing the actual current experience. People would get a better idea of our system if we talked about practically *anything else* besides origin.
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Even saying I'm "origin agnostic" is, for me, dignifying the origin crap with a response. (Even if you ignored Panopticon. Plenty of horrible people have coined plural terms in the past.) And we couldn't even get into ours without a few hours of discussing our family's religious history first, and who wants that info-brick? Who wants to SHARE that level of personal detail with some rando? Not me!
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Yeah the Panopticon thing is just one drop in the bucket, if the only problem was Panopticon wed still use it because terms Can be taken from their terrible creators and all and Panopticon doesnt own the concept of 'agnostic', but even using it is still playing into the idea that origins is something that Needs To Be Said, and needs to be said right off the bat.
Origins theory talk is SO PERSONAL to so many people, it tends to involve very sensitive information in so many cases and can be used to identify people and its just... Honestly if someone is pushy about asking origins we assume they want the information for questionable reasons because why else would someone NEED to know that kind of personal information in a situation where its not directly relevant?
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Indeed. Far as I can tell, "singlet" was coined by a major dirtbag about thirty years ago, just nobody remembers anymore because his name hasn't been spread around!
Yeah, and let's be real, a lot of the time "traumagenic" just becomes an excuse to pick at people's wounds to make sure they "count." I may have chosen to go public about some of my abuse history, but at least I'm getting PAID. Nobody should HAVE to do it! It's repulsive.
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Ye, think we remember hearing something like that? It sound like familiar information.
Also yeah, 'traumagenic' is mostly used to force people to disclose abuse, no one should have to do that publicly- no one should even have to admit to trauma history publicly at all, much less the details.
We see so many people spill a whole bunch of personal details about their trauma for everyone to see CONSTANTLY because they feel obligated to do so to ask others if they 'count as traumagenic and therefore valid' and its just sickening that these often really young teens feel the need to give that kind of personal info to the world just to be 'allowed' to access resources the community has. It truly is repulsive, strong agree there.
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I feel like some scabby old person complaining how things were "so much better back in my day," which isn't so, fictionkin > otakukin by far, and I like fictive over soulbond even though fictive has been narrowly defined to exclude insourced folks which I think is a lacking, but that's not the TERM's fault, that's the PEOPLE what did that, far as I can tell. (And it's also why I've been stuck using "fictioneer" for
its just sickening that these often really young teens feel the need to give that kind of personal info to the world just to be 'allowed' to access resources the community has.
YES! It's maddening! Especially when it's minors being pressured to do it, since they're the ones who are likely to STILL be in a really dangerous situation that they can't escape! What a horrible thing to do, to put a kid in the position of, "you can either hork up all these horrific things being done to you and we'll mmmmaybe give you resources to survive, OR you get nothing but scorn." That seems to me to just be heaping abuse upon abuse, complete with the, "if you question us, you're A BAD PERSON WHO DESERVES THIS," victim-blaming. It makes me really sad! Both the folks who asked me if I was endogenic seemed to be really young, so I can only assume they were steeped in that and don't realize that people outside that cloister find it super-offputting.
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Paragenic is from 'paracosm' which is the word some Immersive Daydreamers use for a daydream world, but the original word itself is not intuitive in the first place so its Awkward. Especially because the venn diagram of other words for created headmates and paragenic headmates is just about a circle.
According to this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/fdwdhd/comment/fjl4mmi/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 parogenic was coined because latin prefix 'I create'. The person who coined it didnt intend for it to get big, and a lot of the tulpamancy community doest even like the term in the first place, so really its only being pushed at this point because of exclusionists not liking tulpamancy in the first place.
As for Pariogenic, its news to us what it could possibly be referencing. Nowhere seems to have a source link for a coining post explaining it that we can find.
Yeah every time we poke our nose in a system space weighted towards people under ~16 we feel like we age 40 years. Glad they are having fun and all but... Oof. Not the best thought out concepts here.
People are out there saying fictives are supposed to never be OCs/from your stories?? Wwwwhat?!?! Thats terrible! Glad we havent seen that. Aaaugh thats the worst. Like its one thing to choose not to apply the label if the headmate/system doesnt want to, but its another for people to complain they arent Ever supposed to use the label if they want.
Yeah, every other week we see at least one Very Obviously A Child making an intro/questioning post on reddit or on tumblr or twitter where they start detailing trauma they have and saying 'you arent obligated to share that' never actually fixes anything. Whats worse is the community doesnt tell people much anymore to be cautious if you are a newly discovered system in talking about it with people who have known you a long time if they hold power over you (such as parents), even if you dont remember anything particularly awful.
Straight up saw a post the other week where an obvious young teen who said they learned they were a system less than a month ago and wanted to come out to everyone now they knew and asked how to come out to their parents. Who they self-admitted were abusive. Tried our best to dissuade them, unsure if it worked. Some people legitimately were ignoring the abusive part and just being like 'I used a powerpoint slideshow!' or 'try bringing notes when you talk to them!'. Completely terrible advice that totally misses the red flags and safety discussion in favor of ~positivity~.
Yeah it truly is just adding to their abuse and trauma especially if they are forced to relive it to appease people, especially if they still are living through it. Publicly forcing people to admit horrible things is just sheer cruelty. Even privately being pressured to give personal information and then having to do so is incredibly violating of an experience. Even if its not explicitly Required, it clearly feels expected enough that people will do it unprompted.
We suppose its a unfortunate natural conclusion to the culture where you are expected to disclose every oppression you face if you are in any sort of leftist-leaning social media space. People really do forget how actually offputting that is if they havent been up to their eyeballs in it.
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People are out there saying fictives are supposed to never be OCs/from your stories?? Wwwwhat?!?! Thats terrible!
I mean, I haven't had anyone be a JERK to me, just... bemused. Like, "why would you use fictive for that, that's just... normal headmates?" and I'm like, "...?!?!?!?" It just seems to be a big cultural difference because multiples on tumblr ATE soulbonders wholesale, as far as I can tell, so that insourced fictives did indeed become normal. Plus maybe there are passing issues where, well, if you AREN'T Harry Potter and stuck being recognized for the rest of your life, why WOULD you admit you're fictive? I'm not sure. God knows, it's caused us trouble as we've started actually getting noticed for some of our prose fiction... but what we're REALLY known for are the multi comics... and they're done under the same name... oops.
And oh god no, our general advice is not to come out as ANYTHING until you're an adult who's much harder to Baker Act. It's so much more dangerous when you're a minor!
We suppose its a unfortunate natural conclusion to the culture where you are expected to disclose every oppression you face if you are in any sort of leftist-leaning social media space.
I sometimes call this the "SJ personals ad." You know, instead of "br/bl 8in DDF" it's "white queer disabled w/exotrauma." Only as far as I can tell, you don't even get laid! At least the personals ad is supposed to get you laid!
--Rogan/Mori
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We have a system member who has that problem, he doesnt consider himself a fictive because he came first and the character in question was inspired by him unknowingly after he showed up. That puts him in a fuzzy grey area and theres probably a lot of systems with that problem.
For sure! Really wish we didnt see so many minors begging for advice on how to tell their parents every facet of their identity. Like its great they feel comfortable, but that doesnt make it less dangerous. Even the nicest seeming parent can freak out about these things. Like us saying 'STOP! TELLING! PEOPLE!' isnt going to stop anyone and it will make them stop listening instead so we are more gentle about it to try to reduce harm, but AAAAaaaaggghhhhh it is 100% how someone gets Baker Act-ed or otherwise subject to psychiatric-based violence even if the parent isnt actively malicious.
It really is!!! If ONLY it got you laid instead of subject to discourse lol.
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If ONLY it got you laid instead of subject to discourse lol.
Now I'm just imagining what the equivalent of "no users, abusers, or accusers" equivalent would be for the SJ personals ad. "No endo, friendo. Comprendo?"
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hehehehe yeah that sounds about right!
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Then again, some outsourced fictives seem to have a very different relationship to their media than we do. It sounds really unpleasant to have to watch an episode of a show to get your life story back, or to feel it or the fandom IS your life, rather than stories about it. Our fictives mostly view the stories about them with feelings ranging from embarassment to scientific fascination, but the stories are just stories to them... Maybe reminders of emotional times, but no more. (Though one of us gets way more ontologically uncomfortable when we're reading about the INSPIRATIONS for his fictional self; that woogs him out more than the stories themselves.)
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Yeah our outsourced fictives are more in line with your experiences- the kind of 'this is just fiction even if I and my experiences are not' relationship to the source. Its always so awkward when we encounter outsource fictives that dont/cant do this.
Weve seen an upkick in the number of fictives (both insourced and outsourced) having this 'the source is 1:1 with reality and everyone around me must treat it as 1:1 reality not not even a little like someones creation they made up' attitude and dont really think its the most healthiest thing to deliberately encourage like some of the plural community likes doing, to be honest.
Some people cant help having the feeling/belief that their source isnt a story in any way but is instead 100% actual reality no one made the canon up as a story its fully real, and thats fine if they can manage it without causing others or their system trouble/distress/harm and it shouldnt be vilified or aggressively reality checked even if its not consensus reality compliant, but to be honest we dont see very many systems who believe this about their source actually have a healthy relationship to said source.
Being in pure outsource fictive spaces you see a lot more of that then spaces that are for both fictionkin and fictives, interestingly!
Something about the culture of examining *why* you identify as a character and offering theories to help make sense of things in an analytical way that fictionkin often bring to the table seems to help curb this kind of thinking into a more manageable state.
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Man, apparently at least onesourced fictive a friend knew came from an animated source and found non-2D visuals really weird. That just sounds like Uncanny Valley hell! (And god, imagine if you came from a super stylized or bad '90s CGI source and felt that way! That sounds like a horror story premise! Were I in that position, I'd find that suuuuper upsetting!)
We aren't really in fictive space, since being insourced kinda weeded us, but we definitely remember plenty of soulbonders who seemed to have intensely ambivalent relationships to the media--they would hate it, watching/reading it would always seem to deeply fuck with their heads, but they couldn't stop, because it was their only connection to themselves. It was always sad to see, like they couldn't build their lives forward so kept trying to crawl back into their pasts, when everything made sense to them.
And yeah, I feel like if you're a creator yourself, you quickly realize that "canon" is kinda bullshit, influenced by deadlines, pagecount limits, budget, and stupid shit like, "okay, by law we can't show red blood without censoring, so blood's hot pink now." We pretend it's some pure unsullied artistic vision, but material constraints always apply. Indeed, those limits often DEFINE the art!
Like, we have fictives from different drafts of the same source, and that's fascinating! Most of the time, they agree on how things went, and then they run into a glaring contradiction and suddenly the seams show! But we don't really have a place to discuss this, because it seems like everything falls into the false binary of, "it is exactly 1:1 like consensus reality in all ways, otherwise it's existential despairing unreal." It's like there's pressure to never discuss those seams, even though I think that shit is important and interesting!
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We know a few folks who do find it legit upsetting/dysphoria inducing to exist in realistic 3d graphics and are always pretty glad none of us have that trouble. Seems pretty rough!
Yeah our canon-character fictive is 'divorced' from her source specifically because we realized interacting with the fandom or the canon was actively upsetting her and us to such a heavy degree any benefit of engaging outweighed the consequences. It was hard to quit it but ultimately necessary and heavily improved all of our mental states. We are a huge proponent of dropping canon sources if it starts harming you and trying to find any sort of identity at all outside of consuming the source and being Ultra Canon Compliant for that reason. It was so helpful and freeing and unfortunately there doesnt seem to be resources around to help others also dig themselves out of that hole.
Hmmm...
Might have to write one. Thats something we sure could have used to have realized it was severely tanking all of our mental health sooner and we think others might find something like that useful.
Yep! Its like people think theres no executive meddling or authors compromising to make a better or more marketable story.
Yeah, nothing is on a binary! Theres consensus reality and there is personal reality and both are important and it would be nice if there were more plural spaces that had attitudes that existed between the two extremes of 'your source memories or identity is all ~substitute beliefs~ and therefore Not Valid' and 'everything is 1:1 with consensus reality, every story is 100% true and not fiction At All in any possible way'. Its like its taboo to take a third option or middle ground.
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God, that's so horrible. I feel like having an intense big fandom of you would be the WORST. Talk about a head trip! Especially if it's like movie fandom, which seem short-lived but INTENSE. It seems like that could be really rough on a fictive, but if people have ever discussed it outside of, "ugh my fandom sucks," I haven't seen it, and it's not really something we could write about, since we've only had one instance of a fan faving two headmates before they came back, and said fan has been polite about it.
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Im the headmate that was mentioned before re:Divorcing The Source, and yeah my source's fandom was relatively big (its died down since) and Intense Fandom is part of why I changed my name to be unlike my source name. People expect you to act like the canon character or be 1:1 canon compliant if they are familiar with fictives and in the fandom and. Well im really not. Having my source name be my public use name gave people the expectation that I would behave like the character or be some level of canon compliant to the newest material or *like* the most recent material and want to talk about it with them, even other fictives would assume that.
It really ought to be discussed more- the ways a source can be awkward or uncomfortable or harmful to interact with as a fictive and what solutions/coping mechanisms/etc are available for that. We suppose its probably something that makes a fictive feel less 'valid' in their existence- to not enjoy their source anymore, or to not be up-to-date on the content, and that discourages people from discussing that sort of thing.
A 'what to do when your source is hurting you' essay is for sure going on our to-write list at this point. We have really seen one 'the source is giving me panic attacks what do I do?' post too many where we are the only people saying 'maybe stop watching your source and interacting with the fandom at large if you can' and that being some kind of revelation so its time for us to pull out the keyboards.
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That sounds horrible! What the hell happens if, I dunno, a sequel comes out years later? Are you expected to just... instantaneously update yourself accordingly? What if, for whatever reason, you CAN'T get the sequel (or plain don't want to)? Is there a grace period where it's okay, because the book is sold out or something, but if you aren't updated by X time, you're doomed? Are there rules if it's a self-owned work coming out regularly vs. a franchise owned by some giant conglomerate that constantly changes the creative team?
This sounds like it would very easily become a source of anguish and awfulness for everybody.
We have really seen one 'the source is giving me panic attacks what do I do?' post too many where we are the only people saying 'maybe stop watching your source and interacting with the fandom at large if you can' and that being some kind of revelation so its time for us to pull out the keyboards.
I mean, that you are saying this makes me sad, because oh god, this seems like such a source of totally preventable existential agony, but on the other hand, that does sound like a super useful resource that we'd love to see, even if it isn't something we ourself deal with.
(Also, wow am I even happier that all our fictives are like twenty years older and thus the fiction is all a long time ago for them.)
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Fictives are treated pretty poorly basically everywhere honestly, *including* in fictive specific spaces and arent really given tools to manage the Existential Situation they find themselves in.
Yeah, it makes US sad too! Its truly preventable, and its wild no one has made anything for this already- weve looked around enough times hoping we didnt have to put out yet another resource/advice document because no one else has done it, but it looks like its necessary lol. It will be awhile before we finish it obviously, but its coming.
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Fictives are treated pretty poorly basically everywhere honestly
IT'S TRUUUUUUUUE. D:<
its wild no one has made anything for this already
I know, right? Maybe we'll talk more about insourced stuff, even though it's out of style these days...
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Any talking on experiences is valuable!
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