An introduction

Hello! I'm Ronin, one of many who has a complicated and nuanced relationship with the word "fictive" in this system. We've had a long and messy history with the question of how to define our identity both collectively and as headmates, a lot of which is pretty firmly rooted in the fact that our introduction to plurality as a concept -- and our discovery of our own system -- came from the otherkin and therian community boards of the early 2010s, back before private forums were mostly superseded by larger aggregate platforms like tumblr, twitter, and so on. There's a lot I could get into about those communities that's already mostly been said, but the key point to keep in mind here is that we learned to navigate our identity through rigorous self-skepticism, cross-referencing, and debate. Much of that culture actively harmed us as a newly-discovered system and took many years to unlearn.

Part of that unlearning has been to internalize that labels and language in the land of identity are mostly for personal benefit, and therefore for personal interpretation and re-definition. Identity is fluid and multifaceted even for the most rigidly singular people in our lives, and therefore in most cases, defining personal, subjective experiences by rigid, objective rules is often inadequate at best and destructive at worst. One of the biggest things we struggled with as we worked through this process during the late 2010s frenzy of popular fakeclaiming and moral scrutiny in plural and alterhuman spaces was the issue of introtivity, the question of what does and doesn't "earn" the descriptor of fictive, factive, etc. Our current conclusion is what I want to share here, both because it helped me tremendously when I first joined the system and because it still feels painfully relevant to current discussions in our communities, despite the new growing trend, at least in the places we visit most, of radical acceptance and concern for privacy.

It is important to bear in mind, however, that the hostility and redundancy of years past has driven us away from community discussions for a very long time: What's presented here is, I hope, old news.

What is a fictive?

Don't worry, I'm not listing out definitions here. This is, however, a question that gets overlooked and taken for granted in most discussions, even those about fictivity itself: We've seen in many debates and conversations this general tendency to assume that everyone who talks about fictivity (and neighboring topics regarding headmates influenced by external factors, though for the sake of simplicity I'll be using "fictive" as an umbrella here, since it's the most popular target of scrutiny among them) is working from the same base definition of the term, despite the fact that there's more than one.

When we were trying to unravel the kinks in our introspective thought processes pre-lockdown -- and before -- the most common understanding of fictivity was that a fictive is a headmate who is entirely a fictional character from the outset: They look like them, speak like them, think as their system's interpretation of their source expects them to, with the understanding that fictives grow into people distinct from their sources over time as their lived experiences in the here and now compete with their initial established identity. That a fictive is a person effectively plucked from one reality into another whole cloth, and has to contend with the alienation and homesickness inherent to that experience. This is a definition that certainly has applied to a few in our system in the past and still does today, but it leaves a lot out, too.

In contrast, it's not uncommon for resources about specifically dissociative identity disorder to define fictives with much greater nuance and flexibility, either keeping language vague ("based on" or "resembling") or specifically outlining different degrees of separation (1, 2) from a given source. By these definitions, fictives might be headmates who only share some traits in common with their source, and who might feel comfortable (perhaps even most comfortable) with being addressed and described with language that excludes their source. This isn't the only way in which community language and perception diverges from the academic and medical worlds, but it is in my opinion one of the least examined and most harmful.

I speak on this from personal experience, mostly; when it comes to definitions of the term, I much more solidly align with the latter than the former. My self image does not align with my source, but the ways I act, my personal interests, and my chosen name reflect it. As a rule, however, I choose not to use the term at all, out of frustration with the popular community consensus working to exclude experiences like mine from the conversation. As probably evidenced by where we choose to host this article, we don't have the time, energy, or patience to argue this point on a regular basis, but feel this is an important issue nonetheless.

The point of my question, then -- What is a fictive? -- is a call for conversation among those who are more readily able to engage with it in community forums: How do we define this term, what should we reconsider, and what, ultimately, is the goal in using and defining these words?

Optics, utility, and communication

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via pcmag.com

The copinglink question

Personal practice

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What comes next

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