11:08am July 20, 2013

➸ no, seriously. shut up.: I’d like to take a moment to point out the absolute uselessness of...

solipsistful:

shutthefuckupotherkin:

I’d like to take a moment to point out the absolute uselessness of fictives on Tumblr.

Let’s posit, for a moment, that it is actually possible for a human being to have fictional characters (STAY WITH ME HERE) living in their head. Ignoring the fact that most fictives tend to latch on to recent…

Or maybe they do talk about this stuff and it never really comes up on tumblr. Since, y’know, people have lives outside of tumblr, and besides, tumblr has become a pretty shitty place to talk about fictive identities.

Or if you do see fictives and factives as psychological introjects, there’s no reason why their version of events would be inherently more legitimate or anything.

- Ace

We actually once got accused of “being anti-fictive" on an LJ community we moderated (this would have been around 2006-2007, for those curious about when we personally first heard the word).

While actually having fictive system members ourselves, who just disguised themselves with codenames and never used icons of their canon versions, or talked about their canons.

To be fair, the “Amorpha are anti-fictive" idea actually seemed to have been started by someone who wanted to turn other systems in the community against us— there was a lot of drama involved here— not even because they had a grudge against us personally, but because of someone we were friends with, and were trying to get at them through attacking us. Like I said, drama.

But also to be fair, we’d given a pretty cold brush-off to some people who came in the community to talk about fictivity. Mostly because we wanted to downplay ours as much as possible, and would justify it to ourselves with things like “well, ours aren’t particularly interested in talking to other people from their canons, so any fictive who is interested in finding others from their canon must still have some kind of roleplayish mentality they can’t shake.“

The real reason we wanted to downplay it, though, was, frankly, because we were afraid. As a matter of fact, at that point, there had been at least two waves of “omg lol LET’S TROLL THESE STUPID CRAZIES WHO THINK FICTIONAL CHARACTERS LIVE IN THEIR HEADS” going around memetically in snark communities, since we got into the plural community (both of which seemed to disappear into the internet aether eventually, and then a new wave of people would come along going “OMG LOL THESE PEOPLE THINK THEY HAVE FICTIONAL CHARACTERS IN THEIR HEADS,“ believing it was an entirely new phenomenon and that they were the first to have discovered it). We, and our co-mod&, had seen it done to several other plurals we knew.

When the former mod resigned and we volunteered to moderate in their place, we had ideals of making it “a place for everybody.” I can’t claim we always succeeded at that. But it was our ideal, at the time— to have a community for multiples where no one would feel driven out because they thought their system “worked wrong" or that they were “too weird.“ We remembered being on a mailing list started with similar ideals in 2001 and feeling like some kind of Dickensian orphan going “Um, er, um, I don’t want to bother anybody, but could you maybe please tell me if any of you ever had fictional characters in your system? Or people who even just seemed to be characters?” Since the answer we got then was “yes"— and because getting that affirmation was important to us at the time— we wanted to create a similar “no one is too weird here" atmosphere in that community, when we started modding in 2004.

Again, I can’t claim that we lived up to those ideals. Even though we’re pretty sure that our plurality wasn’t trauma-induced, being an abuse survivor in a community with a much higher proportion of abuse survivors than you’d find in a random sample of the general public can be a recipe for clusterfucks. We didn’t know how to deal with our anger, we didn’t know how to set boundaries, we didn’t even feel “powerful enough" to ban or warn people most of the time despite being mods (and often argued with the other mod& about what merited banning or warning). So in 2004-2005, a few people started to make posts to the community saying things like “I’m looking for other multiples who aren’t batshit insane. Am I the only one? It seems like like everyone else has a 300-foot tall magical robotic half-elf half-unicorn Harry Potter in their system" (or some similarly exaggerated thing that no one had ever actually claimed to have at all). But essentially, most of the things they were listing as “batshit insane" involved fictivity, nonhumans, and subjective worlds. (Those who don’t know history… etc, etc.)

There were a lot of ways we could have handled that. Unfortunately, we didn’t handle it in any of the ways I’d now consider to be good. We just froze in fear at the reminder that we were hateable*, and suddenly it felt like being back in elementary school when we figured out we couldn’t bring anything we really liked to school, or other kids would try to take it away and destroy it because they thought it was hilarious to see us get upset. Shut up and hide and don’t ever let anyone know about it— that was our instinct. So we ended up with people thinking we were against fictivity during a time when we actually had fictive members running a lot of our day-to-day business offline.

Although… yeah, even if those of us who could be called fictive in some way were interested in meeting and talking to other people from their canons, we wouldn’t have been doing it in a place where everyone and their dog could see it. When we were in the closet, in hiding as a single person, we didn’t make friends by gushing out all our deepest feelings in a place where everyone and their dog could see it, either. I’m guessing the vast majority of people don’t. Because close friendships, private thoughts and feelings, are, you know, PRIVATE. With the few friends we made through fandom, who didn’t gafiate when we no longer shared all our fandoms or it became clear that this wasn’t just a passing phase for us, the vast majority of those friendships were formed in private discussions, locked journal entries, IMs, etc. I’m not sure why people with some kind of fictive identification would be any different in this regard. Hell, even when we argued with other plurals about the validity of fictivity, or even just wanted to talk about it as a general phenomenon without drawing any particular conclusions, or compare and contrast fictivity experiences with people who identified that way beyond any shadow of a doubt, it was in emails and IMs.

-Tamsin, Riel and Julian

*Hateability is a word that a friend of ours came up with, to describe groups of people who aren’t oppressed per se, but because of something about them, often their identity, are widely considered to be just naturally deserving of hate, and not worth protecting from what would be considered legal harassment in any other context, because English has no words for these kinds of people. I think the fact that it doesn’t have a word says something about the persistence of the idea that some people just naturally deserve to be actively hated, in this culture.

I’m the one who came up with the concept of hateability. Because I was looking for a word for little everyone thinks it’s fine to hate, without even questioning, yet wouldn’t push buttons the way “oppressed” does because there are certain requirements for oppression they don’t currently meet. (And somehow that they are not oppressed means they’re even more okay to hate. It’s basically another word for fair game.)

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