We Word-Vomit About Intentional and Unintentional Processes in Born-As, Non-Trauma Plurals

(Entry listed the the Life spacehey category, because plural exist outside of online spaces! We're proudly and openly an endogenic system. This is just how we live. Our inner world is just as literal and just as real as the external one. Don't be plurmisic! Don't be a bigot! We are quite aware of the way we are labeling our SpaceHey.)

This is a repost, with mild edits to fit SpaceHey, from a post on our Tumblr account. On Tumblr we saw a post that was meant to be silly, that said something like:

Us being us, of course we had to hijack the post to talk about our own plural experiences, right? So that's what this is all about. As far as our answer goes to the question, our answer is, and probably always will be: you got a freak who’s trying to posit themselves as normal? Or vice versa? Bonus points if you have characters who oppose each other and BOTH situations are happening?

Those fuckers are indeed ours now. We mean that extremely literally though, we’re so Xive-heavy (people in more oppressed medicalized communities may be more familiar with the term introject, instead of Xive) that we’ll probably just Grab Them. So how that breaks down is, for us, we can: split (accidentally and intentionally - we believe the latter is what many plural communities call willogenic or western tulpamancy) AND soulbond (accidentally and intentionally).

So if we DON’T grab them the first round, if someone asks, the soulbonders are just fine spoiling the rest of us. There are infinite universes out there, if one soul doesn’t consent to being a permanent resident in our head, then we can always find them elsewhere, you know? Once someone requests for it to happen, the folks who can grab people intentionally will absolutely go out of their way to grant the wish. Good luck keeping any sort of character away from us. :v

We don’t think plural communities talk about the intentional part of this often enough. Once upon a time, someone went “hey can we just. DRAG that one character from the Isekai: Slow Life mobile game. Maynard I mean. No it’s not because he posits his freakishness as normal, but he has MASSIVE queer energy I want him in here regardless of if he fronts a lot or just chills in headspace. Please?” and lo! We made contact in the background while our fronter at the time was absolutely fixating on this weird fucking harem anime game. Maynard gave us the condition that we also allow him to bring along his “little Shroomie” so we have the feminine main character running around our head as well. We thought Shroomie was just a nickname but no, she actually goes by that here. Which is super cool we think. Sometimes if we go into headspace you can see Maynard dancing his feet off and it’s so cool. (:

We think he won’t front because we often lose skills and exomemories though, during the transition. Sometimes people see us hyperfixating on hypotheticals and those are really, more often than not, us trying to jot down as much as we can while it’s there. The Ether is very hard for us to access when the goal isn’t explicitly to drag someone else here into the hoard (we say "the hoard" jokingly and lovingly here). Why the disconnect exists is beyond us; some systems absolutely don't have it this way. C'est la vie, we guess.

Another example we were able to think of was, we have 💜 (emoji is an alias) who only very recently has started to project into the background but has managed to learn how to front quite easily. Xe’s a soulbond/tulpa hybrid of sorts, in that xe got plopped here along with ❤️ (name is an alias) by accident when 🖤 (name is an alias) and 🤍 (name is an alias) did and, well, it’s very weird. Neither 🖤 or 🤍 has been aware of those two existing, which is directly contrary to “canon” (a good many of us aren’t exactly in love with this term, but that is for a different post). Even less "canon" is the fact 💜 and ❤️ were fragmented from 🖤 and 🤍 directly.

🖤 and 🤍 were supposed to be their own system separate from 💜 and ❤️, even before arrival. The divergence, described above, has led to he very weird situation where the skills between all four of them are pretty disparate where this would not normally be the case. There is no situation in which the latter could be taught basic plurality/system skills by the former.

💜 initially had more self-awareness than ❤️ upon arrival, but ❤️ learned to project into our surroundings first, which should not happen without access to frontspace. ❤️ still can’t front often, so it was up to 💜 to take in whatever information xe could find. At the same time, 💜 was not able to access our backspace (where we live when we are not controlling the brainbody). 🖤 had to intervene and very blatantly tell them both how to fix the problem, which is vaguely along the lines of "person in frontspace dissociates from the body; person in backspace dissociates from the more abstract entity called our mind(s)" which...somehow worked.

So, all of this is to say, from what we can tell, despite the fact they are technically soulbonds by association, ❤️ and 💜 have been using western tulpamancy/willogenic/intentional splitting to give themselves more awareness of their thoughts/opinions as well as to give themselves what are considered basic functions and skills of our polyplex. Their...whatever they are...🖤 and 🤍 practically had these skills from the outset.

All four of them also literally fell through The Ether by complete accident. 🖤 and 🤍 told us it was like, a Big Hole on their side of the deal, and they can’t seem to go back even if they can vaguely figure out the pathways in which they arrived. That at least feels useful to us because that tells us we definitely aren’t a gateway system. We can also compare the information to other stuff we know about ourselves to figure out that it’s not, in fact, people pretending to be other people. We’re literally just this big of a system, we are in fact a generative system and just. Grow. A lot.

So our experiences just meeting 🖤 and 🤍 particularly can help us discern when we do something on accident, and when it is actually on purpose (the latter indicates we might be worrying too much about what people think about us, the former indicates...the same thing, but with different connotations).

As well as that, to go back around to the initial question: unlike Maynard, these four gremlins do, in fact, fit the “You got a freak who’s trying to posit themselves as normal? Or vice versa? Bonus points if you have characters who oppose each other and BOTH situations are happening?” situation, which is interesting, but not something any of us are keen to be unpacking at this time.