Fictionkin v. Fictives

This is part of a series of posts about the concept of kin and its history. For a more comprehensive explanation of what kin is, check here. A glossary is also included at the bottom for convenience, as not all terms are immediately explained. This post was written in a Google Doc and later posted on 22 Feb, 2022. Happy twosday!

It was last updated on 05 Aug, 2024.

What changed: Unlisted entry. It's been two years, folks.

Ever since the fictionkin boom on Tumblr back in 2014, ‘kin has been conflated and sometimes linked to OSDDID. In reality, they have nothing in common, but the amount of people uneducated on DID in the kin community is nigh infinite, and the people who want to be right is even higher.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) until 1994) and Other Specified Dissociative Disorder (OSDD) (formerly known as Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (DDNOS) until 2013), specifically OSDD-1, are dissociative disorders caused by repeated childhood trauma before the age of about 8. An older and dated explanation of DID is that the amount of trauma the person went through as a child ‘shattered’ their psyche, and I personally think it’s a good enough example for the layman - however, the reason repeated childhood trauma causes this disorder to happen is because the standard integration a child goes through as they grow up is halted.

A characteristic trait of both of these disorders is ‘multiple personalities’ - the proper term for these personalities is ‘alters’. DID and OSDD-1 are almost the same, but handle things like amnesia differently: people with DID tend to experience more blackouts, while people with OSDD tend to experience emotional amnesia (a la ‘that alter experienced that, not me’).

An introject is a type of alter that is based off an outside figure. These alters sometimes will see themselves as the figure, and sometimes will not. While introjects are often based off real people (such as abusers or people the system may idolise), they are also often based off fictional characters for similar reasons. In younger online communities, fictional introjects are more often than not referred to as fictives.

Fictionkin is a term used to mean someone (or a group of people) who are kin with a fictional character. What this means is that fictionkin believe themselves to be a reincarnation or parallel incarnation of a fictional character.

A key difference between these two (aside the obvious) is that OSDDID cannot be spiritual (spirituality is not covered by the DSM and it’s usually specified that the symptoms must come in a sober, not spiritual state) while fictionkin almost always is. I believe the dawn of ‘endogenic systems’^* on Tumblr happening around the same time made it a bit difficult for people to tell the difference, because at the time a lot of information pertaining only to those systems was also said to pertain to DID (which is wrong).

^{*A system without trauma that does not claim to have OSDDID. There’s a lot more to it, but that’s another topic I don’t want to go into.}

I’m not sure exactly how common it was, but some ‘kin would appropriate terms used in system communities for convenience when talking about certain things. Here are a list of terms I’ve seen and been told have been used by kin communities erroneously:

• Fictive: An alter who is wholly or in part based off of a fictional character.
• How it was used: Kintype.
• Front: The alter in control is in front, or fronting.
• How this was used: I am more connected to this kintype right now. The proper term would likely be kinshift.
• Switch: A different alter comes to the front.
• How this was used: I’m starting to feel more connected to a different kintype. The proper term is shift, used as a verb.
• Co-con: Two alters are fronting at the same time, with varying dominance.
• How this was used: I feel somewhat equally connected to two kintypes at once. I’ve seen people use the term co-shift to explain this.