Essays
This section consists of essays and opinion pieces written by various Flatlanders. Though they aim to persuade, they are not held to the same rigorous editorial standards as articles are, and should not be considered representative of all Flatlanders or of multiple groups in general.
One of the most controversial and confusing topics in the online multiplicity community is the ever-changing relationship between multiplicity and soulbonding. In this essay, Tatsuya tries to explain how and why they originally became linked.
A Short History of Soulbonding
The problem with explaining how soulbonding and multiplicity got tangled together is that it's just too easy to insult the hell out of people who don't deserve it. The only safe way to do it is to involve time travel.
Step inside the extra special Hong-Kong TAPDIS rip-off (short for Time and Pirating Dimensions in Space, of course), and don't touch anything, it's all cheap and badly molded plastic. You don't want to break something and get us stranded in the Lost World with a T-Rex breathing down our necks, do you?
Our first stop is Lyn's soulbonding page in Archive.org, circa 2001. VWORP VWORP!
Once upon a time, there was a little junk page with a dumb joke on it. Answer it wrong, and the portal link sends you to Disney. Answer it slightly better, and you just get sent back to the main page. Answer it correctly, and you go on to the actual minisite—a wingy peep named Metapr0n wants to know if you soulbond! Or something like that.
I'm sure that, if you're here, you're wondering what exactly I'm talking about. Soulbonding, a term coined by Amanda Flowers (an old friend of mine), essentially means 'having voices in your head'...but makes you sound less insane. ^^;
It's most prevalent amongst writers or role-players, people who become so close to a character that they can actually feel that character's presence in their mind. This also happens for readers of books, players of video games...everyone, really.
The question I'm asking is do you do it? If yes, then you're not alone... so don't feel like a sociopath. XD;
If you're not sure, then look around some. Enjoy. ^^
Seems nice enough, right? Writers who have a more interactive relationship with their characters than GODMODE. Sounds less egotistical than the hardline, in any event. And look, she's got a nice quote from some author everyone quotes but no one's bothered to read!
"A writer's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them." (Anthony Trollope)
Let's say you're a writer, and you write a story about a group of characters that you've created. You begin to find that these characters talk to you, even when you're writing the story. They comment on events going on around you, and they have events going on with themselves. However, you don't have to be a writer--let's say you were playing a video game, or reading a book, and the characters of those worlds suddenly decided to take up residence in yours. They also spoke to you, even when you weren't playing the game or reading the book. This is the basic definition, for me.
Some SBs talk frequently; others are largely silent. Similarly, some stay for extended periods, while others might only be there for a while (or they just drop in occasionally). This is all my interpretation, however--others have different and just as correct viewpoints (what with humans being the opinionated lot that we are), and these can be found in the essays section...in fact, they usually go into a lot more depth than myself. X3;
Note the lack of "fronting", and that it's all just "characters talking"—there's no mention of soulbonds having any active participation in the "bonder's" life beyond conversation. It's a passive experience, "people you've got a connection with", and it never involves allowing control of the body to pass from one person to another.
That might sounds idyllic compared to the current state of soulbonding, but it might also sound hellish—it depends on whether you had system members who had to "play by the rules" as a soulbond back then or not. It's definitely a version of soulbonding that's been tossed by the wayside in favor of "everybody fronts, always" as the main idea of what soulbonding is.
However, it wasn't less controversial. Hardly. To illustrate this, we're going to take the TAPDIS (vworp vworp) to somewhere else in 2001: Mooncalf's Soulpuppetry Webring.
Don't Soulbond Your Libido
Mooncalf is a slash (gay porn) fanfiction writer. She became extremely famous in certain circles, though her humorous rants and blog drew more attention than her fiction. Anyway, Mooncalf came up with Soulpuppetry as a way of cynically mocking a real phenomenon—slash fangirls who constantly "complain" about their soulbonds "forcing" them write to slash about each other. While she's at it, she also takes the time to mock anyone who dares think that their soulbonds might be—oh no, break out the smelling salts!—real people with real emotions and real independent will.
Recently, when hanging around with other crazy artist types online, the topic of 'muses' has been coming up with startling frequency. Often in combination with the term 'soulbond'. As far as I can tell by browsing soulbond pages, a 'soulbond' is a character, whether your own or someone else's, that moves into your head bag and baggage, and then exercises his/her occupancy by interacting with you and your other soulbonds.
In other words, it's like having extra people living in your mind (and presumably, in your soul).
Now, I'm not here to debate the validity of soulbondage. (Although I couldn't resist the double entendre.) I, personally, don't have soulbonds; while I can make RPG characters talk in my head without too much trouble, it's always clear to me that it's ME making them do the talking. Like puppets. (Soulpuppetry? Maybe! I AM the Jim Henson of my mind! Where do you think all those parodies come from?)
However, I'm more than willing to accept that soulbondage CAN exist, and if you believe in/ experience soulbonds, more power to you. As long as you don't write me impassioned email to try and convince me that they exist.
But ANYWAY.
A muse, on the other hand, is who/whatever inspires you to draw, write, paint, compose, lyricize, or be creative. Sometimes it's a real person, sometimes a part of yourself, and sometimes, a metaphorical construct. Which is where the soulbonds come in. Some people, apparently, just have characters living in their mind which suggest possible projects, or generate ideas just by interacting with each other. To which I would have to respond, "Whatever works for you!"
Hey, if extra personalities means you create beautiful things for me to look at, I'm all for it. I might even try and shove new soulbonds into your head so that you draw characters that I like. I'm just greedy that way. (Yes, I know it doesn't work that way. But I rather like the mental image of me trying to tape a miniature Citan to some poor artist's head.)
To (finally) get to the point of my post, after listening to these conversations and browsing these websites, I started wondering: do I have a muse?
My first response was 'oh hell no'. After all, I find it very hard to take my artistic efforts seriously, and the idea of having a muse seemed far too serious for someone like me, who spends most of her time making fun of things and the rest of her time making fun of herself.
But after a while, I figured out that, yes, I have two muses, although they're not soulbonds, and they're not really personalities, just parts of me. I am inspired, every day, by my libido and my sense of humor. Hell, if you're feeling sufficiently Freudian, call them my id and my superego. Whatever works for you.
But seriously. When I look over the stuff on my site, it's easy to see that a good seventy or eighty percent of my artistic endeavors are clearly fueled by one or the other. Close to ninety-five percent, in the case of my writing. So I have to conclude that, while they're not separate entities, they ARE my muses. How VERY poetic.
But if my libido ever develops its own personality and starts talking to me, I'm in DEEP trouble. Soulbonded to my own libido... yikes.
This, dear reader, is the origin of the community term "muses". When someone says "I don't have soulbonds, I have muses", they mean that they don't share a life with independent minds, but have mental puppets for artistic and entertainment purposes. (Sadly, "soulpuppet" never caught on the way Mooncalf hoped it would.)
Ironically, the fangirls that prompted the rant in the first place somehow missed that it was about them, and thought that Mooncalf was a scream. A HOOT. The webring received wide circulation among their circles. Complaints about being "forced" to write gay porn by soulbonds didn't cease, of course. The soulbonds were just relabeled "muses".
Soul Whispers
Meanwhile, back on the unsnarky side of the fence, there's Riesz. She wrote one of the essays on Lyn's original soulbonding page. Here's an excerpt:
I've made several light-hearted references to insanity throughout this essay (which I believe is only necessary when talking about a subject like this). But are SoulBonds a force for good or evil? I don't believe having a good SoulBond (fluffy, shall we call them?) is harmful, or means you're insane. In fact I think it's life-enhancing, if anything. I believe that SoulBonders are a special kind of people; people who are highly intelligent, have vivid imaginations and simply want more than what everyday life can offer them. If the best way to escape into a fantasy is to SoulBond, then I think it's more likely to stop you going insane. We're not mental, we're just people who want something special. It's the "normal" people, living out their identical day-to-day lives in Boredomsville, Suburbia, who are truly insane. But a thought for the day - is schizophrenia a bad SoulBond? I've just had this little thought that maybe people who hear voices telling them to kill themselves, hurt other people, e.t.c. are just people who have bonded with a soul that turned bad, and now it's controlling them. So I guess the moral of the story is - well, it doesn't really have a moral. But if I had to end with something, I'd say "love thy SoulBond as thyself." Because they are yourself. And most of all, believe in them. Remember the Never Ending Story? Faith is the most important thing - in yourself, in your SoulBond, and always, always in fantasy. Fantasy, after all, is only the reality we create... I thank you, and bid you all oyasumi-nasai.
As you can see, it's a step in the right direction—that is, no should care about a non-standard experience if it's a positive one—but it's still steeped in a lot of defensive "but you're still you" justifications. Soulbonds are still not "allowed" independent will, or any existence separate from that of the bonder. It's all about the bonder, all evidence of how "special" the bonder is. (The bonder is a lot like the host in classic Wilburian dysfunctional multiplicity, actually, but that's a whole rant in its own right.)
Then, out of seemingly nowhere, Riesz created Soul Whispers.
According to Mooncalf, we SoulBonders are all too serious and angsty; we should just be having fun with our characters, not solely dwelling on their dark, traumatic pasts. Maybe by responding to her page at all, I'm just proving myself to be "taking it too seriously", and thus reinforcing her view that the majority of SoulBonders are far too anal-retentive for their own good. [...]
SoulBonding does not make someone a better writer. Nor does it make you a better person in any other respect. SoulBonds are not a clique, a fad, a way to look cool and special and impressive and stand out from the crowd. Anyone using them that way probably is just a "soulpuppeteer". The legions of fangirls who hook their "bishies" up with each other and conduct mass gay orgies/pregnancies/weddings inside their heads, claiming it to be "SoulBonding", are testimony to that, and I have about as much time for them as Mooncalf does.
The problem is, though, that it seems that the "fangirl brigade" are the only "SoulBonders" Mooncalf has had any experience of, and it's on their distorted and misguided idea of "SoulBonding" that her argument is based. I'm not blaming her for that; if the only "SoulBonders" I'd ever been around were deluded little yaoi-shippers who squealed about the latest additions to their "bishie" collection and ranted about how "I didn't want to write a fanfic about Kenshin and Sanosuke having sex/get up in the middle of the night and eat chocolate cheesecake/strip naked and howl at the moon - my SoulBonds made me do it!", then I'd probably think they were angsty, overly-hormonal little attention-grabbers bordering on the insane too. But that's not what true SoulBonding is about.
SoulBonding, and I don't know how many times I'm going to have to say this before the mass majority get it into their heads, is not having voices in your head that make you do things. If it was, I could understand why people would call it insanity. Nor is it about "collecting" characters in your head as though they were trading cards, or seeing how many gay pretty-boys you can pair up/get pregnant/get married. If it was, I could understand why people would call it a stupid, delusional obsession. [...] SoulBonding is simply empathy with a character to the extent where you feel that, in some way, shape or form, spiritually, emotionally or otherwise, they are a part of you. [...] You don't have to be a writer. They don't have to talk to you. They don't have to make you want to get up in the middle of the night and eat cheesecake. They just have to be there with you; a presence, however small, in your life, your heart, and your soul.
Now that I've got the obligatory rant out of the way, I can tackle Mooncalf's (very reasonable, and valid) question; "If you had no way to talk about your soulbonds to anyone, would you still have any? If you didn't have a website or weblog on which you talked about your soulbonds, if you didn't have real life friends to tell about it, would you still have those independent voices in your head?" I can't vouch for anyone else, but I myself can answer that with an unconditional, unequivocal, one hundred percent yes.
We first heard of Soul Whispers in the worst way possible—a bunch of "friends" of ours linked to the Portal of Evil discussion forums, where the forumgoers (and our "friends") were mocking the site and trashing the concept of soulbonding in general. It's a shame, because if it wasn't for that "introduction", it'd have been a message in a bottle for us. The gist of Soul Whispers was and is, basically, "Soulbonds are people, too."
It also brought multiplicity into the equation.
It was a discussion at the Sword and Serpent MB that kicked off this train of thought in my head. One of the regular patrons mentioned that one of his SBs had fallen in love with a NPC that he hardly knew anything about, and he wanted to know how that could happen. SoulBonds aren't just flat, two-dimensional characters, so how could his fall in love with a cardboard cutout to whose name he had only appended the sketchiest of details? And it occured to me that it was possibly *him*, not his SB, who was seeing things in two dimensions. The less we know about a character, the less "fleshed-out" and subsequently "real" they appear to be, just like a car in the distance appears smaller, less detailed and generally less "real" than the car you drive to work every day. But could it not be the case that this NPC was, in fact, just as real and "detailed" a person as the SoulBond in question - just that the 'Bonder himself had only glimpsed him from a distance?
Is it the case that "fragments", "SoulBonds", "NPCs", "Multiples" - all of these are as real and whole as each other, and it is really the perpective of the person at the "front" which differs? Should the continuum not be one of "wholeness" or even "dissociation", but in fact association - that the further a person is dissociated or distanced from the other people within them, the less real they seem, meaning that those who are on equal terms with everyone in the system are those who are truly able to see and acknowledge what is there? [...]
Those of us who were born singlets, or born believing we were so, like to think that we have control over what goes on in our own heads and bodies. Sure, we have SoulBonds, but at the end of the day they're just SoulBonds. They don't do or say anything that you don't know about. They aren't free to pop up at inopportune moments and take over your body. They don't leave you with the problem of equal rights, of whether these people deserve the right to lead equal and individual lives through the medium of the body, to hold down their own jobs, to have their own friends, to be their own people; of how you're going to explain to the rest of the world that hey, sometimes it's li'l ol' me up here and sometimes it's a twenty-foot humanoid dragon or a five-year-old catgirl who can only speak broken Cantonese and meow. To suddenly discover that there are other people in here, no, I mean there are really other people in here, is extremely disconcerting.
But then, I guess it's nothing other than what any awakening Multiple goes through.
It was a step in the direction of the truth for groups like us. It was also a step towards The New Paradigm of Soulbonding, though Riesz didn't know it.
You Have a Problem
Lyn caught wind of this "multiplicity-friendly" version of soulbonding, and she was Not Happy. Her response? She revamped her soulbonding site—still the first and last word on "real soulbonding" for most soulbonders at the time (2002), Soul Whispers notwithstanding. The new design was eye-searingly gothic, and the content was downright livid.
I started this page for fun, and it's spiraled into a big, scary, monster of un-fun-ness, especially by people who are taking it WAY too seriously and smearing its name. The last thing I wanted (or expected) was to have such a stigma develop. This is about having fun and really being in tune with your creations, people. This is NOT about taking whatever character appeals to you and acting like their actions are vital to your continued survival, especially when they're just characters from video games and not even something you created.
This is not a medical condition. This is not something requiring treatment. This is NOT MPD. If your SBs routinely take control of your body during offline situations, then you need help. You have a problem.
There were once large numbers of plural groups trying to explain themselves and find acceptance with "soulbonding". With her angry public declaration, Lyn scared large numbers of those groups back into the closet. Like Mooncalf, Lyn was primarily ranting about slash-bonders with harems, and, like Mooncalf, she assumed that these harem-bonders were the same as the closeted multiple systems.
I still believe all that. I still think little girls creating harems of angsty gay men that torture them so is disgusting, especially when they have to drag soulbonding into it. I still think this is more about having an intimacy with your own or someone else's creations, and that this intimacy does not mean that the creations take over your life to the point where they control you, like a helpless marionette. If you are a marionette to your soulbonds, you aren't soulbonding. You have a disorder that needs treatment. It is not NORMAL to be controlled by a conscious that is not yourself. Further, it is not HEALTHY. If YOU do not control YOU, then there is a problem, and while I certainly can't stop you, I'd appreciate it if you would not call your disease Soulbonding. I find this concept flexible, and all things here are my opinion. But of these opinions, the opinion that Soulbonding is not in any way an uncontrollable disease is surely the strongest. If you disagree, that's OK. I won't hate you, or think less of you, but I will say that I severely disagree with you labelling an instance where your characters--or characters created by someone else--take over your body and make you do things as Soulbonding, because that is not what it is.
And honestly, the only way I can plausibly see a character causing you angst as an SB is if it is your own and you're having problems developing him or her properly. While I'm more iffy on the subject of SBs causing a person emotional distress, I am not so severely against it as long as that angst isn't derived from a VOICE IN YOUR HEAD TAKING OVER YOUR BODY WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT. But that is a gray area.
What REALLY pisses me off are the aforementioned harems. And they DO exist, I see them in livejournal all the goddamn time. I really could care less if you spend all day having sexual fantasies concerning Vincent, Sephiroth, and Cloud. But you do NOT say that you are SBing them and they are forcing you to watch as they screw each other, and Oh God won't they PLEASE STOP because you have HOMEWORK TO DO. You are giving everyone who honestly subscribes to this concept a bad name.
Of course, what do the slash-bonders do? They yell "HELL YEAH RIGHT ON LYN" because she's famous, and start using the term "muses" even more to cover their asses.
Snakes on an Astral Plane
Meanwhile, in another little corner of the 'net, a man named Kinjou Ten coins the term "otakukin". And here it gets REALLY sticky.
I've coined the term "Ota-'Kin", a combination of the words "otaku" and "otherkin", to specifically refer to those otherkin who are heavily influenced by, live with/in, deal with, or are otherwise intimately connected to an Anime/Manga/Live-Action/VGM or related 'dimension', 'world', or paradigm. The initial concept of a supposedly 'fictional' paradigm and/or cosmology having partial or complete basis in an alternative reality is not uncommon among otherkin. Sections of the community accept as reasonable extrapolations of fact Tolkien-esque elves and fae, Pernian dragons, and other phenotypes resembling or derived from allegedly 'fictional' sources. There are numerous theories behind the acceptance of such a concept, ranging from the creators of such fiction's unconcious 'tapping' of these alternate realities to repeated 'imprinting' on the Collective Unconcious (Dreaming, Astral Plane, et al) lending energy and therefore reality to said paradigms. I find either equally potentially valid, as well as many other related and offshoot theories which are too numerous andcomplex to list here with any hopeof being accurate or comprehensive.
Suffice to say thatAnime/Manga/Live Action/VGMs, which draw heavily upon Japanese, Chinese, and Eastern mythology, cosmology, and mysticism in general, appears to have one way or another made its 'imprint' known upon the metaphysical world. I've come to accept this through my own personal metaphysical experiences with these paradigm, as well as an inexplicably increasing number of unsolicited encounters and external confirmations by and with otherkin experiencing similar influences and shifts.
There seems to be a certain amount of resistance to the idea of Anime and Anime-related paradigms being as valid as the various other 'accepted' 'Kin paradigms/pheonotypes, a somewhat disconcerting and ironic contradiction in an alternative community that accepts everything from therianthropes to extraterrestrial fae. The subsequent apparent lack of acceptance expressed toward those who are influenced by this paradigm is what ultimately led to my decision to build the Temple. It's intended to be a small resource and recourse to those 'Kin dealing with this emerging paradigm, as well as a place for them to learn more about 'Kin-relevant aspects of Anime, Manga, VGMs, etc., as well as providing some links to the general Otherkin community. In the future I hope to have some relevant links as well as an image gallery, information exchange, media recommendations, and the like. Your patience is appreciated! :D
Okay, somewhere inside all that mumbo-jumbo is this basic idea: people with strong similarities to fictional characters, to the point of identifying with said characters, can and do exist. Unfortunately, Kinjou's surrounding it with an unbudging, universal, unquestionable supernatural/pseudoscientific/metaphysical explanation: such people must be travelling to this world from another one via the astral plane. Alternate explanations are not allowed.
That's not a good base to start from. Matters of personal belief are not politics—no one has the right to tell you what to believe or disbelieve. One group can believe they project themselves into the body from outer space; another group might believe they are the result of synapses firing in a brain. Both groups are experiencing the same phenomenon, but explaining it differently. Neither group's belief should be deemed "the official position".
Anyway, despite the ready-packaged belief system that came with it, the concept of "otakukin" ended up appealing to a large number of people, both inside plural systems and outside them. Most of these people would have otherwise identified with "soulbonding", but the snarky politics and bad mojo going down over in the soulbonding community, thanks to Lyn's Last Stand, probably didn't help with that.
Somewhere in all of this, snarkers found Fandom Wank. Its purpose was originally to laugh at flame wars, but soon, it became yet another Portal of Evil easter egg hunt for "lame otakukin" to mock and harass because their mere existence breaks copyright laws. The otakukin that prey on other people, of course, are not hurt by ANY OF THIS, because like the "muse" people, they're using the very same emotional shield as the Fandom Wankas—"ZOMG GUISE IM JUST IN IT FOR TEH LULZ HAHAHA". Just like with Lyn and Mooncalf, the ostensible targets are left completely unscathed, while everyone else is getting shot up in "drama" and "friendly fire".
Somehow, and we're not sure how or why this happened, somewhere in 2003-2004, the three ideas converged into the New Holy Paradigm of Soulbonding: soulbonding was suddenly redefined as "what happens when 'otakukin' astral travel from their own world to a soulbonder's body, becoming a multiple group with fronting, co-presence, and all that jazz."
Aftermath
For some groups, that paradigm shift has been a godsend, allowing for healthy sharing of responsibility in groups that would otherwise be forcing themselves to be "muses" to an "author". At the same time, it's homogenized the terminology so that it excludes the original definition, and all the people it actually fit.
It causes more harm than good to completely throw out the original concept of soulbonding as a strong connection. These days, "soulbond" is equated by default with "fictional character" or "otakukin", but in the early days, there were "insourced" soulbonds; actually, there were more of those to start with, as Lyn kept harking back to in her Snarky Revision. "Soulbond" was coined to describe a strong connection to a person, a whole relationship that doesn't involve fronting, and that's something that many of our members still experience regularly. Whether you call it "internal dialogue", "voices in your head", or "talking to people in another world", it's very real and damn it, it's important.
Defining soulbonding wasn't any easier when the term was coined, of course. There was a lot of "oooh, shiny new label, I'm going to slap this on something I experience that's vaguely like it" going on, too—which might explain how Riesz managed to change the paradigm from Lyn's original vision.
The problem with this is the same problem there is with any attempt to lump different experiences into One True Whatever—it ends up ignoring that differences really exist, and they are important. Not every multiple system is identical. Forcing them all to be identical is harmful. The same goes for soulbonding—you can't just go "soulbonding is this, you have to fit this law or else you're faking it", because it just ends up hurting innocent people who try to obey said law.
Consider fronting. For some systems, large numbers of people front, and there has to be a certain amount of shifting for everyone to stay relatively stress-free. If you try to force one person to front All The Time, you'll end up killing that person with Front Stress and Filters, resulting in an almost mentally-dead zombie with no outside will to speak of. Sounds unbelieveable? Well, that's how we operate. The longer someone stays out here, the more it literally eats at their sanity, like some kind of consciousness shoggoth.
For other groups, though, it's exactly the opposite. They can't have a lot of people coming and going—information gets lost, people get confused by the transition, memory gets beaten with a stick, messages get mixed, signals get crossed, and it's too much effort for too little payoff. In short, there are honestly some groups who must operate in a way that's the opposite of how we do it, or else they'll go stark raving mad.
Division of "us" vs. "them" or "crazy people" vs. "sane people" is a bad thing, definitely. But division of "people who are allergic to nuts" and "people who are NOT allergic to nuts" is a dinnertime necessity.
