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[gileonnen]

This is a Curious Post.

During the past few months or so, my circles on the internet have come increasingly into contact with the notion of ' plurality' of personae in one body. I've been working to understand what the concept means and why other people feel that it describes them, so this post isn't an 'explain to me what plurals are, I don't know

Comments

[dejablue7]

I may or may not have something more intelligent to say later, but right now my response is primarily:

YAY~ ♥

[gileonnen]

XD Could you tell me why 'yay'? I admit, on the level of feeling, I've been allowing my very negative experiences with a particular plural system to color my feelings toward the entire concept. Although I want to eradicate that set of feelings, I also admit that I feel a little upset and sick to my stomach when you make a post on your plural story, because it reminds me of that system and the confusion and pain I remember. This is completely divorced from my delight at seeing you so excited about a subject, and my curiosity about that subject.

(All of which is to say, keep posting. It helps me to confront my irrational feelings and to identify why I feel them, and it helps me to understand something that I don't really understand yet.)

As I hope you can see, my feelings are very complicated right now, and I want to know where you're coming from when you reply with a capslocking YAY~. ^___^

I think I love you

[dejablue7]

Just yay! that singlets aside from myself are talking about it... sometimes I wonder if people look at my posts and think I'm just a crazy person or something ._

Re: I think I love you

[gileonnen]

*squeeeeeze* My experience was a little different, because it was online and involved a roleplaying environment in which IC/OOC distinctions were already not terribly well-maintained--so in addition to trying to navigate an entirely new set of social cues having to do with people who interact with the world as a group, I also had to do so while navigating cues that were only sometimes OOC and thus only sometimes pertained to anything that I-the-player had done. This was the social equivalent of deciding, after having mastered the two-ball juggle, to move on to juggling eight viable chicken eggs and a chainsaw.

Needless to say, I wound up with egg on my face.

So--no, I wouldn't say you're terrible for having a bad experience, especially when part of that badness comes from a place of needing fairly specific social cues. I would say that we both have a lot to learn on this front, and that hopefully we can have the kinds of conversations that can help us to learn.

Re: I think I love you

[dejablue7]

*hugs back* c:
That is really interesting, concerning your being introduced to it via roleplaying. :O Definitely, it is easy to imagine where that kind of situation would get...very difficult to navigate :/ It's also interesting for me because the group I'm familiar with...well, if they have soulbonding or fictive identifying persons, I've yet to meet them or to hear any discussion of them, so that's really unfamiliar territory to me (I'm... guessing that soulbonding/fictives were involved in this experience, or something of the variation, from your comments here and below in this post). All in all though, I'm always glad to hear about how other singlets meet plurals; I think it's always really good to hear from different perspectives on that kind of thing.

Re: I think I love you

[gileonnen]

It was more an experience with a plural system advancing one of its members as an original 'character' to interact with other OCs in the game--or possibly more like a person playing the game and then realizing through the course of it that he hadn't created a character, he'd identified a headmate? In any case, a relatively new member of the system was interacting as a character with my fictional character, which was very difficult for me to manage. No soulbonding, and not reeeeally a fictive, but definitely an anxious-making social situation!

[dejablue7]

...my brain, it is breaking. (Which is not to say skepticism about the situation, and more like...it sounds like the fairgrounds for complications and misunderstanding and human drama that would make a scenario from Shakespeare seem straightforward and humdrum by comparison ...More than once though, I've had Shakespeare pop into my head while interacting with plurals, like thinking of Twelfth Night and cases of mistaken identity and people running around and completely confused as to what's really going on).

And so that's how you were introduced to plurality? ...I'm not sure I'd be even able to handle that kind of situation Orz :c That's really great that you're still trying to keep an open-minded perspective on the notion of plurality as a whole though! I'm sure a lot of people would just throw up their hands and go, I give up, the internet is crazy. Which, to be fair, can be true: there's a lot of strange things on the internet, and strange people, along with the reasonable. It's also the reason, though, that I'm all for