#twilight sparkle.txt

[the-indigo-symphony]

When it comes to queerness, I think a lot of pluralphobia comes from the way that most singlets just do not accept that the plural things they do not understand and will likely never understand can have very large effects on our identities. They (mostly, often, generally – there are exceptions, but exceptions are not the majority) don't get what it's like to not remember what you were assigned at birth or what parts your body has, they don't get what it's like to view your body as nothing more than a flesh vessel you're not all that attached to, they don't get what it's like to have memories of an entirely different life, they don't get what it's like to not have any personal experience with growing up because you came into the world bodily an adult, they don't get what it's like to sense someone else's feelings or confuse them for your own; they don't get what it's like to have to navigate the confusing line(s) between polyamory and monogamy, or between different kinds of relationships, because you may not feel the same way tomorrow as you did today, and tomorrow's "you" might not be you at all, but someone else.

They can conceptualize these experiences as Plural Things but cannot comprehend that if a Plural Thing affects your gender, sexuality, relationships, etc., then it's also gonna be a Queer Thing nine times out of ten. When it's a Plural Thing, they can just shrug and say they don't get it. But when it's a Queer Thing? When it becomes something that challenges their understanding of queerness? When we take up space because our plurality and queerness cannot be separated into neat little boxes? That's when they throw a fit.

And I'm not surprised, because I saw the exact same thing happen to autigender people a few years ago when they blurred the lines between what was an Autism Thing and a Queer Thing. People love to talk about intersectionality and say, "we need weirder queers", but they can't handle it when someone dares to say, "This thing that affects the entirety of my life naturally affects my queerness, too, since gender/sexuality/the relationships I am or am not in with other people/my relationship with my body and what I choose to do with it/being queer is/are a part of my life."

Tough shit. You don't get us. I thought that didn't matter? Wasn't that exactly what you were claiming not too long ago, that you need to respect someone even if you don't "get" them? Now, I'm seeing so-called "inclusionists" backpedal on that, but tough shit, we're not going to silence ourselves so you can continue thinking of queerness as this neat, simple thing that never overlaps with other categories. We're here, we're queer, and we're more-than-one, too.

I'm plural and queer and those things cannot be separated. Nice to meet ya.

[the-indigo-symphony]

I'm glad to have helped! I'd like to recommend this paper, Tracking the Tulpa, as a starting point, as it's commonly referenced when this is brought up, and covers a lot of basics with sources but without taking a lot of time to read

My new essay about the interconnections between transmisogyny and pluralphobia is live right now! It's titled "Transfemininity and Dissociative Identity Disorder: An Undertheorized Intersection," and you can read it here ✨

[theatrical-syndicate]

Hey hey hey! This is the system sideblog for @crime-soncloud ! We are the theatrical syndicate system! This blog is for all the non-hosts, although the host may pop in time to time

Current Host: Crimson :3 and Baroness (⁠ ⁠╹⁠▽⁠╹⁠ ⁠)

Current members of system:

Crimson: she/her, Host and original. Also a mizuki fictive. Because. tag crim.txt

Rose: she/any, brainmade. tag rose.txt

Luna/Ichika: she/star/🌕, fictive of Ichika Hoshino from pjsk. tag Luna.txt

Sparkle/Saki: she/they/star/✨, fictive of Saki Tenma from pjsk. tag sparkle.txt

Amie/Honami/Twilight: she/they/star and some other Neo's (test them out), fictive of Honami Mochizuki from pjsk and Twilight Sparkle from MLP (yeah that's what happens when you joke about an mlp fictive/silly) tag Amie.txt

Val/Shiho: he/she/they, fictive of Shiho Hinomori from pjsk. tag val.txt

Maria/Rui: she/he/they/crow, fictive of Rui Kamishiro. Tag maria.txt

Mizuki: she/they, Mizuki fictive babyyyy. Tag Mizu.txt

Minori: she/her, Minori fictive! Tag mino.txt

Medusa: she/it, brainmade. Tag dusa.txt

(damn this is out of date)

Akito/Nova: fictive of Akito from project sekai. He/she/they/star. nova.txt

Haruka: she/they, haruka kiritani fictive. Haru.txt

Baroness: she/they/any, fictive of baroness from nilfruits. ess.txt

I'll update the others if they ever show up here. Rn they ain't interested

Standard DNI, no bigotry, lewd comments (body is a minor and most of us are). Also we don't want to get into syscourse. We don't even know what kind of system we are LOL. We are pro endo, but won't talk about it much probably

Additions and changes will no doubt be made, both to new headmates and other stuff. Yeahh that's about it

[the-indigo-symphony]

We mentioned this a while back as part of a larger post, but it bears repeating on its own – it is in fact common for systems to experience a burst of new system members shortly after syscovery. If this happens/ed to you, it's not a sign that you were wrong about your plurality – it's just something that happens.

Why does it happen? Could be any number of reasons, really. Maybe you've been stressed about this whole process, and that's caused some new folks to pop up to deal with it. Maybe they're old members coming out of dormancy. Maybe it's psychological, and your brain is responding to the change in dissociative barriers and how your system works. Maybe it's spiritual, and all you really needed was a foot in the door for the gate to open, like folktales that say just knowing about other entities can draw their attention to you. Maybe you get new members really easily, and this is just the first time you've knowingly experienced a burst. Whatever the reason, the effect is the same – a sharp increase in number of system members just as you're figuring things out.

It can be off-putting! Frightening, even! But as I said earlier, it's not an automatic sign that you're wrong about being a system. You'll find plenty of other systems who have gone through similar when they were first discovering their systems. Take a breath, take things one step at a time, and trust that things will work out if you just keep working at it. That's how most things work out.

[the-indigo-symphony]

Y'know, there are a lot of genuine complaints to be made about how people respond to literatary analysis education with stuff like "the curtains are just blue", but I think at least a good amount of these complaints completely miss where these responses are coming from. They seem to think these responses just come from a handful of ignorant people dismissing the idea off the bat, but I've always viewed these responses differently, as coming from a deeper place of bitterness and genuine reasons to be frustrated. And dismissing that bitterness just contributes to it, so let's talk about one of the reasons someone may become disillusioned with literary analysis.

Literary analysis, as a subject, is dependent on personal interpretation and being able to turn something upside down and inside out, and ask it questions about what it means. It's a lot closer to philosophy than people think at first, especially if you're talking about novels or other creative texts and not random posts on the internet, like most schools use. However, this is at odds with how these schools run; a lot of school is focused on getting exactly the right answer, which really means "the state* approved answer". There is little room for encouraging individual interpretation; even in classes that include individual interpretation in certain assignments, the teachers are often limited by the tests they have to set, or actively limit the students themselves by setting specific answers as "the correct interpretation". As such, students end up feeling tricked or lied to when their individual interpretations and analysis come back marked "incorrect" on their papers and tests, or are outright told they're incorrect during discussions (which has its own layers of the shame that often comes from being publicly told off, no matter how gentle these "corrections" are). They're being told one thing (to explore the text for themselves so that they might understand it better and get more out of it), but taught another (that it doesn't matter what they think, because memorizing the textbook, already decided upon answers/interpretations, and a set of procedures on how to "tell what the text is saying" are more important). And of the two, what's being taught is obviously going to have a greater impact, since it's their grades and parental/guardian approval that hang in the balance.

Now, I mentioned asking questions is another part of literary analysis – this is another aspect where schools fail. As classes and teachers have limited time, questions are not able to be given the needed time to properly discuss and answer them unless they fit into a specific narrative the teacher is already expecting to get. Some questions may even be dismissed out of hand for being "irrelevant", no matter how relevant that question is to the student who asked it, simply because the teacher is not prepared to consider it, or actually give it weight and the attention it deserves or needs. With the "correct answers" already set out ahead of time, the teacher must focus on making sure their students can pre-emptively ask those questions and memorize the answers, rather than allowing them to ask their own questions and find their own answers. As such, "asking questions" becomes less about actual understanding of the text, and more so about anticipating what questions will be on the next test.

Following this, "the curtains are just blue" doesn't come solely from a lack of interest in the idea of literary analysis (though there's also something to be said about how the common feeling of being bored at school is certainly not helping favors) – it's more so frustration with these conflicting instructions that are being given. If you tell a student to be unique, but also punish them for being "weird", they're going to decide being unimpressive and "normal" is safer, no matter what you say. Similarly, if you tell a student that there are "no wrong answers", that analysis is "up to interpretation", and that they're meant to ask questions about the text, but then punish them for their interpretations being "wrong", and cannot allow them the time and practice needed to properly ask and answer any questions they may have, of course they're going to learn to dislike the subject as a whole! You just made them feel lied to about the whole purpose of it!

In some cases, this can go even further than just the students' interpretation – for example, everyone in my own literature analysis class had heard of the author who took a standardized literature test that included part of their work, but found none of the questions about it had answers that were accurate to their intentions and text. How are you meant to reconcile a story like that with all the assignments and quizzes that ask about "what the author intended"? With the supposed lesson of these studies being to foster your personal understanding of texts, whether you read or write them? Being told, over and over, that you are "wrong" for attempting to do exactly as the class claims to teach you and seeing for yourself that the "correct answers/intended understandings of the text" are just opinions agreed upon by a couple of strangers writing these test booklets – that's going to make anyone bitter. Of course some of these students are going to throw the whole concept of literary analysis in the trash – it was presented to them by the dumpster.

"The curtains are just blue" not as in "blue curtains may never hold any meaning", but as in "I don't even want to look at another question that claims to care about what I think the curtains represent, since I know it's all false platitudes anyway, so the curtains might as well be meaningless."

There's more I could say here about the different layers of "the curtains are just blue", and I probably will one day, but here's one aspect that's been on my mind lately. Contrary to how a lot of people seem to think when it comes to "piss on the poor" comments, you're not going to be able to shame people into something (developing their individual interpretations and interest in analysis) that they were shamed out of in the first place. So, maybe just keep that in mind the next time you see someone missing the point of a post, and try explaining it to them instead of reacting with derision.

* using "state" here to refer to multiple types of states, not just states in the USA.

[the-indigo-symphony]

Do fictives, if they're sourced from cartoons, from ever experience confusion from being moved from a cartoonist 2D reality to a 3D one? I don't know if it works like that, but I imagine, if it does, it has to be pretty jarring.

Yeah, that happens sometimes. I know some of our fictives have experienced it, at least (Twilight's in front, and she says she just tries not to think about it, which is fair, honestly)

[the-indigo-symphony]

I'd love more stories about DID that actually show the person growing up with it. So many DID stories go out of their way to mention the main character's ~tragic backstory~* but don't show anything of that backstory, not even in flashbacks or descriptions of the past. This contrasts how, for many of us, a big part of discovering and learning to live with DID is hindsight – identifying past experiences that were affected or caused by our DID, and how we can approach any similar experiences in the future, now that we know the root of it all. I think it would also help a lot of people who are in the process of questioning or getting diagnosed to have a story based on the experiences of growing up with DID to compare and relate to; it could give some perspective and reassurance. But mainly, I'm just interested in seeing a character go through something like I did when I was younger, always being "quirky" but never realizing what was going on. I think that would be really cathartic for me (especially if the adults in the story were actually competent at noticing what was going on with the MC and got them the help they needed, or at least angsted about the fact they weren't and didn't). It'd be really nice to read.

* put in tildes not because I don't think trauma that causes DID is serious, but because I find the ways it's often introduced in these stories to be dramatic and unnecessary. Especially when the trauma in question is not properly incorporated into the character's behavior with other effects of trauma. Feels like an awkward let-down most of the time

[the-indigo-symphony]

It really is concerning that I've now seen multiple "call-outs" based on information that not only isn't given a proper source, but based on what I can figure out, may be sourced from bad actors impersonating and spreading lies about the victim(s) of these call-outs in question. Please remember to always verify if your sources are trustworthy by asking questions such as:

Is this information up-to-date? Was it posted recently enough to probably still be accurate, or has enough time passed that we may have discovered new information on the subject that contradicts or elaborates on this?

Who posted it? Do they have the experience and/or qualifications to know what they're talking about? Can I verify that they are who they say they are? Are they sharing this information second- or third-hand? Are the publisher and author the same? If not, could the relationship between the publisher and author have influenced the text? Have the author and/or publisher published reliable information in the past? Have they published unreliable information in the past? Do they make a habit of either? What patterns can you find in their texts?

Does this sound realistic? If not, am I willing to accept it if I find enough evidence to confirm things really are that strange? If so, am I jumping on the bandwagon too quick due to my emotions (ex. an accusation against someone gets you too angry to stop and think if it's true)? Should I take a step back and revisit this later with fresh eyes? Can this be corroborated by other sources?

Why was this posted? Was it just to share this information? Was it to get people united against a specific, designated enemy? Was it to warn others about something? Was it for a project? Was posting it part of someone's job? What was the base of the information – a social media post? An experiment? A personal experience?

What biases may be present in it? What assumptions does the author make? Does any of it feel like an overreaction, or like someone jumped to conclusions? Am I meant to take it seriously? Is it a joke, or something taken out of context? How would I feel about it if this were in a different context? What is the actual context?

If all this seems like too much for you, don't worry – the base of all this is the CRAAP test, which is a method of determining if information or a source is trustworthy and reliable in what it says. These are simply some of the questions to ask that go along with CRAAP; you don't have to ask every single one of them, but you should at least consider some of them.

Again, please remember to verify your sources. Unfortunately, you never know when some information you come across is going to be false – I mean, hey, can you confirm I'm telling the truth about what the CRAAP test is? If not, you should probably go check by looking it up and using some of the very questions I've listed above to confirm the sources you find are reliable! Good luck out there, and if nothing else, make sure someone doesn't have a known record of being impersonated before you take any claims about them at face value.

[the-indigo-symphony]

I love how every time I'm doubting one of my physical disabilities, my body decides to crash and burn in that particular area and leave me – at best – feeling really wonky. Thanks body, you're a real one. Did you have to cause this in the first place, tho?

[the-indigo-symphony]

There was a horse

I don't want to just be standard in what I give out this year so I'm mixing it up! That's why I got out this super special candy bowl

Trick-or-treaters I acknowledge those of you who are still in my inbox. It's just that after the horse I'm struggling to come up with new things to pull out of the candy bowl. There's a whole pasture in there now that I've gotta go through to get to the candy; you know how it is with Halloween horses