On Origin and Discovery of Fictotypes - June 13th, 2021

I’ve tried to segment things out, but a lot of this blends together and my discovery isn’t always linear. Thus, it gets a bit mixed up and rambly at times.

A note: I sometimes refer to kintypes that have their own genders in their canons or lives with a pronoun that mixes referring to them as separate and referring to them as myself (ex. hei, shei, we), so it isn’t a typo, it’s just the cleanest way I can think of both expressing their life in canon and my own experience of said life at once.

Warnings include mentions of stabbing, impalement, neglect, and murder.

Starting around, from what I can remember, middle school. I already knew I was a domestic cat because it is the form that has had by far the consistently strongest effect on me throughout my life, and because when I joined the community, it was the “standard” to have one theriotype, maybe two if you’re up to being questioned. But I didn’t join the communities saying I was a domestic cat; I joined saying that I was a small cat demon with bat wings, because that is the form that felt “right” in my brain at the time. Sure, sometimes my tail felt like two tails, and I didn’t understand why, but I figured it was my brain playing with me, or that I had misunderstood my form and that I was actually a nekomata, a cat spirit with a split tail. I felt that I should be able to know more and sometimes was able to predict situations before they happened, sure; but middle school is also when my mental health crashed, and I continued to exist with a mild film of psychosis covering my experience of the world for the rest of adolescence. I have been able, slipping between stability and worse states, to see what things stick with me throughout and what things exist for the most part only when I am actively brainbad. But when looking back as long ago as middle school, it is a bit harder to discern what exact thought patterns classified as markedly disordered, so I apologize that I can’t go too in-depth about that.

That is like the base of it, and how I was, troubled by but mostly dismissing the discrepancies that showed up in how I viewed myself because they weren’t so constant that I couldn’t ignore them... until they weren’t, and around July 2014, I awakened to being a Meowstic.

My awakenings are typically not very subtle, and usually happen in a burst of memories, strong shifts, and a prominence in the forefront of my thoughts. There are times when they come on more quietly, or over a period of time, but most times, I will not accept something as a kintype by name until it has cemented itself so prominently in my life that I cannot ignore it any longer. It is not inherently a bad thing to have multiple kintypes, but even knowing I had at least two after awakening as a Meowstic made me feel humiliated and embarrassed to show everyone what I was. It was after awakening as a Meowstic that I deleted my old blog, demoncatkin, and created a new blog, kincats, exclusively to separate any idea that I could be fictionkin from my old blog. I used to have different opinions, and I think this led to me deleting that old blog without saving many, or any, records, because I was so embarrassed about the discrepancies between what I had said and what I was now experiencing. Unfortunately, this also means I can’t offer any old writings from that time, and I now regret deleting everything if only for the sake of archiving.

It is a fact that I am also prone to fictionflickering, “becoming” fictional characters temporarily after I watch or read the media they come from, so that played a part in my reluctance to accept any other possible identities that I would have without essentially putting them through a trial and seeing if they would overpower me, and for a length of time, to the point where it would be foolish to continue pretending they didn’t exist.

As a nonhuman experience, being a Meowstic affects me more on the physical front than my human fictotypes; I still experience shifts for my human fictotypes, often including their hair, clothes, mannerisms, how we speak, etc, but they still feel different, and have more of a heavy focus on memories. As a Meowstic, I experience large droopy ears that overlap some of my face, and two large fluffy tails, as well as mental shifts that mirror my personality at the time; grumpy and no-nonsense, which frankly isn’t too far from my current personality. My misanthropy heightens during these shifts due to my experiences (having been caught by a human during a storm in which I was separated from my siblings for the rest of my life). There are also aspects of me being mildly precognitive; I don’t want to argue for this being real or fake because I do have a brain geared towards delusional thinking and this may or may not be a part of it, but it’s a fact that I’ve sometimes felt like something would happen, dismissed it because I was probably just anxious (as these feelings can sometimes overlap with my anxiety, making them not always accurate), and then it actually happens.

Ultimately, like my other kintypes, it’s something that hasn’t faded away entirely in the years since I’ve discovered it, unlike other experiences that were more transient or are ones that we purely classify as “past lives” (whether or not they’re actually past lives or merely experiences that only rarely or vaguely affect us, to the point of me not feeling like it’ll be helpful to call them kintypes, I don’t know).

Unfortunately I’d rather not share my initial writeup for how I realized that I was Maizono verbatim due to my past self writing about some personal subjects I’d rather not bring up so publicly, but there are aspects of it that are still relevant to share. This fictotype is one I sometimes doubt nowadays, but it’s something I’m still observing to see how that situation develops. Whether I “was” her or “am” her, it is still a part of me as of now.

In canon, Maizono presents as a very cheerful, kind person who’s always open to help others. Shei was shown to be able to act well, and manipulate others, as well. Especially when we were younger, we had a lot of trouble with knowing who we were and being able to display emotions that properly fit the situation. I feel like this tied into how we were as Maizono; constantly having to act as someone we weren’t, rarely able to relax due to our reputation-heavy job and having to watch ourselves around others so not to ruin it, when I had time to be alone, I felt like I didn’t know who I was anymore. I have a strong attachment to singing, feeling like I was meant to do it, which could also be due to my confusing Rin-ity, and a fear of being vulnerable, which extended to showers. Even before I awoke to this fictotype, my anxiety repeatedly gave me scenarios of someone coming in and stabbing me while I was in the shower; anxiety is, well, anxiety, so all variances of death scenarios aren’t particularly out of the question, but it was still... interesting to me, given the location of my death in-canon.

There is a theory that sometimes, past life wounds are a cause for things that still affect a later life; scars, birthmarks, pain. This is one thing I connected with being Maizono; I had stabbing pains in my stomach, which was interesting to me considering that shei had died by being stabbed in the stomach. It is very important to note here that I properly went to a doctor for the various sharp pains I experienced that may or may not be phantom pains caused by having been my kintypes, because simply assuming it’s a purely metaphysical experience can be dangerous. At no time during these examinations was any physical reason found for my pain. These stabbing pains, which I still have, are part of other symptoms that I have as someone who probably has Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which has no physical presentation and is effectively a “you experience pain but we don’t actually see anything wrong” syndrome given to people who confuse doctors. (This aspect of pain is also relevant when it comes to being Ivlis, as I received several divine spears through my chest, but I figured I’d save that for the relevant section.)

A fun fact to break up the more serious rambling is that my catchphrase as Maizono was “It’s because I’m an esper!” (エスパーですから！) I find my lives as them, if they’re lives and this isn’t a purely psychological phenomenon, linked together due to this: I was a blue psychic-type Pokemon that evolved from a Pokemon called Espurr (ニャスパー, nya + esper, in Japanese, so it still holds up), and then I was a blue-haired individual with intuition so keen I would joke I was an esper... Coincidence?

The first time I outright stated that I was Ivlis, in my archives, was in mid January 2015, but records indicate I’d been grappling with the possibility since late December 2014. I went through a few stages before this; at first, I thought I was Ater, a cat demon from the same source, and a background character without a name, because I found someone with traits similar to mine; horns that curved in the same way, and a heart-tipped tail. But Ater didn’t stay a primary identity for long, and I started worrying that it was a cameo and that I had unintentionally falsified memories of being her. I had also begun to think that I might not be a background character after all, and that any attachment I had to the Garden was because of Ater, and having fused memories together. But there was an alternative... a character whose horns and tail matched mine, a place in the world that I had felt at home in despite its villain side in the game, and someone who I knew would make me hated and avoided in the kin community for that source. That last reason made me reject it and speaking about it openly for a bit afterwards. When I was open about it, I stated that I was specifically the official female version, because the heart-shaped tail is the shape mine has only in that form, while it takes on a more arrow-like shape in my male form. I would continue to flow between these two forms, which I attribute to my being a divine being in that world; most of the others who I knew were also able to do it and did so openly.

Like with what I discussed regarding the physical pain I felt tied to Maizono, as Ivlis, I received several divine spears through my chest in canon. In the present world, I was experiencing stabbing pains in my chest as well, sometimes so severe I was scared I was having a heart attack, and where I could barely breathe. It could be tied, it could not be; regardless, to make sure, we had our heart and lungs checked, heart for worry about heart problems because it kept hurting and the lungs because I often had trouble breathing, and still do, and was wondering if it was related. It all turned out clear, and the strength of the pains subsided after a few years; from some research, there is some chest pain that is similar to this that occurs when one is growing, and it was likely that, though I’m not completely sure due to this taking place when I was around 15-16, which may be too late. Regardless, while I still have chest pains, it isn’t to the severity that they used to be. Similarly, as I already discussed my doctor-addressed stomach pains in the Maizono section, I also experienced times where my abdominal area would feel like it was burning, which I partially attributed to the fire inside me, being a flame demon.

There is some stuff that is a bit hard to talk about when it comes to being Ivlis, because I’m unsure how to trigger tag the memories. But let’s say there were sensations that I was experiencing that scared me, and that made me feel like maybe I was actually repressing something that happened in this world, even if that wasn’t very realistic because of the timeframe of things. Unfortunately, those sensations make a lot of sense with being Ivlis, and for a long time I was tormented by memories of a certain someone repeatedly hurting me, for a long time. Someones, you could say, but it was primarily that one individual who did the most damage. The strength of these feelings reduced as this source stopped being my primary interest and spending so much time involved in the world and his existence inherently being a part of it, and it is a reason I don’t heavily involve myself in the source now as well, even if I sometimes communicate with others from that world in a dubiously-serious server I am in purely due to missing connection with other ‘kin.

With Ivlis, my noemata are particularly strong; maybe it’s having lived so long, maybe it’s having been divine, but when it comes to my world’s workings and the lives of myself and other characters, I found it strangely easy to confirm/deny others’ headcanons (not to their face, of course) and theories. It is an existence I still feel very strongly connected to; my bursts of anger and constant irritability are likely tied to mental illness, but it is also a trait I had as Ivlis. Being timid and scared, but displaying it frequently as anger. It was being in this world, in a different body with a different skill set and away from those who tormented me for so long, that actually helped me deal with some of my fear and anger tied to that world. I still struggle with it, but as I’ve grown older, it’s become easier to deal with. It’s one of those things where it can be related to being ‘kin, but can also easily just be a part of you; it’s hard to separate them, and sometimes I wonder if they even can be properly separated, when being you and being ‘kin are really the same thing in the end. Maybe it’s just me holding onto old community warnings of not interpreting “normal behavior” as being kin-related and false-positive-ing it.

And what of being Ater and holding those memories? It could just be my brain’s attempt at rationalizing the experience, but due to other noemata I have, it seems like when doing my initial sweep of the Garden, I had implanted a piece of my power into her, which allowed me to maintain a connection to the Garden, know where it was. This allowed Ater to use some powers that were similar to mine, and when she died in an incident involving a cave-in and something burning that I only vaguely remember, the piece of myself that held her self and memories was reabsorbed back into me. This seems like a reasonable explanation to me as of now, but of course, it’s impossible to know anything for sure.

With being C-ta, I realized it differently and more slowly than I did the others. Usually, I either flat out dislike or don’t care about my kintypes before realizing that I’m them; being C-ta and Mika are the exceptions. With C-ta, when reading my source, I felt a strong connection to it. I mean, of course I would; here I am, struggling with obsessive tendencies that make me relate to the yandere trope (happy to say that this has calmed down quite a bit since highschool, and isolating myself has reduced these feelings further), and here’s a character who exhibits behaviors that, while I don’t do, are something I can understand the reasoning for. I don’t usually strongly relate to my kintypes until I actually think about it and realize how much of my behavior and self is actually reflected in how they grew up. So, strongly relating to him like this, he must be a synpath! He was yandere and paranoid, and so was I, which made him a perfect character to latch onto. My records state that I had him down as a synpath before April 2016, but by the end of May 2016 I’d realized he was a kintype; unfortunately I’m not seeing much writing explaining my actual process of realization, unlike with some of the other fictotypes.

While I can’t explain my exact thought process because of that lack of archived discussion, I can state some of the shift abnormalities that likely led me towards it. For context, C-ta is a character who is obsessed with his childhood friend, A-ya, and is dedicated to protecting him. While hei wouldn’t admit it then, we loved him dearly, and couldn’t imagine life without him for several reasons. In this life, I’m honestly scared of irl guys; I don’t feel comfortable around them, and can’t trust them. I’m also asexual. And in C-ta shifts, that changes, which is an extremely strange feeling that I find hard to discuss for multiple reasons. I feel strongly towards A-ya and have a different understanding of certain things. This marked shift in experience, alongside the way those shifts are a concentrated, overwhelming feeling of guilt, paranoia, and fixation, make it an experience that is very hard to ignore, and is certainly not something I experience even with synpaths who I have minor shifts to. I also retain some of our social charisma, despite my strong social anxiety in this life, which can make observing conversations I have in-shift versus out quite fascinating because of the marked shift in my social prowess. I may be wrong, but I think this ‘type is one that comes with the greatest shift in identity and ability of my ‘types, which makes it quite impossible to simply reject its effect on my life.

The last I will discuss, and the most recent fictotype I have discovered, is being Mika. This was also a more slow discovery, but also something I tried to shove aside unsuccessfully for a while. I first started vaguely questioning it late 2016, but I believe I only confirmed it mid-2017, but archives on that are blurry due to the questioning length. (Yes, I’m very aware that the fictotypes I have talked about here were essentially discovered one after another between 2014-2016; yes I’m a bit insecure about it, yes I feel anxious that it makes me look fake, but also they have for the most part remained stable since then and it is already 2021, so...)

This is another ‘type that I related to and liked at first. I don’t typically have the experience of knowing I’m ‘kin at first sight; it usually takes the realization seeping in, often accompanied with a dash of horror because why this, again!? I’ve always felt a strong connection to heterochromia, since I first became aware of it; seeing it was a comfort to me, I loved characters who had it, and I gave the trait to my fantasy self in middle school. So of course, with him having heterochromia, I latched onto him and some other characters I liked when encountering the game. But then, as we continued reading the story we started to realize that hm... something wasn’t quite right. This feels too familiar, and I keep having noemata and being confused when something differs from them because “I swear I read it somewhere, that’s why I know this fact, right?” I wish my past self archived these latter discoveries as well as we archived the earlier ones, but unfortunately I can’t say too much on exactly what we felt and thought then.

With being Mika, while kintypes are not contingent on how much of your life has some kind of tie to them, I realized, and continue to realize more, things that match up from before I knew the source existed. I speak about being crowhearted, and this is a part of my identity that has existed since childhood. As Mika, I often compared myself to a crow, and was compared to one by others at times, even saying I had pitch-black feathers. I identified myself as not-quite-human, whether I was a crow or doll or tool or something else, and even when treated as human, there was a collaboration story with another source in which a character from there feels most comfortable with Meka (Me+Mika combo I sometimes use) because hei felt the least human out of the humans there. There’s also the aspect of being afraid of loud male voices; this is likely tied to fear gained from the arguments we heard as a child, afraid that they’d escalate, but there was also an individual in our life as Mika who we had an unhealthy and controlling relationship with, and who often yelled at us. (Despite this, our canon self loved him dearly; I, personally, have moved on, and quite frankly can’t deal with him at all.) Our canon self has also stated that he is more comfortable around girls and feels nervous around guys. I always liked sewing and creating as well, which he does often. And this especially I have no idea if it’s related, but there is a system in that canon with a systemmate who is very dear to me; no idea if this drew us more towards systems depicted in media, or if it was experiencing plurality ourselves in this life that pushed us towards it.

A bit of a tricky thing with being Mika is that as time has gone on, I’ve essentially “become” more and more canon-divergent, in the sense that my canon is ongoing and has continued to consistently release new content long after I realized I was him. As such, most newer content either makes little sense to me or actively goes against what being me was and is like, so if anyone who knew my canon were to mention it, it’d honestly be hard to speak about in a way that relates to me. My canon self, in the current moment, feels like a very different person to who I was, because our lives diverged at a few points that actually led to markedly different outcomes for our health and self-perception. For instance, the person I mentioned above who I was in an unhealthy relationship with has, in canon, made efforts to try and become a better person. I fully acknowledge this, and though they have hurt many people who don’t owe them anything, they are trying their best to make up for their wrongdoings. However, this didn’t happen for me. He didn’t change, and we remained in an unhealthy mess that stretched for a long time after the positive changes had occurred in canon. This means my feelings towards him are more harsh or bitter than some of the doubles I see, and I’ve even seen a non-kin state that if someone was kin with me and hated him, how could they even say that they’re me? Which is... hard to even respond to, but I admit it got to me at the time. Another thing is the canon that I’m from a small rural town that didn’t always treat me kindly, and was from an orphanage there. My noemata naturally filled in the blanks; my canon self was from an orphanage, but I continued living with my neglectful family and scrounging for myself. The kids in the town always threw stones at me, calling me a monster or demon for my mismatched eyes. When he, the person I’ve been referencing, found me there, he took me with him away from that town and we never saw it again... so my surprise when canon stated that the town’s kids loved me and came to see me during a Halloween event was immense. Them? Those kids, the ones who loathed my monstrous self? So while we’re the same individual, the level of canon divergence does, at times, make it a bit hard to see myself in my canon.

There are other experiences that I have that might count as fictotypes, but honestly, I’m ignoring them and pushing them away; they’re somewhat distressing, and if they aren’t demanding to be acknowledged and coped with by me, I won’t acknowledge them in return. The above that I acknowledge are ‘types that I couldn’t shove away without them biting back at me with a passion and retaliating against my suppression with a flood of memories and shifts. That, and patience, is part of what I employ to figure out what actual relevant experiences are versus experiences that would complicate things too much and that I avoid.

My human-species fictotypes, while not contributing to my species identity as I consider myself fully nonhuman, have the greatest effect on my life both through mental shifts with an impact on my demeanor and through the experiences that I have gone through and am going through as them. As such, when speaking of those lives, I find that personal life experience takes priority, unlike how my species affects my experience of the world in more nonhuman fictotypes. I can explain fairly well how my individual life went as my human fictotypes, but for my nonhuman fictotypes, I can also explain how the world was; how we functioned, how things worked for us. This is also likely because my human fictotypes don’t take place in fantastical worlds, unlike my nonhuman fictotypes, which makes their lives more “mundane”. Just personal experience here, as this probably differs between individuals.

In the past, when I was more heavily on Tumblr, I was more prone to categorizing my kintypes in the usual format; primary, secondary, etc. This was a hierarchy based on how frequently I shifted to a particular kintype, and how strongly I felt I was them at the time. I have since abandoned this, because I felt it wasn’t a very useful system for me, and as my kintypes became more balanced (after an awakening, shifts are skewed heavily towards the newcomer kintype, which make me interpret them as more prominent in my life than they ultimately may end up being), it’s easier to just accept that they flow around in strength depending on various variables in my daily life.

Ultimately, even if I do not experience constant shifts to some of my kintypes, with a few of them only seeming to emerge when I encounter something in my life that ends up triggering their recurrence (which isn’t particularly uncommon, really; for better or worse, the world is filled with things that trigger shifts), I feel that my kintypes have an ongoing influence on how I experience and maneuver the world. I am all my kintypes individually, but ultimately, I am also a fusion of them all; the creature I am now is formed from a combination of all those experiences, the impacts being them has had on various parts of my life and tendencies even before I knew I was them. It would feel disingenuous to strip them from my identity, because even when I doubt them being a part of myself, something I’ve been mistaken on, it feels like parts of them are integrated into my general state of being, who I am and what drives me.

There are times when they are so “quiet” that I wonder if I should stop calling myself them and see what happens, but I usually take a while to vocalize any decisions on that front, as things can change at any time.

As I never know anything 100% for sure, what with life being unpredictable sometimes, there may be things here that are incorrect or that I discover I was wrong about later. It’s fine! Discovery happens. And because of the volume, I may have been too vague on some things.