On fictivity, interpretation, realness, and who you are.
| 15 min read
There's two big gripes I have with fictivity - or, rather, how people treat or engage with fictivity: assuming what that means as far as connections (or lack of) to a corresponding fictional media, and assumptions about what that means as far as who a person is.
For anybody reading who's not already familiar with the term, fictive is a term more often used in plural communities than clinical psychological literature (the more common clinical term is introject, I believe) to describe a member of a plural household who bears a resemblance to a fictional character. (In our experience, this is also actually very common; over the years we have had numerous plural friends and known many plural people, and the vague majority of them, even in fairly medicalized spaces, have had at least one member who fits that to some varying degree.)
Fictives can vary widely, too. We’ve met people who describe themselves as fictives/introjects who just bear a handful of abstract traits in common, and we’ve also met fictives/introjects who heavily resemble the fictional character in internal appearance, mannerism, and who have memories corresponding to some version of the events portrayed in the fictional media (often termed “exomemories” by the community). Neither of those are intended to be "ends of a spectrum" in terms of how that corresponds to the level of personal connection that one feels nor overall similarity that one has to the fictional media, though. Our "most scene-by-scene canon-compliant fictive" also, interestingly enough, happens to be the one with some of the most stark differences, too.
Also, a brief note about exomemories: Those are basically any memories a person in a plural household might have that is not a memory that their shared body experienced. For example, I have memories, as Jason Lovelace, formerly Jason Everitt, formerly Lisa Sullivan, of being born in 1919 and being raised in an environment that looked like 1920s-1930s midwest USA. Obviously this body was not born in 1919, though, and those memories I have of the 1920s spanning to 1952 and beyond also did not happen in this reality.
There’s a number of different ways that plural folks conceptualize and understand their exomemories. Some people take a more spiritual approach/belief; some people take them heavily metaphorically; some people (like me) simply consider them memories that did happen, but that likely happened internally somewhere at some point. The 1920s that I remember would then basically have been an environment that resembled this world’s 1920s, but somewhere in our internal universe. If we can have a headspace and a whole internal universe, that makes the most sense to me - but, I will note, not everyone in our household has the exact same belief about all of that, so don’t think that my opinion will be exactly the same as Sky’s or Nailë’s or anyone else’s.
Actually, I myself (Jason) am technically a fictive, and if you are already familiar enough with my parallel media and you read this blog closely enough, you might be able to put two and two together and figure out what character I resemble in some fashion.
BUT a big part of the points I want to touch on here are predicated on people not making immediate assumptions about people based on things like that, so I’m not saying more than that right now. Just keep reading, ahah.
So - my gripes with the way people treat fictivity currently, both among plurals and in communities where plurals and non-plurals are both sharing a space, are not easily separated from each other. The fact that people honestly do not seem to have an understanding of the line between fictional story, individual interpretation, and real fucking people does also end up affecting the other gripe of how people assume that "fictive" implies certain personal meanings and connections to the fictional media in question - and that can in turn affect what kind of person they think I am, if they've already assumed what a fictional character means to me, and so on.
Starting with the most common issue I see: Thinking you know anything about the real person, even if they do resemble something fictional in any manner (or just self-describe as a fictive, because you can have folks who identify as fictives who bear little to no obvious resemblance), just because you are familiar with the fictional media!
I think, honestly, that sometimes people - including other plurals and fictives - think they understand this, but then still confuse the line between subjective interpretation and real person.
See - interpretations and understandings of fictional characters are NOT universal. I don’t know what your interpretation of a given fictional character truly is. In a constructed narrative, unlike real life, especially in a medium like animation, everything on the screen was put there intentionally by an actual person in order to convey something within the story. A specific prop or background may be intended to imply something about the characters in the scene to the audience. The coloring or lighting may be intended to imply something about the characters’ motivations or feelings. But not all of these things are stated explicitly, and individual audience members’ opinions of exactly what that means, along with conclusions drawn from characters' actions and statements that otherwise haven't been explicitly stated in the narrative, can ABSOLUTELY vary. That is part of why media analysis is even a thing in the first place! It’s why discussing the implicit details of media is so interesting!
But - when I say my name (not Jason; I have a different name in addition to that!) and mention certain personal details, some of which resemble in some form or fashion a fictional character from a specific TV show, and someone says “oh, so you’re Blorbo from The Show,” I don’t know what their specific interpretation of the character Blorbo actually is. I don’t know what their opinions on all of those unspoken details and hints and symbolism are. I don’t know if we are both picturing an identical full set of personality traits, emotions, motivations, and dynamics - and in all likelihood, we probably aren’t, even if there is a lot of overlap, simply because we are each going to interpret media through our own lens because we each have different life experiences. So - if I agree with them and say “yes, I’m Blorbo from The Show,” I don’t know what I’m agreeing to, actually, because I don’t know if their mental picture of the fictional character is the same as mine, and I certainly don’t know if it’s actually anything close to who I am. (And, honestly, even if I disagree with them, that doesn't stop them from making assumptions anyway because… well, unfortunately, there’s not many other characters I could be mistaken for, especially with some very specific details, so the resemblance is kind of hard to hide even if I deny it.)
Personal note on my own experience “as a fictive”: This might sound odd to some, but honestly, I do not actually feel any stronger of a connection to the fictional character I’m called a “fictive of” than I do to, say, Jud Duplenticy and Jefferson Wicks in the movie Wake Up Dead Man, which is a movie I quite like a lot, but have little to no personal connection to beyond, like… normal-ass “I find this characterization interesting in relation to my own self,” which is not an experience exclusive to fictives, by far. I know many fictives themselves seem to hold a source media a lot higher in regard or personal connection, but I am not one of them, I guess. In fact, the fictional character I’m a “fictive of” is, upon actually sitting down and thinking about it, not even the character in the associated TV show that I relate to the most - there’s two completely different characters in the second season of the TV show that I actually relate to a lot more, particularly in terms of their roles in the narrative and their characterizations.
I do certainly get that not every person who could be described as a fictive would necessarily feel the same, but the assumption does persistently seem to be that I will have a much deeper and much more personal connection or association on a core level with the character, even though I feel much more like a fan of and not a guy FROM the show.
On the topic of exomemories, though, and following the idea of fiction is constructed for an audience: in a fictional media, narratives and details are designed and intentionally placed by an actual person to convey additional information, but for actual, real people, including fictives, it does not always work the same way that it normally does in an intentionally-constructed narrative. There is so much additional context possible in ways that don't always follow the path that a story made for entertainment might. Hypothetically, a scene that, in a fictional media, most people interpret as one character being cruel to another could, in someone’s exomemories, actually have been a bluffing act to protect that character from a third party who, in the fictional version, would not have been “on-screen” - and that detail might be something that, if it were written into the fictional story, could feel narratively out of place or not narratively satisfying, so it would be maybe marginally more unlikely - the fiction is for entertainment. But in someone’s memories, it might make total sense and have happened that way anyway, even though on the surface the memory looks almost identical to the fictional scene, because exomemories are not something intentionally constructed for entertainment.
Anyway, this blurring of interpretation and reality or assumption that your interpretation will be more universal than it is sometimes gets very weird when interacting with others, especially for folks who often get “clocked” as a fictive pretty damn fast if anybody in the vicinity knows anything about the media they have any resemblance to. We’ve gotten people assuming alternately that none of us could possibly have "committed crimes." I've even gotten several people assuming things about our trauma history. We've gotten some people assuming our entire household is going to all be cartoonishly evil assholes just because two of us have a visual resemblance or a name in common with villain characters, despite that those characters are on screen for less than four hours and, again, are not real and do not exist outside of those less-than-four-hours' screen time. Give me four hours’ worth of clips of your life and see how accurate of a picture of YOUR entire self that I can construct solely from that in order to judge you on. Christ almighty.
Even other fictives are not immune nor exempt from this. A common comparison that we get, even from other fictives - in fact, especially from other fictives of villain characters - is some variation of declaring yourself “better than or as bad as the canon character.”
…I never know how to answer that. I have exomemories of doing some pretty-not-good things, some of which are arguably comparable in severity to the actions that the fictional character is at times depicted doing. I have made mistakes, in exomemories and nowadays, and I’m doing my best to understand those mistakes and not repeat them. I’ve been working extremely hard to understand my own personal patterns and habits, working to understand why they’re there, and actively choose what I want to do with them and who I want to be. My personal experiences - all of them - affect how I interpret and move through the world, including those that earn me the "fictive" label.
I understand a lot more about my own responsibility and am actively trying to choose to foster an environment in which people can feel safe disagreeing with me and setting boundaries with me. Even though I’ve made mistakes, I can choose to do better, even if it feels really scary to try to give up the old habits - maladaptive as they are, even the ones from exomemories/fictive-relevant experiences - that, in previous situations, are what kept me safe. I’ve even been working with our therapist to reframe how I view my rhetoric and social skills, because I’d been somewhat scared of it there for a bit. I was even scared of myself and am still nervous about accidentally scaring anyone else.
But. I’ve built a lot of new and good relationships. I'm trying to repair existing relationships. I have people I feel safe with and who have told me they feel safe with me. I’m developing actually a pretty big itch to fucking do something about a lot of this shit - even tentatively starting to plan some actual, albeit small enough, IRL advocacy about some of it. I've actually already been talking to a good number of clinicians about some of this. Even that I still feel is inseparable from all of my experiences, including the experiences that get me termed a fictive. In fact - there's some experiences or exomemories (albeit some "canon-divergent," as folks would say - that is, exomemories that don't match up with or otherwise are not depicted in the fictional canon parallel) that are decent influences in how I go about mental health ideas in general. All of that goes into how I am actively trying to choose what kind of person I want to be now.
Aaaaand let’s go back to the question of: “Are you better than or as bad as the canon fictional character?”
Dude, how the fuck should I know what you're going to think about that? How do I summarize any of that? Do you want me to say I’ve never hurt people? I can’t. Do you want me to say I’ve never hurt people in some of the same ways that the parallel fictional character is depicted? I can’t. Do you want me to say all the good things I've done? I could try, but that's gonna feel kind of weird! But also, I am not a literal cartoon, I am a real person, and real people are capable of good AND bad. I'm a real person who's been working like hell to try to figure himself out and do better, fictive or not. Is the canon guy a "bad person?" I mean, the character was kind of written intentionally to be a villain, so yeah kinda, by design! But I myself was not written by somebody! I don't think REAL PEOPLE can be inherently good or bad! Every person on the planet is capable of great good and great evil, and not acknowledging that risks dismissing the mistakes of people given the "good person" label and ignoring genuine improvements of others you've discarded as "bad." The people accusing "fictives of villains" of being horrible people capable of horrible things right off the bat, often without even talking to any of them, are just as capable of those horrible things as the people they're accusing, because any person is capable of that shit, congrats, it came free with your Being A Real Person - and, frankly, there are some people who, if they do ever make a mistake along those lines, they will have one hell of a time trying to reconcile that, because it will contradict their likely self-image as an "inherently good person" so damn hard. Recognizing and addressing mistakes and actually doing better is always going to be more important than whatever self-image purity anybody has going on.
(Even back during some of my worst times, even if I was making mistakes, I still don’t think I, my real self, was inherently a bad person. I was a normal fucking human who was making a lot of fucking mistakes and was kind of being an idiot at times, but who still had the capacity to do good. And oooooh boy I do not think every person reading this will understand the sheer amount of work and therapy that it has taken for me to be able to say that, holy fucking shit. It’s what you choose. You are capable of choosing good OR bad, just like anyone else, and it's your job to fucking handle those choices and the consequences responsibly.)
I’m at a point in my life where I’m trying to actually do good things. I mean, hell, I’ve got meetings to schedule with actual real-life degree-holding licensed clinicians to discuss trauma-informed approaches in therapy programs. I have discussion topics and logistics for an in-person local support group I’m hoping to start next year to work on, and a guest sermon on fucking mental health pathology and clinician bias to put together. All of that is inseparable, actually, from all of my experience, including those as a fucking fictive. Get off your high horse and do something better with your time than whining at me on a fucking internet chat app about shit you don’t even have enough context to comment on.
...Anyway. I think you can tell I'm a little incensed about that, ahah, but I think I have rambled enough now. Feel free to note your own experiences in the comments, or questions, or what have you!
Thank you!