But Why "Fictionkind"? Why not Just "Fictive"?

By Saki Hanami & Kotone Fujita

(Originally posted on Dreamwidth on August 18, 2024)

Summary: We initially used the fictive label for everyone in our system that has fictional identities (which is almost everyone), but as time goes on we felt that fictionkind suits us better for various reasons. We questioned this decision of ours for a while until we finally settled on our decision.

For context, this was our understanding of the terms fictive and fictionkind until recently:

• Fictive: A member of a plural system that identifies as a fictional character or species. Typically knows their identity instantly and doesn't see their body's life as theirs.
• Fictionkind: Someone who identifies as a fictional character or species. Typically goes through a questioning phase before confirming their identity and identifies with the life they have pre-awakening.

Experience-wise, a vast majority of us have experiences that align with fictives more than fictionkind when our base identities are concerned. We're plural. We know our identity the moment we're identifiable. We don't see our body's life history as ours, but the body's. The one experience we have that fits both categories would be us identifying as our source. This had caused some problems in the past, which is centered around our hesitance of going to fictionkind spaces and using fictionkind-related tags unless we have a fictotype outside of our base identity. If we go by the understanding we listed above, we have much fewer fictionkind members than fictive members. For reasons very likely tied to lack of understanding and general fear of stepping on toes, we thought that fictives in fictionkind spaces would be considered intruding due to the differing experiences. What didn't help were various anecdotes we've seen of people considering fictives and fictionkind to be more different than what they really are for several reasons, sometimes in nonsensical and contradictory ways. Some spaces say that fictives are "realer" than fictionkind. Some others say that fictives aren't really their sources. We never got ourselves directly caught in the line of fire of this discourse, but reading those accounts didn't help to reduce our fear. It was not until much later that we considered using the fictionkind label in addition to fictive.

What pushed us that way were discussions on the difference between the two identities in alterhuman spaces and some re-reads of the definitions in alterhuman glossaries. This was how we realized that there are fictives who don't identify as their source the way we do, and may simply only look like their source or otherwise have a fiction-based source without identifying as/with it. This is also where we started to get the idea of "you're free to use the label you want" into our head. But it was a gradual process. We still had some moments of trying to justify our label choice to silence the negativity in our head that represents hypothetical people on the internet who has nothing better to do than to berate us for perceived wrongs, but for now it stopped bothering us with this topic specifically. Our hangups were only on the connotations specifically, since we already know the definitions. After we managed to let go of the idea that the connotations are required, we finally let ourselves use the fictionkind label more openly.

So why "fictionkind"? Why not just "fictive"?

If we're asked about our reasoning now, we'll simply state that we align more closely with the alterhuman community's culture compared to the plural community, and that our definitions of fictionkind and fictive are not very far apart from each other. The only important part to us is that we identify as fictional characters or beings, nothing else matters that much, this reasoning is enough.