Extra System Lore
Overview
We are The Dragonheart Collective, an adult nonhuman multiple system.
As dragons are very important to us in general, and 'collective' is a group noun that connotates more emphasized personhood then system does, we decided to name ourselves 'The Dragonheart Collective'.
Our multiplicity is a major part of our lives. It would be impossible to get an accurate read on us without taking it into account as it informs everything we do and massively effects all of us. If we did not share a brain we wouldn't be able to so directly cross reference what various identity things 'feel like' to use as reference points such as genders and orientations.
Our ability and desire to present in various ways is altered by the fact that we make those major decisions as a group, as well. Our transition path takes the fact that we share a body very heavily into account. We generally consider ownership of the body and our life shared between us, though we do have a 'default fronter' who is referred to as a host.
We have been aware of our plurality sporadically throughout our life, but we started to identify as a system around late 2014. We have gone through identifying as being a part of a variety of plural subcommunities over the years, including the daemonism, tulpamancy, and OSDD/DID communities before coming to lurk in the corner of the general inclusive plurality community.
The incredibly volatile and pervasive nature of origins discourse prevented us from properly acknowledging the breadth of our plural experiences and accessing necessary resources for a long time. Specifically- system exclusionists insisting that plurality must present and be viewed in a very specific way to be valid.
Our negative history with origins discourse and particularly system exclusionists is a large part of why we feel very strongly that origin theory being so heavily focused on as the most important identity label and the major divider of experiences only hurts the community at large.
We tend to, in general, eschew the microlabels and frameworks favored in the current plural community, as they often are ill-fitting for us and our understanding of ourselves. This includes but is not limited to origin labels, consciousness labels, and disorder status. If a given system prefers them, all the power to that system, but we do not.
We just generally defy many frameworks and all-or-nothing generalizations that exist in the community.
Our General Views
While we don't agree on everything, many of our various stances on certain things are in the same range.
For one, we are all generally leftist, and believe that government should exist to serve and take care of the people first and foremost. When people are being harmed or struggling to survive, government has failed. We are also explicitly anti-bigotry and pro equality.
We also hold generally Neurodiversity-oriented, Anti-Psych, and Mad Pride views due to our previous negative experiences with therapy, diagnosis status wank, and general ableism.
We also generally believe in harm-based morality. That is to say- a given thing is fine so long as it doesn't cause or require direct inherent harm. This extends to being in support of people's right to make and enjoy taboo/dark/sexual fictional content and engage in consensual kink practices with other adults. We do not believe in thoughtcrime and are strongly sex-positive.
In the vein of the above, we also all hold to a creed of functional pacifism. We do our best to avoid doing harm as much as possible. This is less because we view violence as Always Wrong, and more because we don't feel we are good at judging what is and is not an appropriate ‘moral’ time to do a violence, regardless of our positions on its morality in various situations. Therefore we abstain entirely to be safe and fall in line with our harm-based morality.
In terms of more plural and nonhuman/fictional identity related opinions, we believe in unity between those with nonhuman and fictional related identities. We do however, dislike and strongly criticize the term 'alterhuman' and how its subsequently used. We feel inherently and forcibly including plurality by default under alterhuman is in incredibly poor taste and dehumanizing in a bad way with how the term is currently as opt-out in practice; especially when no other neurodivergency is treated this way. We are also against the theivery of 'kin' terminology from the community by fandom folks who self-admittedly do not identify as something fictional or nonhuman, for details see our KFF essay [HERE]. Regarding plurality related discourse, we think drawing lines in the sand over origin theories is counterproductive and completely dumb, and fakeclaiming helps no one.
General Structure and Inner World
Our system and inner world can both currently be divided into two categories. The Upstairs and the Downstairs.
Upstairs refers to the 'upstairs' portion of our inner world and houses the 'main' members of the system. These are all recognized as their own people.
Downstairs, also called 'Brain Soup', is 'downstairs' in our inner world and encompasses all entites in the system that have not declared themselves as active seperate people (such as some known fragments) and any entities associated with them. Those downstairs can control major aspects of the system such as memory or who finds it easiest to keep front, but are not necessarily sapient and/or aware enough to have more reasoning than instinct.
Our inner world is a large building. As previously stated, there is an Upstairs, which is mostly all one 'main' room with a hallway, and a Downstairs. We consider it to be a thought construct generated by all the members of the system, rather than a real place. We don't reside in it unless we intentionally imagine ourselves in it for communication purposes. We consciously imagined and built most of the features inside it, but some features appeared without known conscious generation of someone in the system.
While we feel we have spiritual elements to our systemhood, the way we feel our plurality works is very psychologically-oriented.
We consider everyone in the system to reside in our brain, not somewhere else, and our inner world as what is essentially a shared ‘multiplayer’ daydream/complex thought we all imagine and change together. This both effects how we perceive our material experiences, and is also why we perceive our experiences as they are in the first place.
Fronting and Switching
For us, fronting and switching is largely of the 'non-possessive' type. The front is mostly the only perspective that memory is recorded and when we switch it generally feels like 'passing the I' to the person switching in. We can occasionally get very brief switches where it feels more 'possessive' though and its like watching the other use the body, but its rare as of writing this.
We have some level of control over our switching, but we switch unintentionally or when triggered as well. We are capable of co-fronting, but generally tend to dislike it due to how it feels similar to being blurry.
When we make a conscious choice to switch, the person who wants to switch out visualizes 'stepping back' into the headspace and the person who wants to front visualizes 'stepping forward'. The person who wants to switch out then has to let go of the 'I' and the person who wants to come forward has to take it.
To reorient ourselves in the body, we stretch and visualize our supernumerary phantom limbs alonglide moving our normal ones a bit.
Communication
We did a seperate essay [HERE] on this.
Disorder Status And Origins Theory
The category so many people insist defines everything of note about your system! Obviously, we disagree with this attitude.
In terms of origins we, as stated previously, do not identify with any community standard specific concrete labels. We do not consider our theories to sort us into a 'kind' of system, they are merely theories to explain experiences. We also generally do not consider our reasoning for our theories to be anyone's buisness.
Our theories on how and why our plurality is in the state it currently is are varied, and we do not all agree on the same theories and generally don't care about them strongly enough to bother reasoning them through that much. Some things we generally believe contributed to our current state of being include but are not limited to; inherent inborn traits, adaptions to circumstances, spirituality, and deliberate cultivation.
In terms of disorder, our official stance as a system is that we generally do not consider our system to fit cleanly into disordered or nondisordered categories. This is partially due to our general disillusionment and ambivalence regarding diagnostic labels, and partially due to genuinely straddling the line on meeting the exclusion criteria. This is again, something we do not all agree on.
Our origin theories are far from the most important aspect of our plurality and making them into a cutesy label that goes in every intro under the sun only implies that it is.
Also we do not owe anyone our on-paper medical information and demanding it of internet strangers is weird and invasive.
Social Codes
'Codes' in terms of subcultures, are strings of symbols and letters that are used to convey large amounts of information about a specific thing in reference to a person in a short amount of characters. Each code has a 'key' that can be used to decypher it. They were very popular in the 90s. There have been numerous codes made for the plural community.
For us, we find ourselves extremely discontent with the extant plural/multiple codes out there. We end up having to leave out significant portions of the code because they do not fit us or we don't want to specify (either because it takes too long or because we do not want to volunteer that information). That said, here are our codes;
The Multiple Code: MuC N-- A(b-) Wd^ Cc+ I--- OF(r o++) F#/~/p! Xo+^!# Do R C++ So
The Multiple Code Redux: Muc N- Pgq/n/qr A Wb~ C+ OF(r o++) F#/~/p+ Xq Ggq Jo So R!
The Plural Code: PLC TW GQ AP x x QU CH+CA
If any of this made you the reader upsetti spagetti, remember that internet opinions don’t trump our lived experience and will not change our experiences or feelings about them.
