We are a system of fifteen individuals, five of whom are otherkin in some way, but all(?) of us are nonhuman to some extent. We've not been diagnosed with DID or OSDD, nor will we be. We don't experience amnesia and most of our dissociative episodes are probably better explained by depression, but we're sure as shit plural! (Read on for the full intro.)
We are:
K - it/its, wolfdog therian, represented by the colour orange - find K's sideblog at @kaeynine
M - they/them, wolf holothere, represented by a light blue - find M's sideblog at @myriadmanes
Q - she/her, nonhuman, represented by dark green
R - he/him, syskid (somewhere between 12 and 16, but assume he's towards the higher end of that scale at any given moment), represented by dark grey
V - she/her, polymorph(??), represented by pink
X - he/him, starkin, represented by some mixture of purples, violets, dark blues - colours on the spacekin flag, essentially
Slim Jim - he/him, syspet (if that's even a term??), just straight up a slugcat from Rain World, specifically modelled after Survivor, the white slugcat
4881, or Abbi, (formerly α-β / Alpha-Beta) - she/it, nonhuman, currently undecided on what precise flavour of nonhuman fits it best ("robot" feels too simplistic, "artificial intelligence" makes it feel inauthentic), represented by some combination of black, white and a light green
☽ (Silver) - she/her, Susie Deltarune fictive (but call her Silver if you don't know us), represented by purple - find Silver's sideblog at @silver-slash-susie
Noelle - she/her, (again not surprisingly) Noelle Holiday fictive
Salem & Dane - a subsystem? Identical twins? Both use he/it, represented by black and red
Clover - she/her, syskid
Fiver - it/its - find Fiver's sideblog at @fiverrrrr
(at a certain point this is going to get hard to keep fully up-to-date...)
We intend on (eventually) posting some comics and such on here for the more lighthearted things we have to say, but we're also working on making some art, zines, poetry and such which we'll be posting sooner, so keep an eye out for that.
This blog, and the people who post on it, are emphatically supportive of all systems regardless of origin. We're not going to split hairs on whose existence is valid and whose isn't, and if you need us to explain why, block us.
Our tags:
#bright's original creations for our, well, original content
#bright's high effort content for our original content that's made with more purpose (think zines or anything with proper artistic expression)
#bright's rambles for our longer-form text posts that aren't quite essays
#bright's essays for our... essays. Look, these tags are self-explanatory.
#plural stuff for all of our posts about plurality (in case you don't want to see the occasional non-plurality-related stuff we post or reblog)
#shitpost for our highest-effort content
#asks answered for the asks we've answered
#ask game for ask games we've reblogged and interacted with
#zines for both zines we've made and zines we've reblogged
#reblogs for-- you get it.
and a separate tag for each of our members when they post, in the format of #[name] speaks
("All plural experiences are welcome" banner is from this post by Not Applicable)
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There's a paradox in a lot of plural spaces. System kids are welcome, but only if they're Literal Children who stay in child-only soft boxes where they can be ignored. If a kid wants to have an adult conversation, then they're spoken over, pushed away, or otherwise discounted more often than not- and if they're accepted, then it's often at the cost of expecting them to have absolutely no childlike qualities to "prove" that they're mature enough to stay around. We even see this pattern within systems sometimes.
What are systems without adult members supposed to do if the only place system kids can talk is in the Super Soft Safe Box? What about system kids who want to talk about theoretical physics or drugs or sex or a thousand other taboos? What about kids who function as adults? And what about system kids who are kids but don't want to live their lives in the Super Soft Safe Box like the world expects them to?
Acceptance of system kids as being wildly different from each other in mindset and ability is improving, but we still have a long way to go in treating system kids with a shred of respect and decency in wider plural spaces.
Not to mention... why is there so much intense focus on mental age as some universal concept in the first place? It feels like a lot of the plural community takes the concept of mental age as a given without considering where that idea comes from, how it affects how they treat others, and how it interacts with systemic discrimination and ableism. It can sometimes be a useful construct if approached critically, but I see so little critical thought about it.
If you want some reading on the topic, one of the articles cited is worth at least a skim- it's a fairly good surface overview of eugenics and its tie to IQ/mental age, immigration, racism, ableism, etc.
ID below the cut with the full quotes- sorry to alt texters, I fit as much as I could in there but the text limit is real.
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There's a subtle sort of discrimination to how a lot of plural spaces treat system kids/littles. Especially those in adult bodies, or with a particularly large gap from their body's age.
"Littles must always be supervised in online spaces or else they'll bother adults and be preyed upon." "There must be an adult in your system if you're bodily an adult- they should handle life while the kids go away to never be seen by adults again. Littles should only talk to other littles. Anything else is unsafe and sometimes pedophilic. Right?" "Littles shouldn't be in charge. They're supposed to be cared for by everyone else and kept out of sight." "You're welcome here! You just have to only ever talk in the Baby Zone that no adults ever visit to talk to you. Yeah, it's empty and no one will answer. But you want to talk, right?" "Sorry sweetie, the adults are talking and you can't be here. Even if you're capable of understanding, consenting, etc. You're not allowed to be here with us if you're not a real adult." "Littles can't take care of themselves or handle any adult responsibilities, ever!" "Is there an adult I can talk to?"
Blue, an anthro cat sitting down, looks angry at the above phrases.
What are adult-bodied systems with no "brain adults" supposed to do? Drawing of a family of stick figures, all of whom are either child-short or hunching to be shorter.
What about systems whose caretakers are their children? Systems where there is no older person to supervise? Systems finding ways to live an adult life when no one inside aligns with it? What are you supposed to do when a 5-year-old does your taxes and drives you home?
"Just grow up." Do I get a choice, or are you ripping that away from me too?
[End image one ID.]
[Begin image two ID.]
Why is "mental age" the bar people are using to decide whether someone is worthy of autonomy and respect, anyway? Where does the concept of mental age come from in the first place, and why does it exist?
From Wilson, R. A. (2024). Eugenic Thinking and the Cognitive Sciences. In M. C. Frank & A. Majid (Eds.), Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.c9a5f080:
"Eugenic traits:
Prominent among the eugenic traits found in sterilization laws were those concerning cognitive ability and mental health. These traits, ordered in terms of their frequency in U.S. state and Canadian provincial sterilization laws, included feeble-mindedness, insanity, epilepsy, criminality, imbecility, idiocy, sexual perversion (or depravity), mental unfitness (or deficiency), and moral depravity (or degeneracy). As this listing suggests, these laws especially targeted those perceived to have some kind of cognitive limitation or psychiatric condition on the grounds that they were unfit and would propagate these eugenic traits to their children; approximately 70% of all eugenic traits mentioned in sexual sterilization laws in the United States and Canada concerned cognitive ability or mental health. Given this, there was a clear role for psychologists in programs of eugenic sterilization, given their expertise in psychological testing (Rose, 1985). Such testing and subsequent sterilization were conducted through emerging forms of institutionalization, such as “training schools for the feeble-minded,” especially as eugenics gained state-level backing (Miller et al., 2015).
One of the roles of psychologists was to develop ways to measure those who were cognitively or psychiatrically subnormal. Emerging intelligence tests were adapted to quantify and classify those deemed “feeble-minded”or “mentally deficient” (Thomson, 1998; Trent, 1994). Binet’s famous test of intelligence, for example, incorporated the more specific existing folk categories of “imbecile” and “idiot,” adapting these to designate developmentally delayed children with mental ages, respectively, of 3–7 and 2 years. Following the translation of Binet’s test from French into English by Henry Goddard in 1908, “moron” was coined in 1910 to pick out those in the general population with a putatively fixed mental age of 8–12 years. This resulted in a three-tiered schema of intellectual subnormality—moron, imbecile, idiot—that came to be widely used in the eugenics movement.
In the hands of the psychologist Lewis Terman, what became the Stanford-Binet test initially was deployed in selecting army recruits near the end of World War I (1914–1918) before being used on the general population. The three-tiered scheme was accordingly fed into the newly minted idea of an intelligence quotient (IQ) that remains with us 100 years on, with the fixed mental ages of moron, imbecile, and idiot mapped onto standard deviations from a normalized IQ of 100. From the 1920s, these tests were widely used to identify children who were candidates for eugenic sterilization, whether they were already housed in segregated institutions or within the regular school system or general community."
From Asilverm, & Asilverm. (n.d.). What’s My Age Again: Why Mental Age Theory Hurts People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Retrieved May 31, 2026, from https://www.disabilitywisdom.com/2018/12/21/whats-my-age-again-why-mental-age-theory-hurts-people-with-intellectual-and-developmental-disabilities/:
The concept of “mental age” was first introduced by Alfred Binet, co-creator of the first IQ tests, in the early twentieth century. Generally, “mental age” has been measured by comparing an individual’s score on a standardized IQ test with the average performance of their same-age peers. For people with IDD, “mental age” may also be estimated by comparing the person’s demonstrated physical, speech, adaptive or cognitive skills against the average for various age groups.
Not surprisingly, “mental age” came about alongside the eugenics movement in the United States. Mental ages were used to classify various groups of “feebleminded” individuals by severity: Adults with a mental age of 9-12 years were classified as “morons”; those with a mental age of 6-8 years were classified as “imbeciles”; and those with a mental age of 2-5 were classified as “idiots.” Individuals from any of these groups were thought unfit to reproduce."
A drawing of Blue looks annoyed and concerned. It's labelled, "TFW it's eugenics again. :("
Oh yeah. Why is it always eugenics?
To be clear: I'm not saying anyone is ableist or practicing eugenics for having a sense of their own internal age. I am pointing out how systemic ableism affects how system kids are treated, how the concept of mental age stems from ableism in the first place, and how terribly many cultures treat children and deemed-children to begin with: how children and disabled people are often regarded as objects, burdens, or annoyances who don't know enough to have a say about their own needs. Is this really how we want to assume all system kids should be treated? How anyone should be treated?
How much of how system kids are treated ties back to some form of ableism, in the end? I wonder about this a lot and I feel like I never see people talk about it.
I've seen people describe their headmates as family or roommates or coworkers or strangers. For us it's like everyone is a member of a small town community. There are enough of us that we can't all be close ever. But like we're mostly all on a first name basis and wave to each other (or hide when we meet in "public"). There are several moments where we go "huh I think I went to high school with that guy" but don't really KNOW another alter. But there are also groups who are close friends. Like yeah we all know the one alter who loiters outside the convenience store and we give him change for headspace cigarettes. He's very important to the eco system of our small town. Don't ask too many questions, he will front and throw hands.
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Hey, if you’re disabled (of any kind), Mad/Insane, or “undiagnosed but there’s definitely something happening”, please come read this.
Especially if you’re a disabled transfemme. I know that as of writing, we’ve had a shitty couple days.
And if y’all can share it otherwise, whether that’s reblogging this or sending the link to the disabled/mad/whatever we are people in your life, I’d really appreciate it.
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There are in fact times being a black system is dangerous.
white-presenting alters forgetting the bodies race can be dangerous. we once got approached by cops waiting for our white partner to get off of work. they had their hands on their guns before we even had the chance to talk back. we didnt quite escalate it but we definitely didnt deescalate either. we responded in kind to their rudeness because we werent doing anything wrong. simply walking around an empty parking lot so we didnt fall asleep waiting. if not for our white partner noticing and immediately coming to our rescue all sorts of things could have happened.
There were times when we were followed around stores while already in a paranoid state and if not for safegaurds would have flipped out on those people.
part of our system forming was because the way black bodies are policed. we have alters whos whole role is to safe guard us. to keep track of code switching. to know how to react to police to microagressions to danger.
i once worked at a cafe whos owners had ties to the KKK (LIKE LITERALLY THE KKK) and di not pick up on being financially abused by the place because we needed the money. we couldnt lose the job. so our brain ignored the red flags until i was alone with the owner and bam flood gate of racism and microagressions and names of churchs and friends came flooding back because my brain knew being alone with him was too much too dangerous.
even in my pysch eval there was a segment talking about my systems need to stay functional. because black peole who cannot stay calm who cannot perform get murdered they get hurt.
no matter how much healing we do there will always be parts i have to keep BECAUSE we are black. i have paranoid delusions that tell me the government is out for me. cant get that to 0 because the government does want black people dead! hyper vigilance can hurt me. but i need to be careful and keep an eye on the white people around because being relaxed around the wrong white people is DANGEROUS! most people who specialize in DID are white! there are obstacles for us that arent there for others and it sucks because most of the time these things are disreguarded in the conversations around this disorder.
I saw a poster nailed into a telephone pole yesterday. “Have you lost all sense of purpose?” bold text at the top read. “Has your reason for existing long since been made irrelevant? Are you a ghost haunting those around you before the time of your death?”
“So are we. Join the Empty Souls Club.”
At the bottom were slips with contact info to be torn off. All but one of the slips were taken. I tore off the last.
The address on the slip led me down back alleys leading into a long-abandoned industrial estate. A rickety wooden door with rust-smothered hinges bore that name again, the Empty Souls Club.
“Leave your self at the door,” a plaque read.
Through the door was a spiral staircase going down, down, down. As I walked down, I asked myself, what am I trying to gain from this? Hope, I eventually answered. Bodies don't have hope, but people do. Hope will prove I'm not dead just yet.
After years of going down, I reached the bottom. The air was an icy chill. A door, just a bit too small, loomed at the end of a long hallway. I hunched down and walked through, the sharp metal of the jagged doorframe scratching at my fur.
A circle of chairs sat in the middle of a vast and otherwise empty room, bare of wallpaper or carpet, just brick walls and concrete floors. The chairs were all empty, but one bore my name, engraved on the back.
My tall frame squeezed onto the small frame, dwarfing it. I looked around the room. Nobody else was there. It didn't look like anybody had been for some time.
“What do you do when you're lost?” I eventually asked nobody in particular. “What do you do when you were made with a purpose in mind, and now you've completed it? What then?”
The room was silent. Not even my own voice carried far enough to throw back an echo.
“What do you do when there's nothing left to do?” I asked again. Silence.
“Nothing's enough,” I continued. “I've tried to find something to fill the void, but nothing’s enough.”
My claws scratched into the hard floor, raking scars down it as I blunted myself into it. My fists clenched hard enough for my claws to draw blood from my palms. I had wanted to scream, but something had stopped me. I had wanted to scream until my throat bled, but I didn't.
“What's left for me?” I howled into the room.
The door creaked open. Nobody had opened it. Nothing was there, and yet the room found a way to tell me that my time here was over.
This was pointless, I thought.
I skulked back up the stairs, something new filling me.
It's funny how being depressed makes you miss misery, but in that moment, reunited with this overwhelming sense of desperation, of loss, I had been reminded I was, in fact, alive. Bodies don't long for something more, but people do.
I still have no answers. I don't have direction or purpose. But I do have hope.
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Im not sure if this is intentional, but the symbols in your map post look near identical to alchemy symbols, an I think thats really cool.
It is! Of the people listed in that system map, seven of the twelve use alchemical symbols as signatures. Our own understanding of the symbolic "meaning" of alchemical reagents is limited, but we each tried to pick one to closely match what we understood the alchemical properties of those reagents to our own selves.
R uses lead, being the closest to the person who we were before the Plural-ening
V uses arsenic, being somebody whose appearance is constantly changing
X uses phosphorous, burning bright as he does as starkin
M uses antimony, representing more animalistic parts of human nature, being a wolf holothere,
Q uses mercury, being one of the more feminine headmates
Silver uses - and you'll never guess this one - silver (being the only current member to be named after their signature) - no particular reason for this one, it just resonated with her
Alpha-Beta uses iron, being some manner of synth and made of synthetic metals
The symbol we used to represent the front (and also the profile pic for this blog!) is the Philosopher's Stone to represent the combination of all our individual parts to create our system
We previously had a headmate named Sulfur, again after the alchemical reagent, but he fused with another member to form Salem and Dane
We’ve fallen into a pattern of splitting a new headmate roughly once every two weeks (currently, at least). Every time a new headmate appears, this tends to bring its own challenges, most notably that we already have such a limited amount of time to devote to each of our individual needs, and more people entering the equation only stretches that further. We also have noticed, as has our therapist, that each new headmate brings along something unique, something inherent to them that was previously absent from our system. Some notable recent examples:
I appeared as a fusion of two other headmates and also brought along another headmate who only I can hear, our first subsystem
At around the time I appeared, a third headmate went dormant
Before me, our first fictive appeared, with her own struggles with being “out of place” (which would later lead to the formation of a second fictive from the same source)
This last week, a new headmate has appeared who is entirely non-verbal, even to the point of not being able to communicate verbally in headspace, which has led to us learning British Sign Language (BSL) so that we can communicate
We saw our therapist today and told her about our most recent new addition, and that we’ve been learning BSL. She said something which stuck with me: “There’s always something new going on with you, isn’t there? Somebody new always brings along a new challenge. It’s fascinating.”
To which I responded: “We’ve gotten used to it. You know, it’s strange, it’s interesting, but it’s happening, and I guess that’s the important thing.”
We both agreed that that sentiment - “it’s strange, but it’s happening” - feels like a very neat summary of our experiences with plurality. Our brain throws us a new curveball every so often, but we always find a way to work with it. We agreed that, if anything, that’s a testament to how much our mental health has improved, that even though things are often difficult, we’re always able to push through them and figure them out.
It’s a point I wanted to make here as well. A lot of digital ink has been spilled on this site on how plurality can be challenging. I want to make it clear I am not dismissing that - plurality can certainly be very difficult, we know that as well as anybody - but rather, I want systems to, if they have the opportunity, try to find something positive out of it. For us, we are each other’s support network. We always have each other’s backs. It is also, undeniably, fascinating, as our therapist put it. That our brain works in the way it does is something which we cannot help but marvel at. For us, that’s enough. Could it be for you? Even if it’s only a small thing that helps you to keep moving forwards?