#headmate appearance

that sounds really cool?? now i wish we could visualize ourselves beyond basic information :')

... probably for the best we don't though. (<- i may or may not have been there when our host hadn't cracked their plural egg yet and hated how they looked and got real depressed when seeing themself in a mirror. happened on multiple occasions.)

Hiya! We’re not sure what you mean here: your alters do have appearances, but they are foggy and difficult to discern? or your alters do not have a clear sense of what they look like?

If it's the former, maybe doing visualization exercises can help! :3 Things like working on your headspace, thinking about your alters often, engaging with them, and trying to help them feel more focused and present in your body and in the world! >w< Helping them to learn some grounding techniques might help them feel more certain of themselves and their appearances, too!

If it's the latter, picrew can be a cool resource for pinning down alter appearances! You can also try drawing them or finding faceclaims online. It’s okay if alters and headmates need time and resources to settle on an appearance that works or feels like themselves!! Here’s a post with some picrews we used in the past if you need a place to get started!

It might be even paired up with a phantom limb effect, but the actual experience is basically; the brain uses our body as a rig and pairs it up with the alter's appearance.

Even small details get rigged to the alter, such as shifts in our expressions, posture, and even eye movement. We feel like a Vtuber model or a VRChat model.

-Daimon (Obanai Fictive)

thx for helping with the other ask twin even if we're on call while i write this

so like, we have a few headmates builders in the system. their role is quite literally to pick up shards and fuse them into new functional headmates.

there are these two groups though, who are pretty aggressive about that. one is much smaller than the other but that's not really the point of this ask.

they make "clones". most of them are what we call aesthetives (headmates who are based on a character's form, but have no memories). there are also actual clones from headmates who already exist though. for example Mash, who's part of a "batch" based on a QP polycule which has existed in the system for a while now.

anyways. i wish you a good day, mod. :] -Anon from @starlight-chickens

that's honestly kinda cool!! we dont have builders. or "aesthetives". and most of us dont even have memories (exo or not. i actually dont know what i did yesterday) so we can't really relate ?

we'd also look through all the sourced & introject terms on pluralpedia for a page about what you guys call an aesthetive (the term with that name is about introjected aesthetics) but there are about 465 pages in that category... and i'm completely out of it right now :')

so if anyone knows if a term like this is coined (preferably on pluralpedia) that would be GREAT because we'd def use it . or we can all just say [character]soma

-The siphonophore system. 🌊

Sort of happens to us too, though usually it turns into an introject rather than staying something anonymous... or they disappear completely after the first interaction and we never get to learn more.

Even though we do have a headspace, it's hard for us to see each other's bodies. We're more like collections of abstract concepts or apps on a computer than people, so having a "form" doesn't come naturally to us. The only reason we know what we look like at all is because we feel it — like alterhuman phantom shifts, but for humanoid things like hair or eye colour.

Pinterest has been very helpful for visualising ourselves. We can pick specific traits or aesthetics and build from there.

[𝐹𝑚] (please add this to the list of signoffs if you haven't already)

We seem to be the complete opposite!

We don't have a headspace. Or at least not a space, considering we can visualize ourselves a bit (we're hypophantasic, it's more like knowing inherent information than actually seeing eachother.)

-mod Permian