#watcher writes

This past few days I've been feeling very... nonhuman, for the lack of a better word. Almost like a caged animal, always snarling at the bars of my prison. Eating and sleeping less. Which I know it sucks for my physical and mental health but...

It just feels like they're testing my every move, my every thought. That I need to perform well for them in order to get my reward. But in the process I'm working myself to the bone, to the brink of exhaustion, because I feel like I need to be better, be enough. Every paper exam, every project turned in, every class attendance, are just tests they are putting me through to see how well I perform. If I do well, I get rewarded. If I don't, I fail.

It makes me feel more "connected", for lack of a better word, to the lab experiment archetype. Part my lab experiment identity always comes from two places: The literal and the perceived way. I feel like a lab experiment in the literal sense of the word, because I had medical procedures done to me when I was born, and in a way I was a test subject in the doctors' eyes. They ran tests to ensure my survival, opened open my body and clipped and trapped my wings to make me look more human.

I'm thinking about the classifications of minecraft mobs to classify my own species, watchers, into it and oufff. Oufff. I have to write my own canon here and base it on my neomata because if I trust canon then I'll go nowhere.

Because obviously you have normal animals (passive mobs) and inside those you have canines (the wolves and foxes), felines (cats and ocelots), rodents/placentalia (rabbits, bats, armadillos), domestic birds (chickens, I guess parrots?), amphibious (frogs, I guess the tadpole), fishes (cod, salmon, tropical, balloon fishes, squid and glowsquid, nautilus and zombie nautilus), aquatic mammals (dolphin), domestic animals (pigs, sheep, goats, cows, mooshrooms, horses, donkeys, mules, lamas, camels and husk camels), bears (polar and panda), and passive bugs (like bees).

I guess the sniffer is a category of its own because it's not a real animal. Allays are also a category of their own.

Then with hostile mobs you have slime (slime, magma, and sulfur), ender creatures (endermite, enderman, ender dragon (also a boss mob), shulkers), bugs (silverfish, cave and normal spider), undead (zombies, villager zombies, zombie horses, drowned, husks), skeleton variants (skeleton horse, skeleton, husks, strays, bogged, parched, withers), illagers (pillager, vindicator, evoker, illusioner, vex, witches, ravagers), the creepers which to be honest I think they deserve a category on their own inside of hostile mobs, as well as phantoms. The creaking and warden get their own category as "biome specific mobs" and bosses.

This is also the case for nether mobs, in which we have striders, as a category of its own, ghasts (with normal and happy ghast), another category of its own, and blazes, also a category of its own. Then you have "the pig mobs": Hoglin, zombiefied hoglin, zombie pigmen, piglins and brutes.

Then you have humanoids, with villagers (normal and wandering trader), golems (iron, snow, copper).

Finally, the bosses (the previously mentioned creaking and warden, both in the same category as biome bosses. watchers would also be biome bosses), wither as a "nether" boss, the breeze as a "trails" boss, and the guardians (normal and elder) as "ocean" bosses. And the ender dragon, of course.

In my own head, from memories, noemata, and general knowledge from my source, watchers would be considered inside the "bosses" category if they existed in the game. Sometimes I've also talked about them as if they were demigods or generally above mortals. Demigod is not the word or category I would personally use for us, just to be clear. Because gods are a human concept. Watchers are not gods, the whole point of this classification is to give them a name.

As it stands, I think watchers would enter inside of the ender creatures category, and the boss category. But I don't think they would be hostile mobs, but neutral. Not passive, exactly, because watchers attack when provoked. So they would be like endermen, that they leave you alone as long as you don't look them in the eye. As long as you don't attack watchers, they won't attack the player.

it seems interesting to me how much most of my nonhuman identities intersect with one another. I'm a watcher first and foremost, but I'm also a barn owl because that's one of my main forms (tho this one I'm still a bit so-so about, because I don't really feel like an owl most of the time, I just have the form of one). I'm actually wondering if I should remove the barn owlkin from my kin list, because I just look like a barn owl sometimes. but like, the form. not the animal.

also, I'm a winged cat. and that winged cat identity stems from the watcher identity, because they both have wings and a connection with the night and/or space. I was a winged cat first, that's true, because I have always had cat instincts, even when I was a kid, stemming from a special interest in the Warrior Cats books. from a very strong special interest in dogs, I'm also a dog therian. so from that I can say that I started my life as a watcher (being made in a lab in all that aka the lab experiment archetype), then I became a dog, and then I became a winged cat. these three are my "strongest" kins, because they were the first.

my hare identity comes from a very strong feeling of prey, feeling like a prey and having prey instincts. (that's why I'm also starting to wonder if I'm truly a hare, because it's not that I don't feel like a hare, but that the kin can also be described as a very strong prey drive. I'm starting to think of renaming it to a prey archetrope). this stems from my anxiety and possibly, now that I'm thinking about it, trauma. this kin is not really connected to the others, that's why I don't talk often about being a hare.

child of the moon and lab experiment? child of the moon is connected to being a watcher and their connection to the Universe (when I talk about the Universe with the capital U I'm referring to the Universe from the minecraft poem “and the Universe said I love you, because you are love”), and lab experiment is connected to my own experience as a young hatchling, because I was born a watcher and transformed into a human-like form, hiding the wings on my back under my skin. I've talked about it in this blog a couple of times, so I won't dive into it now. so the lab experiment archetrope is connected, again, to my own youth and birth.

I’ve been wanting to write this essay for a few months more or less, but never properly started because of, well, life. But now I want to talk about it. So, for those who don’t know me, I’m Moss, also known as Watcher, before I changed my name. I’m a watcher, along with other species, but that’s one of my main identities as of right now.

One of Watchers’ job is data collecting and archiving. From different versions, and to preserve the life of worlds now forgotten. This data may seem meaningless to some, but it’s invaluable to my species as a whole. I’m now separated from my kind. I’m alone. And therefore, that recollection is up to me now.

All my life I’ve been a bit of a data hoarder. Everything I stumble on, that being a book, a movie, a song, etc, I save it. In my laptop, in the cloud, a copy on a external pen drive, just so I can have it saved for later. This, I believe, is a combination on anxiety and watcher instincts to preserve everything I read. My human mother is the same, she saves photos and writings in physical copies in her home. 

I have a terrible, terrible fear of losing things. This is linked to my adhd, autism, and a fear of forgetting, as I have memory issues. From what I know, this… instinct, fear, impulse, started years ago, when I was reading fanfiction and I liked to save the best ones as pdf to read them again sometime. Looking back, I’m glad I did, because sometimes I try to use the link on the pdf and it doesn’t work, as the person that originally posted it deleted it and their account. But I still have it. Saved in my computer, in the cloud. So I can read it again and again and again. For this same reason, I have like… six or seven gmail accounts, just so I can have more Google Drive storage. For the average person that might look a bit excessive, but I don’t really care.

I write. And I save. In my opinion, everyone should do this. To preserve thoughts, memories. For yourself.

What I’m trying to say is: Nothing that stays online stays forever. Everything we post in social media stays in the internet forever, that is true, but it doesn’t stay accessible forever. One day, your account may be deleted. One day, that blog that you’ve had for eight years might disappear. All I ask is, don’t rely on social media to save the things that you created. Alterhumans who write essays, informative posts, identity coiners… I beg you to take that information and put it safe somewhere else. That information, that documentation may look useless now but maybe in the future for a young baby alterhuman who’s just starting to figure out their identity for them it may be an invaluable piece of information to find themselves.

I love community writings. Some of them are exclusively discourse, of course, but I love when folks make genuine discussions of well, everything! What it means to be an animal, relating their “animal” lives to their “human” lives, their desires to go back to the wild, to be themselves… Discussions about hearthomes, types, instincts, behaviours… I would love to see more of them, actually. Obviously, typing out a well-written essay is not for everyone, but it doesn’t have to be very good, or well thought! Even just ranting is a great step over nothing.

Sometimes I see creatures in this platform talk about returning to their natural habitat one day. They talk about their journey growing in a human society, a human family, trying to meet expectations and failing. Naturally, they long to go back to their real homes. I've come to feel inspired by their stories, trying to aim for the same objective, but... For them, that's a plausible goal to reach in the future. A hope they can claw on and never let go, a wish to keep going, a future to live in. I wish it was that simple for me.

I'm a watcher. That's news to no-one. I'm other species as well, but none of them are as “strong” (for lack of a better word) as my watcher identity. Is what my body looks like the most, it's the one I get most shifts. My headmate, Orion, is also a watcher, so we believe that would be the most plausible to transition to. Not only because watchers look a bit human (no longer true since I shifted my physical form, that's more like a barn owl, but it's what its original form looks like), but it's what would make us happier.

I've been working on blueprints to build myself a pair of wings. Since my wings are under my skin, it would be extremely painful to rip the skin open to get them out. Plus, my scars would need to be remade and heal again, which would take really really long. They were trapped for a reason, maybe they were not developed enough. My theory is that, when they came out (since watcher fledglings only grow out their wings around puberty time), they were really underdeveloped, since I was born early myself, so they needed more time to grow. But now, when I transform, they are huge, so I don't really know what the deal is anymore.

For years I claimed to be atheist, but after reading books about ghosts and angels and demons, and specially Platon's theory, my belief system changed. You see, when I was in my last years of high school, I had a subject named History of Philosophy. There, we studied authors such as Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Descartes, Hume, Marx, etc.

One of the authors who stood out the most for me was Plato. You see, Plato had the theory that man, the human being, had two parts: the soul and the body. The body was what linked him to the earth, and it was mortal and had needs. The soul, however, is immortal, travels from one body to another, and is the principle of knowledge. The soul and the mind were one and the same. Plato also believed in a place called the World of Ideas, where souls went when the body died.

In reference to what Plato said, I think the same. I think we all have a soul and a body, and the soul is always the same in our existence; it simply travels from one body to another. Therefore, while I don't believe I had a past life as some of my species, I do think my soul has at some point passed through the lives of other animals, I just don't remember it.

You are stronger than you think

You are your eyes, your wings, your magic

Your won't let anyone take it away

You are braver than you think

You are yourself, through hardships, through pain, through regection

You are your feathers, your cape, your energy

You are destined to do something great

Don't let anyone take it away from you

Bark, hiss, bite, run. You are strong, you are brave, you are great

You run, you climb, you dart, you be

You have the heart of an animal

You love, and create, and live, and be

You have the heart of an animal

You write, you draw, you make, you be

You have the soul of an animal