The Draconic Wizard Workshop

"Through what lens do you see your fictomere? Is it religious, spiritual, neuro/psychological, supernatural, cultural, creative, something else, just-is...?"

For those who know me, it is no secret that I am a fictive--in fact, most of our system that posts here (or at least thinks about posting here) finds their fiction-based identity being their only identity, in that they are fictives. I tend to take a very psychological approach to my... alterhumanity, I suppose, although applying the label to myself outside of the system at large still feels... odd. I am a vampire, but because I made myself a vampire back in-source, and while that is quite inhuman in some ways, sometimes I suppose that I forget that it counts. I certainly look at my draconic... irregularity as being fairly psychological, but I discussed that in another post.

My being a fictive, however? I barely view it as psychological at all.

The why of it being me that arrived here--Goratrix, not, say, Amzira--I feel is explainable in a way that could be called psychological if so desired. Tanix, the system host, fixated fairly hard on me-as-the-character, and related to me in some very key ways. Around the same time, the system  was recovering from a fairly traumatic medical procedure, and desperately needed someone with a level head that had been through worse who was willing and able to step up into the front for long periods of time. It was an easy connection for the brain to make, and so it chose me.

And yet...

The idea of being a strictly psychological phenomenon terrifies me. The idea of only being a piece of a single being's brain, fooling itself into thinking that it is Goratrix bani Tremere, known as the Betrayer and Lightbringer in equal turn? Desperately clinging to an already unstable identity, one with BPD, while not ever truly being?

I can't think about it. I cannot imagine ever coming to terms with that were it true. Perhaps that is an explanation that works fine for some fictives, and perhaps similar explanations, other psychological explanations, make sense to and bring peace to others, but I cannot accept that. No one in the system can. The DWW considers itself a someone spiritual system for the reason of believing that all stories are truth, somewhere, whether that be in another timeline or another dimension or some such, and thus, when we latch onto a character and form them in the system, it is essentially copying an actual entity out there somewhere and placing them within the system. It is imperfect--not all memories or skills transfer--but it gets the majority of the being, the essence of them, if you will.

Do I believe that? I don't know. It's a little... immaterial for me, typically. It is not an answer that would normally satisfy me, but any other investigation into the topic scares the hell out of me, and has caused brief total-system panic attacks when considered for too long. We have to be who we were, not just... imprints of them. We have to be, or we being to spiral and fear that it doesn't matter, that none of it ever mattered--the pain, the trauma, the struggles, failures, successes, the love. My God, I need it to be real because it has to have mattered. It has to, for otherwise, I am just a broken piece of glass making up stories about itself with the reflections it casts on the concrete.

Besides, it's not as if I haven't experienced magic before. I was a Mage before I was a vampire, wasn't I? This is a spiritual or magical phenomenon I do not understand well, but it can be understood, in theory, if given the right information and ability to investigate. I doubt that we will learn much more about it, but I am content enough with what we know. It is an answer that, while not complete, brings me peace, or at least, helps me avoid distress, and that is good enough for me.