Misconceptions

[hungryghosts]

Which misconceptions about plurality (or specific types of plurality) bother you the most? (Or at all, really.)

Feel free to list anything, but we're especially interested in lesser-known misconceptions and information correcting misconceptions with sources.

(Inspired in large part by this Reddit post.)

Comments

[hungryghosts]

[Lark] I would say that, for myself specifically, it's the nigh-ubiquity of roles. The belief that roles are something that individual system members must have; the belief that having a particular role means that one does not have needs, wants, or limitations; the belief that roles define one's existence.

I've written an essay on this before, with a reference to an excellent post by LB Lee.

[lb_lee]

Rogan: the one that has hands-down fucked me over most is the idea that I confabulate horrible memories for no reason to avoid taking responsibility for my life. That one involved a bogus nonprofit and Astroturf campaign over the course of years, many court cases, and just a whole fucking MOVEMENT that I still have to slog through every goddamn day.

That and the old “homophobia in a spiffy new hat” idea that noncorporeal relationships are a sign of immaturity and inability to function in a “real” (singlet, heterosexual) relationship.

Oh and the idea that any plural who isn’t coming from the correct traumatized/white-medicalized philosophy is somehow ableist and stealing from our noble oppression.

Man, a bunch of those ones in the Reddit, I’d never even HEARD of. Not sorry either, they sound incredibly petty and I don’t even understand some of the terms being used!

[ghost_ship]

Kaito: The thing that bugs me the most is this implication I've seen where fictives' or soulbonds' trauma from our sources is basically just bodily trauma in disguise. It isn't! None of my crap has anything to do with our bodyborn's concerns or struggles.

Adelaide: I gotta talk about the way people talk about tulpamancers. I swear people have wild ideas about 'em.

Back in the early days of exploring our systemhood, we hung around tulpa.info. The tagline of that site is "For Science!" And the topic of spirtuality or metaphysical concepts in relation to tulpamancy was a verifiable point of controversy. I remember, and can prove, that it was such a sore spot for the community that the board for discussing that stuff was hidden from people without accounts. For an example, see this web capture of the main forum page from 2019 here, and you can see-- or rather, you can't see the Metaphysics and Parapsychology board. Nowadays, you can, without an account. Take a look at the "About this board" post there, and you can see that it was made in 2012! And I'm sure there's posts about that board being made fully public somewhere, but even without those, yeah, we can see the metaphysics board was swept under a rug, away from bassing guests' eyes. I also remember the spirituality vs. science slapfights that would go down onoccasion.

So imagine my surprise when I see people say that tulpamancers are "spirtitual." Not the ones I knew about! Even the people that talked about spirituality there didn't approach it from the Tibetan Buddhist angle.

Also! There's something of a stereotype that tulpamancers treat their tulpas as disposable. Again, I have to wonder where they got that impression from (though in this case, I fear it is becaure there are actually some people out there doing awful shit). As I remember it, the tulpa.info users were just as deeply invested in ethics and treating tulpas equally as they were being Scientific and Rational™. Maybe it's because the userbase skewed older and forums tend to foster more of a community vibe. That community had its issues, but people being dicks to tulpas wasn't one of them.