I’m honestly not sure where to draw the line on what a “fictional introject” is, how much an alter needs to draw from a character to be one. A majority of The Orchard are home-made from scratch, especially the much younger ones. However.
I am, and have always been, the emotional caretaker of the system. Our hosts have been autistic young kids clinging onto media to cope. I’ve taken on the vague appearance and name of whatever comfort character helped best over the years, even if my personality remained the same as always.
Now that our previous host has taken a backseat and I’m one of the co-hosts, I’m fine with this being my identity for the foreseeable future. I’m attached to it, and it has interesting links to the body’s name at birth. At some point, my partner in the system thought it felt right (or fun maybe) to lean into a name and appearance that paired with mine, mostly just for the hell of it. Are either of us actually the characters we resemble? Not in the slightest, in my opinion. Do we at times react oddly to things with those characters anyway? Sometimes.
One of the others in The Orchard, a teenage boy projecting his trauma onto a character his age and deciding he wanted to be called that– is that a fictive? Isn’t that just how teens are? A teenage girl (painfully eager to please at times), deciding she should be more like my character’s younger sister in the game, because she wants me to care about her like that? (I do, she could be my younger sister without all that.)
I’m acknowledging this here, solely because I dread catching the: “Hey, are you that guy from – “, I would really prefer not to have that specific conversation, it’s uncomfortable. I’d like to play around with using my proxy more on Discord and wanted to clear the air on this first. I also just want to bring up that there’s definitely a lot of … nuance to the topic. And of course, if anyone’s reaction is that they don’t like that The Orchard is like this – genuinely, it just is what it is, I’m sorry.
It’s fine you are that way. I’m sorry if I made it seem otherwise. You are welcome just as you are.
Do not worry — this is something I wanted to acknowledge regardless, and I understand what you meant in your post.