The history of the term ‘fictive.’
Okay, so regarding the term ‘fictive,’ this isn’t ENTIRELY in my wheelhouse. That’s because AFAIK, it was coined in the soulbonding community, which… I’m not the strongest at. (We DID admittedly come to plurality through the LJ soulbonding community, which had a lot of overlap, but we pretty quickly realized we were more one than the other.)
This means my understanding of soulbonding history is limited purely to Livejournal. Soulbonding did not START there, certainly didn’t end there, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Fortunately for me, Livejournal is chock full of journals and communities that never updated after a month or so, giving nice little time capsules into terminology at the time. Hardly formal, but whatever, you guys want formal soulbonding history, you shouldn’t’ve asked ME.
Anyway, I did a quick search of journal with ‘fictives’ as one of their interests. First old-ass thing I found? The theoslogos Livejournal community.
From what little I can see, theoslogos was devoted to the idea of a soulbonding religion–the idea that soulbonding was some form of alchemy or chaos magic. I don’t know jack fucking shit about any of that, but it’s HUGELY clear that DID was NOT a part of this religion, and the mod, as far as I know, was a soulbonder.
Theoslogos was created in December 2004 and dead a year later. So the ‘fictive’ term was in use by soulbonders by that time.
The earliest individual LJ with that as an interest (earliest as in, it died first so can be guaranteed not to have updated their interests later on) is roswellingram, whose LJ seems to have died in February 2006. (They created it in 2002.) They don’t show any interest in multiplicity or DID space, only fandom, and deleted everything but three strange random entries, so I’m not sure you can take that one way or another.
However, take a look at all the comms that show up with ‘fictives’ in their interests:
You see that, guys? Every single fucking one of them is a soulbonding or fictionkin comm, with the exception of formerassassins, which has written in its profile the words:
“This community is also primarily (but not exclusively) for a particular group of people whose experiences often go undocumented; people who identify as soulbonds, fiction-kin or otakukin. … This community is also open to people in multiple systems who have killed in other worlds, system worlds or offworlds, and people who remember being killers or assassins in past lives and have dealt with or are dealing with those memories.”
So yeah, even that one was primarily a soulbonding/fictionkin comm. And it was updated the most recently, meaning that the word may have spread into more general use later on.
In one of the locked comms I’m a member of, I also found this comment from a plural system in March 18, 2007, from tej_agni/Silhouettes:
“I’ve also seen the term “fictives”.“
This is incredibly loose and sloppy, but leads me to form the hypothesis that the term ‘fictive’ was originally a soulbonding/fictionkin term, and that it then later generalized into general plural use on Livejournal, on account of the very thin barrier between the groups at the time. (THIS IS A HYPOTHESIS NOT A CONCLUSION.)
However, I think that as far as a loose LJ search can prove, ‘fictive’ was NOT a DID-only term, and CERTAINLY not the same as ‘fictional introject.’ The term developed in soulbonding and fictionkin communities, until someone comes up with better evidence to smack me down with.
