the sound of the woman who loved you

Astarion, he/him. Nér. Fictive, if you must.

[denizenhardwick]

sex-repulsed people are fully within our rights to be cranky and blunt about not liking sex and how it's fucking everywhere btw. we shouldn't have to tiptoe around and make sure our phrasing is perfectly squeaky clean because people interpret any criticism of sex and sexualization as puritanism. venting about compulsory sexuality is not purity culture. maybe you could stand to learn a thing or two from us.

[pluralpolls]

How old is your oldest headmate? (Like what is their age, not how long have you had them)

a baby

a child (aged 2-10)

a tween/teen (aged 11-18)

a young adult (aged 19-25)

an adult (aged 26-35)

a middle aged adult (aged 36-45)

an older adult aged (46-65)

an elder aged (66-85)

a very wise adult (aged 86-100)

The Ancient One (aged over 100)

Voting ended onJun 4

[pluralpolls]

I hope this was a misclick because if it's not I feel bad for the "lil babies only" system out there

Stay strong lil baby

[daylightatlast]

I’m amused by the insinuation that over a hundred is “ancient.” As someone in his 200s, I consider myself relatively young for an elf.

[crabussy]

every time a trans man who does not want to be called a twink gets called a twink I will personally go out into the world and rend 1 parked car to shreds with my teeth. cut it out

[crabussy]

walk with me for a moment. let's think for a sec. I'm not upset but I do want people to understand. do you think assigning a label associated with feminine features, hairlessness, skinniness/lack of muscle tone, and high pitched voices is something that most trans men would feel comfortable being associated with? why or why not?

[crabussy]

every time a trans man who does not want to be called a twink gets called a twink I will personally go out into the world and rend 1 parked car to shreds with my teeth. cut it out

[crabussy]

walk with me for a moment. let's think for a sec. I'm not upset but I do want people to understand. do you think assigning a label associated with feminine features, hairlessness, skinniness/lack of muscle tone, and high pitched voices is something that most trans men would feel comfortable being associated with? why or why not?

[householddreaming]

Shout out to fictives who feel uncomfortable and exposed by the fact that their sources exist as public media that anybody gets to see. The fact that anyone can just pull it up and see all of your history and traumas and mistakes, without your say or even knowledge. The fictives who don't even feel they're allowed to be upset about it because it's "just fiction" and therefore doesn't matter. Who feel like less than "real people" because of it.

We see you. You matter.

[daylightatlast]

Shout out to those who feel this way and who are mad about it as well. Who resent their fans, who resent their visibility.

[intercal]

"it is what it is," he coped seethingly

[karazhan-crew]

I wrote what I am calling a "weird" essay about my relationship with being fictional, which is to say, I'm not, the fiction is ME. I use terms like "fictive" and "source" to communicate more effectively and find people with similar experiences, less because I feel like I'm "from" something fictional. And then Khadgar lives somewhere between those two points, seeing himself as needing to wrench himself from the jaws of canon, in his own words. I don't see it, myself, because I don't believe that canon has much to do with me other than curiously reflecting a good portion of my life and getting the names right. It's more folklore or a myth than a retelling, to me.

The essay is a mess and I will need to return to it a few times for editing, but I'll post it either here or on our website when it's done. Most things go directly to our website these days because it's just so much work to edit them for multiple platforms. Formatting is a real bitch. The downside is that it means that almost no one reads them because they have no way to know they exist.

-Medivh

[karazhan-crew]

This essay, I'm Not Fictional, the Fiction is Me, is now up on our website. It was also crossposted to the Fictionkind Dreamwidth if anyone who's a member would prefer to read it there. This is also accompanied by a significant update to our website in general, including essays from Mithras, Khadgar, Tanix, Research, Popel, and myself, plus Caleb and Khadgar's poems from the Centaurus Festival. (We have other poems we've written since that we're hanging onto for now since we're debating what we should do with them.)

Anyone can feel free to message us on whatever platform is most convenient if they'd like to talk about anything we've written on our website. We don't crosspost to Tumblr much at this point partially for formatting reasons and partially because Tumblr is just awful for longform discussions. Still, if it's the best platform for you to talk to us on, feel free.

-Medivh

[inkzncowfolk]

do you think the sunlight from foreign suns still burns vampires born on the other side of the galaxy?

mechtober day 20 is vampire and i ALWAYS jump at an excuse to draw my fave :)

prompt list under the cut!

@mechtober2025

[mxmy]

Thank you for the beautiful art!!!

[batsu4eva]

I honestly love the versatility of sire-childe relationships. Like they could literally have any dynamic. That’s my mom or dad. That’s my lover. That’s my roommate. That’s my best friend. We’re like siblings. We’re mortal enemies. That’s some guy that stops by for a beer sometimes. That’s my mentor that keeps checking in on my progress every night. They saved me. They ruined me. I hate them. I love them. I know nothing about that man. We know everything about each other. See what I mean

[teethmeats]

90% of making art is being in agony over your creations not being on par with the vision you had for it but that other 10% is soooooo blissful and worth it ngl *:ﾟ*｡⋆ฺ(*´◡`)

[fleebites]

‘we live forever.

we are as old as the sky,

old as the moon.’

(junicorn day 01)

[pronounyaoi]

dude stop before i develop a strange and powerful fondness for you

[bandits-whump-collection]

Pain that shows itself in aggression. Whumpees who lash out with whatever they have, be it fang and claw, or tooth and nail. Whumpees who snarl and growl and fight when faced by hurt, only adding fuel to fight.

So what made them finally stop? Finally lay down, choking on sobs and clutching the wound? What forced them to accept help, to let their aggression be replaced by helplessness?

[interstellarsystem]

On Being “Cured”

I’m Jayfeather, a fictive of the character by the same name from the Warriors books. In those books, as well as my own memories, I was blind. This came with a lot of challenges and quite frankly ableist bullshit I had to deal with back there. Now, since my own death, I’m here. Stuffed into the body of a twoleg, sitting here with our kittypet on our bed next to me as I write this–an uncanny reminder, in a way. But this isn't about him. With all the weirdness that is being here, there’s one thing that unsettles me the most. I can see.

Our eyes are far from perfect. We need glasses, our vision is degrading over time and will continue to do so, we’re light sensitive as a result of our autism. But we can see, and we can do it well enough that I can see the individual leaves on trees, ants running along the ground if I look closely, and the faces of those we care about. You’d think this would all come as great news to me, the blind cat can finally see what grass looks like. While that’s interesting and all, it’s a very surface-level, watered down version of what I really feel about it. It’s nice to see, I guess, but it’s also so inherently wrong.

My disability came with its own struggles. I suffered greatly because of it in a lot of ways, both due to ableism in my clan and the things it prevented me from doing in life. But in the end, it’s a part of who I am, who I shaped up to be, and it dictated the path of my whole life. It’s as much a part of me as the fact I have ears, or paws, or a tendency to mouth-off at anyone who says something foolish around me. Those things can cause struggles too, those things can hurt me, just as my blindness often did. It doesn’t make any of them less healthy to accept as a part of my being. Now I’m here, and along with other traits my body once had, my blindness is also gone.

(Read more below.)

You’d expect me to miss those other things. Species dysphoria is known about, of course if you had a limb taken away you’d struggle to cope with that loss. People can understand why I’d miss my tail when I need to balance better, or my fur when I feel cold. Missing a disability, though? That’s something a lot of folks tend to be unable to wrap their heads around. People are quick to jump to assumptions of “wanting to be special”, eagerness to fake a disability, or the feeling itself being indicative of being ill in some other way (which also, mind you, tends to be brought up in ways that are pretty ableist to those conditions anyway, leave them alone). People expect those who were disabled in memories who now aren’t disabled in those ways here to feel happy, to feel “cured”, to feel like this is a new chance without the horrible terrible disabilities weighing them down. But I think it’s worth discussing as a genuine form of dysphoria one can have, related to missing an inherent part of themselves, just like any other thing normalised in the community to miss.

I don’t want to pretend to be blind here. I don’t want to make the body blind, either. Being blind, like any other disability, also doesn’t come with a magical “special person” card so it’d be ridiculous to even think of it that way (not to mention ableist). I don’t want to be blind to use it as an “excuse”. I don’t want to be blind for “fun”. All those stereotypes we’ve seen brought up when someone misses a disability they once had? They sure as hell don’t apply to every case, and assuming they do is honestly ridiculous. In my case, it’s not even because I’m delusional or have BIID–though those things also should never make the feelings less acceptable to talk about. Hell, I don’t necessarily want to be blind here, in the same way I don’t want to transform into a cat. I would not be able to live this life the same way I’ve been doing it if I suddenly was a cat again, or if I was suddenly blind again. Despite the fact I miss both those things about myself, I can also just… Live this life, even if it does hurt sometimes. A person can miss something, be dysphoric about something, or even actually want something without implying anything else about actions they’d take around that.

My blindness, in the end, is the same as any other bodily trait you’d be likely to miss from one's own exomemories. Not because it was perfect, not because it was without flaws, but because it was me, and now I no longer have it. I miss my paws, despite the fact that it’s easier to get by here with the addition of thumbs and fingers to grab things. I miss my blindness, despite the fact that it’s easier to get by here while being sighted in a body known to be sighted too. Those two things feel almost exactly the same to me, and yet, one is much more normalised to talk about than the other.

This inherent tie between disability and sense of self isn’t even unique to myself and my past life memories. It’s really similar to how we’d feel about a “cure” for our autism here, in the present, in this body. Our autism disables us, it means we will never live a “normal” neurotypical life. It’s caused us plenty of suffering, and it still does and will always do so. Yet, a “cure” for our autism is a cure for our selfhood, our being, our own identity. There is no us without what we were born with. Who would we be otherwise, if it was suddenly gone? We wouldn’t know ourselves. 

This even applies to more “scary” things we have. Our schizoaffective disorder especially. We struggle with disorganised thinking and speech often, yet we make fun with it. We have plenty of injokes because of silly things we’ve said while struggling to remember a basic word. Our hallucinations may be scary, but we’ve learned to live with them and cope well. We ask them to pay rent, we laugh about it, we have jokes about them and we’re used to visions and voices buzzing around our head. With our dissociative identity disorder, we wouldn’t even be a “we” in the same way we are now if we didn’t have it. We have some tulpas, soulbonds, daemons… But a lot of our main fronters would never have existed. We wouldn’t be where we are today. We suffered to get to this point, and we still suffer, but this is us. Our head would feel empty without all of this. We’d be missing fundamental pieces, or even our own selves altogether. You cannot strip us, a disabled person, of all our disabilities, and expect us to feel whole.

You could argue, maybe, that a mental disorder is different from a physical disability. There’s a separation between body and mind, or whatever. But honestly? If you could really and truly cure most of our physical issues, there’d still be a struggle there, for the ones we’ve had most of our life. Aside from needing to pay for them (even if we wish we didn’t need them sometimes) we’d be confused to look in the mirror and see no need for our glasses. We’ve always needed them, always will, that’s a part of us, we look wrong without them. We’d also feel naked without our cane to help us walk, and our ears would strain to hear the satisfying clack of it hitting the floor in time with our steps. We’d listen for that little reminder to us that we have something to hold onto to ease our pain and help us walk at all. These things being lost could be coped with, but they’d leave a mark, just as my blindness has left on me.

Some things that we deal with are newer. Symptoms and struggles we’ve yet to learn to cope with and integrate into our daily life as parts of ourselves. Those things would be easier to let go, a lot of them we’re actively trying to fix. But for those things we know will be lifelong, and we’ve made peace with? Those things that will walk with us always, until we die? A part of ourselves would die with their “cure”. That’s the point, really. It’s a loss of something that’s shaped your life, even if it’s shaped it in more negative ways than positive. You can’t take a person's shadow, even if it’s dark, cold and gloomy, and not much more than that. It’s tied to them. There’d always be something “off”. And with my death and arrival in this body, I had mine taken.

Aside from it being a major part of my sense of self, since getting here I’ve learned that my blindness also protected me from what seeing is really like. It’s horribly overwhelming. I know being visually overstimulated can come from the autism the body has, but I think my point still stands no matter its origin. Lights are far too bright oftentimes, colours can feel like burning, and being able to see gross or horrific things just adds another sense that has to be forced to perceive them. I’m one of the folks in here that often walks around wearing our sunglasses, not because I think they look cool, but because being sighted really does hurt me physically. It’s absolutely something I still haven’t adjusted to, even being here in this body for 3 years now. I doubt I will ever adjust to these things.

Another thing I’ve learned since my arrival is that I do think my vision is actively worse than some of my headmates. This isn’t really new to us–we have multiple headmates who can’t hear, see, walk or speak as well as the general collective can. I’m still not blind for sure, but our glasses don’t work as well for me. They still do something, at the very least, but it’s noticeable that I just can’t see quite as well as the rest (aside from other headmates who struggle). Things are more blurry, I have trouble getting them to focus on anything at all, and our lazy eye even seems to drift more when I front. 

Headmates with differing levels of disability (or entirely different disabilities altogether) are no new thing, I believe the concept has even been studied a little.  It’s familiar to us, for sure, as stated we have plenty. I know that technically, these symptoms are “all in our head” and they don’t “mean” anything, there’s not always going to be a connection to our previous bodies in how our symptoms manifest… But, on one paw, I’m a little ticked, because if I’m going to be forced to see… at least have me do it properly, without worse vision or pain? On another paw, I’m a little upset that I didn’t end up being blind when I front. We know other folks who have similar stuff, and some little part of me is upset that I end up stuck struggling against bright lights when the brain could have just kept me blind even though it would come with its own struggles. Hell, maybe I’d be mad that my headmates can see and I still can’t, in that theoretical? And on another, this is as close as I’ll get to how I was before. Maybe my pain from being sighted would be worse if I could see properly? I know for sure if I was entirely blind in front, I’d be unable to do a lot of stuff my system does regularly here. Maybe a middleground is for the best?

In the end, I don’t see this as a cure. A cure implies I’ve had something fixed, and this is not something that needed healing. I’ve been changed, altered, or given sight, but not “cured”. A nonhuman being born into a human body is not “cured” of their paws any more than I am “cured” of my blindness. It was a part of my body and self as much as anything else, and I will stand by that. I also don’t see my feelings about it as something to be ashamed of, despite a lot of ideas we’ve seen floating around. It’s not wrong to miss a part of yourself, even if it was a disability you no longer have. I honestly think that line of thought gets too close to “disabled people can never be happy while being disabled or they’re faking/not really disabled” ideas, and I’m very happy to stay right the hell away from that ableist nonsense.

I’ll cope, I’ve done so for 3 years now, and I’ll continue doing so. I’d just like to get this out there, and maybe see a little bit more kindness about the whole concept of missing your own disabilities, maybe share some experiences with others who might not have felt okay to talk about it. Others with similar experiences might feel differently to me, they might feel cured and happy that they’re no longer disabled–this is in no way anything against those folks either, more power to them, I’m glad they’ve found joy. This is more of an account of my own experiences than it is any sort of one true way to feel about it, don’t misconstrue it as anything beyond my own emotions, gripes and experiences being offered and shared to the public.

At the very least, I’m an angry old cat with opinions who can’t for the life of him hold them in for too long. A cat who can’t front without going on a rant at least once. So… I personally won’t be going anywhere, blind or not, and my system as well as everyone else is stuck with me.

[bidimensionality]

As someone who also currently has different disabilities than I had in source, your story rings very true for me. The scars that I had in my source timeline are gone now, and having complete vision in my left eye is still very jarring. I've been thinking of it in the same way as you have, the niceness but also the wrongness. I still remember exactly how it felt, and it's strange and difficult now that it's not here anymore.

I'm hopeful that with time (as someone who only claimed/discovered this kintype a little over two years ago) it becomes easier. I think that it's something that a lot of alterhumans have to deal with.

Have you noticed any things that you still do that you used to do/did in your source/timeline? I know that I've noticed that I still tilt my head a little to the left when I'm looking at things intently or things that are far away from me, like I would have in source when my left eye was weaker so that my right could compensate. It's a strange little quirk.

[interstellarsystem]

It's very nice to hear I'm not alone and that this has been well received by a lot of folks. Thank you for sharing your experience. I'd assume, as with most things, that time does make it less jarring of an experience. I'm certainly less distressed over it as time goes on.

Because the body I'm in now is very different, it's a little hard to tell what carried over and what didn't. I at least am aware I touch things more often when moving around--having my hands run along a desk slightly when I walk past, walking so I'm just brushing against a wall, etc. Though it's hard to tell if this is a product of my prior blindness or if I just prefer that extra stability.

Some of my headmates are different, however, and are clearly more affected by habits continuing into this life. We have one in particular (Toge, He/Him) who lost his arm in his previous life. Here, he barely uses that arm even though he maintains full functionality in it, essentially acting as if he still doesn't have it most of the time. He'll be more likely to opt to hold things in his elbow, mouth, or between his neck and shoulder if at all possible than to actually use our left arm at all. A lot of the time, that arm even physically alternates between hurting and feeling uncomfortably numb hen he fronts.

We have another (Shrapnel, He/Him) who does experience less hearing than our baseline in the body, and he will turn his head or move to stand next to you so his good ear is facing you whenever possible. If he's wearing only one earphone, he puts it in his bad ear so he's able to hear what's going on around him still.

Habits definitely carry over to some degree in here, whether or not you experience any physical symptoms.

[daylightatlast]

I feel as though I relate to this conversation some, albeit with my previous "disability" being vampirism. I do consider being here something of a cure. I'm able to experience the things I lost, I can taste regular food and enjoy the sun. Several of my siblings who I brought here have more mixed feelings on the subject, that the thing that needed curing was our situation rather than the condition as a whole.

This body is subject to particularly brutal photosensitive migraines, if we're out without a hat in the wrong weather for too long, which does feel more than a touch cruel. I find myself more inclined to sit and enjoy the sun when I'm closer to front, and I do pay particular attention to when I'm in front enough to register eating as a "me" memory. Prior to being turned, I was an elf. I still am, I was just an elf afflicted by vampirism for a while and now I'm one occupying a human body. I'd call mortality and humanity disabilities on their own, even setting aside the gastrointestinal issues this body has.

[batsu4eva]

I honestly love the versatility of sire-childe relationships. Like they could literally have any dynamic. That’s my mom or dad. That’s my lover. That’s my roommate. That’s my best friend. We’re like siblings. We’re mortal enemies. That’s some guy that stops by for a beer sometimes. That’s my mentor that keeps checking in on my progress every night. They saved me. They ruined me. I hate them. I love them. I know nothing about that man. We know everything about each other. See what I mean

[academic-vampire]

𝔴𝔞𝔯𝔪, 𝔰𝔞𝔩𝔱𝔶 𝔞𝔦𝔯

[carolineissofine]

I mis the Mediterranean, that’s where I feel the most at peace!

[susie-dreemurr]

The one bad thing about blocking liberally is that when you see what looks like a cool blog, and you see you blocked them, you don’t know if it’s because they annoyed you on a bad day or if they’re fucking racist or something.

[doomhamster]

Yes! There really should be at least the option to tag why you blocked someone! After the past three years my block list numbers in the hundreds, and is any given person on it an antisemite? a transphobe? an annoying puritan? a Wyllstarion fan? I've no clue.