Stories Don't Exist in Vacuums: Towards Critical Fictionkinity
There's something that bothers me about the current state of fictionkin self-discourse. So much of it just feels like talking in circles again and again about how "people with fictotypes who did problematic things are VALID!!!" And while I more or less don't...... disagree with those kinds of posts, I feel like they're sorely lacking in nuance.
Perhaps ironically, talking about fiction can be very tricky in fictionkin communities because to a lot of us, the "fiction" of our sources is just as real as the lives we lead in the real world. This is not a monolithic experience, of course—many fictionkin consider themselves "canon divergent," and many others outright reject their sources—but nonetheless the community as a whole struggles to divorce fiction from fictionkinity.
Fiction doesn't exist in a vacuum. Even if your source is your own lived experience, either as a past life or a parallel life or something else, in this reality it exists as a story whose writer(s) wanted to convey some sort of message to their audience. Stories have implications, and are shaped by the time and sociopolitical environment they were created in; this is something we need to be aware of as fictionkin.
This is what bothers me so much about self-discourse in the fictionkin community: so little time is spent reflecting on the biases one's source may hold, and whether or not the way one interacts with their fictionkin identity might uphold those biases. I'm not asking you to apologize for your source, or self-flagellate, or write some arbitrary amount of analysis about how the "problematic" nature of your source or your fictotype make you feel, but it is something that I think you should be aware of and take into consideration.
On a personal level, I take issue with the way that my source, as a work of fiction, uses its alternate history to create a narrative that is suspiciously apologetic of Japanese nationalism (among other things). This is something that I have to take into account when, for example, I talk about source homesickness; I don't want to come off as being nostalgic for a revisionist idea of imperial Japan! Likewise, even though my fictotype is Japanese, I myself am white and am from the United States. Because of how I was born and raised, I have to be aware of the Orientalism that plagues (so-called) Western perceptions of Japan and actively avoid repeating those same sentiments.
And before anyone tries to play the "involuntary identity" card: allow me to remind you that no one chooses their race, economic class, or assigned gender at birth, either, and yet people are still granted or deprived of certain privileges and rights based on those factors. Unfortunately, not having a choice in your identity does not mean you can simply reject all of the baggage that comes with it.
Again, this isn't me trying to police anyone's identity or say that you're only "allowed" to talk about your problematic source/fictotype if you feel sufficiently bad about it—I still love my source despite its...... well...... everything. I just want to encourage more self-reflection and political awareness, because God knows this community needs it. I get that a lot of fictionkin are still young, and I get that the community itself still hasn't fully recovered from the fallout of KFF discourse that started over ten years ago at this point, but that doesn't mean we can't have nuanced conversations about our identities and their relationship to, you know, fiction.
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