hello! we are legion's cafe, or simply the legion, and we are a monoconscious system.
as of right now, we know that there are ten distinct members who have all named themselves. more will probably pop up, and we'll update this post as that happens. (last update: 7/25/26)
remember to be respectful of others, as you are not living in other people's heads and can't dictate what they can and cannot experience based on your own biases. your experiences are not universal, so don't act like a fucking cop. we have no dni and block freely.
here are our personal tags! (will be updated as needed)
☕️ legion's cafe ⊹₊˚‧︵‿₊୨ᰔ୧₊‿︵‧˚₊⊹ the collective
🌌 new existences offer new possibilities ⊹ ࣪ ˖ ໒꒱ the ferrier (ae/aer)
🪷 honey sweet to lure you into my trap ˚˖𓍢ִ໋❀ the trickster (she/her)
🌸 died and came back multiple ᛝ₊⊹ the fusion (they/them)
🦊 traps in a maze of endless archives ᝰ.ᐟ the scholar (he/they)
✨️ a light to guide your way ⚚๋࣭ ⭑ the spirit (any/all)
🎐 an expression of the soul through art ˖ ݁♬⋆.˚𝄞 the hymn (he/they)
🎭 the show's on! ˙𐃷˙ the enigma (it/they/he)
🥀 the rot brings forth new life 𖣂 ๋࣭ ࣪ ˖ the reborn (they/he)
♠️ life's tough. but i'm tougher ｡𖦹°‧ the survivor (he/him/xem)
🕊 to survive no matter the cost ꒰ঌ ໒꒱ the dove (he/him)
🗻 where things are born and where they go to die ꉂ(˵˃ ᗜ ˂˵) the jubilant (he/him)
🌑 where words fail ₍^. .^₎⟆ the soft-spoken (it/its)
we've revamped our blog. i disliked how public we were about our names and such, so i changed our personal tags. if you spot any posts that have any of our names in the tags, please let us know
I always wish the concept of plurality/multiple selves was more widely accepted because I’ll be watching someone play a game and say something strange then immediately go “what’s wrong with you man” and it’s like wow I do that.girl turn around plurality is behind you
i wonder if people still think i'm off-putting. my mask may have been ripped from my face and subsequently damaged, but i suppose i can't really help trying to use it when talking to people i don't know. do i come across as insincere?
as much as i would love to get rid of the 🌸 posts, i do think that the way that they impacted us was significant enough to stay. they were a fusion between myself and 🪷, and what they experienced regarding nonbinary femininity and lesbianism and everything was very real. so those posts get to stay. because the fusion experience was real and it was impactful, and 🌸 was almost their own person as much as i was part of them
existing again has been... weird. i'll discuss why underneath a read more, but please proceed with caution, since i will be discussing in-sys relationships, and a near-death experience for a headmate.
i first formed on march 6th of this year, after i split off of ♠️ and took all of the issues he had with our mother, but couldn't handle, with me. at the time, i wore a mask of haughty confidence that was described as unsettling and wrong. it was intentional -- ♠️ has outright stated that i've always had a "delicate heart", and i suppose i was trying to prevent anyone from getting close enough to see it.
♠️ and i were immediately close. we quickly fell into an easy dance where we would banter back and forth, and our friends -- as well as 🌌 -- found it to be quite entertaining. the positive response encouraged us, and i mean... i was drawn to xem for xyr honesty anyway. it was so easy to love him, and he seemed to easily love me back. it was so fun, and xe made me feel safe enough to stick around and chat. learning about the concept of heartmates has caused some things regarding this to click into place, and it certainly explains how quickly we bonded.
and then, someone that we thought was our friend berated us for "flaunting" our relationship. this person was constantly berating us by this point, so we did see it coming, especially since they mentioned at some point early on in our syscovery that they had "trauma from their first system friend abandoning them due to an in-sys relationship". it was bound to happen once our banter took on a flirtatious tone. ♠️ acted fast, and he confronted this person while i faded into the background. and it's strange -- i'm not really sure what happened to me. but when i came back later that night, i felt wounded. raw. it felt as though i had been robbed of my mask, and it hurt.
after that, it was difficult to stick. i can hardly remember anything after that, besides the fact that our collective noted that my presence was getting weaker by the day. i could chat, but it was hard. it took a lot of effort, and i could no longer engage in the dance with ♠️ that made me feel happy, loved, and safe. i felt hollow, and eventually, i stopped showing up altogether. everyone else in our collective was sure that i had died. that whatever wound i had suffered on that day had simply been too much for me.
and only after we cut this person off a few days ago for trying to do the same thing to another one of our system friends, did anyone start to mourn. ♠️, understandably, took it the hardest. he wept for me and expressed such heavy, devastating guilt for not protecting me. i'm not sure how, but i remember trying to comfort xem. i tried to hug xem, tell him that i was there, but he barely registered my presence, and xe couldn't even see me. it made things worse, because he was afraid that his mind was playing tricks on xem -- creating a ghost of me in xyr desperation to have me at his side again. but as i stayed with him, my presence grew stronger, and stronger, until... he heard me quite clearly and could no longer deny my existence as part of xyr grief.
it's been only a few days since then. i've been fronting every day, only occasionally moving back a bit so that someone else can take active front. i haven't been able to leave, but our friends think that it's because i need to take some time to re-establish my existence, process my feelings, and tend to my wounds. my mask is broken. it's hard to even put it on anymore. i think it hurts to try. when it was removed during that confrontation, i wasn't ready for it to be gone yet, and so... it took skin with it. there are other ways in which my in-sys body has been affected by all of this, and now i have almost crippling anxiety. the other night, someone joked about ♠️ and i being boyfriends -- since we've been able to reconnect since my return -- and i nearly spiraled, seeing as that possibility was precisely what got me hurt in the first place.
and, thinking back to why i was hurt (the heartmate thing aside), i believe it was because ♠️ was the first person to make me feel truly seen, loved, happy, and safe. xe made me feel safe enough to love him back. and someone wanted to rip that away from me. it felt like they were telling me that i didn't deserve to feel like that, because it threatened their happiness and the ownership they thought they had over us. i'm very glad we survived that -- that i survived that -- and were able to get away from them
we discovered that 🌸 was a fusion between myself and 🪷, as i was rather stubborn about the idea of us splitting. turns out, all i needed to do for us to finally split was rename myself, and bam! i suddenly had my own identity, so that's fun!
There's a paradox in a lot of plural spaces. System kids are welcome, but only if they're Literal Children who stay in child-only soft boxes where they can be ignored. If a kid wants to have an adult conversation, then they're spoken over, pushed away, or otherwise discounted more often than not- and if they're accepted, then it's often at the cost of expecting them to have absolutely no childlike qualities to "prove" that they're mature enough to stay around. We even see this pattern within systems sometimes.
What are systems without adult members supposed to do if the only place system kids can talk is in the Super Soft Safe Box? What about system kids who want to talk about theoretical physics or drugs or sex or a thousand other taboos? What about kids who function as adults? And what about system kids who are kids but don't want to live their lives in the Super Soft Safe Box like the world expects them to?
Acceptance of system kids as being wildly different from each other in mindset and ability is improving, but we still have a long way to go in treating system kids with a shred of respect and decency in wider plural spaces.
Not to mention... why is there so much intense focus on mental age as some universal concept in the first place? It feels like a lot of the plural community takes the concept of mental age as a given without considering where that idea comes from, how it affects how they treat others, and how it interacts with systemic discrimination and ableism. It can sometimes be a useful construct if approached critically, but I see so little critical thought about it.
If you want some reading on the topic, one of the articles cited is worth at least a skim- it's a fairly good surface overview of eugenics and its tie to IQ/mental age, immigration, racism, ableism, etc.
ID below the cut with the full quotes- sorry to alt texters, I fit as much as I could in there but the text limit is real.
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There's a subtle sort of discrimination to how a lot of plural spaces treat system kids/littles. Especially those in adult bodies, or with a particularly large gap from their body's age.
"Littles must always be supervised in online spaces or else they'll bother adults and be preyed upon." "There must be an adult in your system if you're bodily an adult- they should handle life while the kids go away to never be seen by adults again. Littles should only talk to other littles. Anything else is unsafe and sometimes pedophilic. Right?" "Littles shouldn't be in charge. They're supposed to be cared for by everyone else and kept out of sight." "You're welcome here! You just have to only ever talk in the Baby Zone that no adults ever visit to talk to you. Yeah, it's empty and no one will answer. But you want to talk, right?" "Sorry sweetie, the adults are talking and you can't be here. Even if you're capable of understanding, consenting, etc. You're not allowed to be here with us if you're not a real adult." "Littles can't take care of themselves or handle any adult responsibilities, ever!" "Is there an adult I can talk to?"
Blue, an anthro cat sitting down, looks angry at the above phrases.
What are adult-bodied systems with no "brain adults" supposed to do? Drawing of a family of stick figures, all of whom are either child-short or hunching to be shorter.
What about systems whose caretakers are their children? Systems where there is no older person to supervise? Systems finding ways to live an adult life when no one inside aligns with it? What are you supposed to do when a 5-year-old does your taxes and drives you home?
"Just grow up." Do I get a choice, or are you ripping that away from me too?
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Why is "mental age" the bar people are using to decide whether someone is worthy of autonomy and respect, anyway? Where does the concept of mental age come from in the first place, and why does it exist?
From Wilson, R. A. (2024). Eugenic Thinking and the Cognitive Sciences. In M. C. Frank & A. Majid (Eds.), Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.c9a5f080:
"Eugenic traits:
Prominent among the eugenic traits found in sterilization laws were those concerning cognitive ability and mental health. These traits, ordered in terms of their frequency in U.S. state and Canadian provincial sterilization laws, included feeble-mindedness, insanity, epilepsy, criminality, imbecility, idiocy, sexual perversion (or depravity), mental unfitness (or deficiency), and moral depravity (or degeneracy). As this listing suggests, these laws especially targeted those perceived to have some kind of cognitive limitation or psychiatric condition on the grounds that they were unfit and would propagate these eugenic traits to their children; approximately 70% of all eugenic traits mentioned in sexual sterilization laws in the United States and Canada concerned cognitive ability or mental health. Given this, there was a clear role for psychologists in programs of eugenic sterilization, given their expertise in psychological testing (Rose, 1985). Such testing and subsequent sterilization were conducted through emerging forms of institutionalization, such as “training schools for the feeble-minded,” especially as eugenics gained state-level backing (Miller et al., 2015).
One of the roles of psychologists was to develop ways to measure those who were cognitively or psychiatrically subnormal. Emerging intelligence tests were adapted to quantify and classify those deemed “feeble-minded”or “mentally deficient” (Thomson, 1998; Trent, 1994). Binet’s famous test of intelligence, for example, incorporated the more specific existing folk categories of “imbecile” and “idiot,” adapting these to designate developmentally delayed children with mental ages, respectively, of 3–7 and 2 years. Following the translation of Binet’s test from French into English by Henry Goddard in 1908, “moron” was coined in 1910 to pick out those in the general population with a putatively fixed mental age of 8–12 years. This resulted in a three-tiered schema of intellectual subnormality—moron, imbecile, idiot—that came to be widely used in the eugenics movement.
In the hands of the psychologist Lewis Terman, what became the Stanford-Binet test initially was deployed in selecting army recruits near the end of World War I (1914–1918) before being used on the general population. The three-tiered scheme was accordingly fed into the newly minted idea of an intelligence quotient (IQ) that remains with us 100 years on, with the fixed mental ages of moron, imbecile, and idiot mapped onto standard deviations from a normalized IQ of 100. From the 1920s, these tests were widely used to identify children who were candidates for eugenic sterilization, whether they were already housed in segregated institutions or within the regular school system or general community."
From Asilverm, & Asilverm. (n.d.). What’s My Age Again: Why Mental Age Theory Hurts People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Retrieved May 31, 2026, from https://www.disabilitywisdom.com/2018/12/21/whats-my-age-again-why-mental-age-theory-hurts-people-with-intellectual-and-developmental-disabilities/:
The concept of “mental age” was first introduced by Alfred Binet, co-creator of the first IQ tests, in the early twentieth century. Generally, “mental age” has been measured by comparing an individual’s score on a standardized IQ test with the average performance of their same-age peers. For people with IDD, “mental age” may also be estimated by comparing the person’s demonstrated physical, speech, adaptive or cognitive skills against the average for various age groups.
Not surprisingly, “mental age” came about alongside the eugenics movement in the United States. Mental ages were used to classify various groups of “feebleminded” individuals by severity: Adults with a mental age of 9-12 years were classified as “morons”; those with a mental age of 6-8 years were classified as “imbeciles”; and those with a mental age of 2-5 were classified as “idiots.” Individuals from any of these groups were thought unfit to reproduce."
A drawing of Blue looks annoyed and concerned. It's labelled, "TFW it's eugenics again. :("
Oh yeah. Why is it always eugenics?
To be clear: I'm not saying anyone is ableist or practicing eugenics for having a sense of their own internal age. I am pointing out how systemic ableism affects how system kids are treated, how the concept of mental age stems from ableism in the first place, and how terribly many cultures treat children and deemed-children to begin with: how children and disabled people are often regarded as objects, burdens, or annoyances who don't know enough to have a say about their own needs. Is this really how we want to assume all system kids should be treated? How anyone should be treated?
How much of how system kids are treated ties back to some form of ableism, in the end? I wonder about this a lot and I feel like I never see people talk about it.
I think our biggest gripes with the origin label discourse and the general community bend towards "you must categorize yourself under one of two boxes, and the other box is evil" are:
The assumption that experiences have an objective, fundamental truth that allows perfect sorting
The assumption that experiences and understandings of those experiences also never change- that if you can sort yourself into a box, then you should live there forever.
The general "us versus them" of the whole thing.
Point one: experiences of self, identity, consciousness, etc. are all very fuzzy, subjective concepts at the moment. We've yet to pin down what even makes a person conscious, let alone what a person's "I" is. I'm not confident that an objective truth of the self exists.
Maybe some meatspace things do have a usefully objective truth, though more often than not it's filtered through human definitions like anything else- if this desk is a meter long, then how big is a meter, and is a meter truly an objective measurement? Who made it?
What's a person? What's a self? Are those things the same, or different? Where do I end, and where do you begin? Ask ten people and you'll get ten different answers. That's the beauty of it. We don't fully know.
Point two: People change all the time. We are always having new and different experiences in life, and those can shape how you see yourself over time. We used to exclusively see ourselves as a medicalized, psychology-based system. We see ourselves a lot more holistically now, but our life experiences are still just as much a factor as any woo-woo spirituality we experience. That's a change that breaks boxes.
We are not the only system who's changed how they understand themselves over time. Spirituality, medical psychology, and other frameworks are neither mutually exclusive nor fixed in place. Like the framework of plurality, they're a way to understand the world and your experiences in it. They're an attempt to make sense of it all. If it's not working, put it down and try something else.
Point three: it's slowly improving, but the average Joe still has no idea plural people exist outside of horror movie serial killers and shock stories. They don't think they'll ever meet a multiple, and if they do, they're still using Multiple Personality Disorder as a label for it regardless of the system's actual experiences.
We have bigger problems than each other. Biting each other's throats won't help us any more than infighting and scapegoating has helped in any other community. The fact that we're still fighting over this in one form or another 20 years later is depressing.
