hello! we are legion's cafe, 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: 6/11/26)
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 || the collective
🌌 new existences offer new possibilities || charon (ae/aer)
🪷 honey sweet to lure you into my trap || mizuki (she/her)
🌸 died and came back multiple || kyou (they/them)
🦊 traps in a maze of endless archives || soren (he/they)
✨️ a light to guide your way || lumen (any/all)
🎶 an expression of the soul through art || sonata (he/they)
🎭 the show's on! || enigmata (it/they/he)
🥀 the rot brings forth new life || elegy (they/he/it)
♠️ life's tough. but i'm tougher || xayne (he/xem)
♟️ to survive no matter the cost || ophelius (he/him)
🗻 where things are born and where they go to die || dirt (he/him)
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 xayne 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 -- xayne 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.
xayne 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 charon -- 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. xayne 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 xayne 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. xayne, 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 xayne 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 xayne 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 kyou was a fusion between myself and mizuki, 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.
[Image one ID begins:]
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?
[End image one ID.]
[Begin image two ID.]
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.
Outside of situations where masking plurality is necessary (e.g. where someone may use known memory problems as an abuse tool), you probably need to mask yourselves less than you think.
Very, very few people will notice overt plurality without being directly told about it. The few that might notice tend to be plural themselves or have plural friends, and they tend to be safe to be spotted by anyway because they're familiar with plurality and how to handle it respectfully.
The average person doesn't have plurality on their radar in the first place. Heck, they barely know what DID is, assuming that they live somewhere it's a diagnosis option, and they've never heard of anything beyond that. Most people will see overt plurality and think "oh, they're moody, or genderfluid, or just use a lot of names, or do a lot of things, or..." if they notice anything different at all.
Seriously, people are oblivious. You can introduce yourself by three different names, have wildly different preferences and modes of expression, and even toss in an accent. The most you might get in response is "are you okay?" (to which the non-disclosure answer is something like "yeah, just feeling different today" or "yeah, I'm just like this sometimes, it's normal". They'll usually let it go if you don't make a fuss about it).
In any case, people are probably not looking for signs of plurality when talking to you- they're more focused on the conversation. The odds of them noticing something different in the first place and bringing it up are low. They have other things to talk about.
“Body” is a vehicle that is under someone(s) name(s)
Others (feel free to comment)
Voting ended onMay 10
Strictly for this earthly realm and this physical reality, to keep things simple.
You are still welcomed to talk about your experiences if you are parallel lives sharing a mind, or each having your own body, or a hivemind structure, etc.
This is a fascinating question and one that we've been thinking on a lot lately as we've begun making AAC for a member of our system who has the closest line of contact with our body. As we understand our relationship to our body right now:
Our body is our animal. It has instincts, urges, needs, desires, preferences, and feelings. We cannot truly be separated from our animal while we are alive with it, yet we are not exactly the same entities either.
We simultaneously live in our body, possess it, and are it- yet it feels like it lives in a different space than we do, like it fundamentally belongs in the external/meatspace world, whereas most of us feel we belong in our headspace and spiritual spaces. (There's one exception who bridges both spaces and acts as a liaison for our body- and also partially is our body without being the exact same entity as it- but that gets hard to explain.)
Our body does communicate with the rest of us who occupy our mental space, but not in verbal language- it speaks in its instincts, needs, preferences, feelings, etc. directly, or by locking up and refusing to listen to us. It can be as simple as a stomach grumble or as complicated as the sensation of pop rocks going up our neck, muscle fasciculations, heartburn, buzzing limbs, temperature and sensory changes, or abruptly yelling simple things like "EE".
Most often, it speaks in subtle physical sensations or by tinting our feelings (getting "hangry" is a great example). It escalates if we fail to listen to it.
This is more complicated still because our liaison speaks the same language, but with small traces of mental imagery and internal vibes added. It's a very complex relationship between them where they simultaneously are each other and aren't, but differentiating whether a message came from one or the other doesn't tend to be important enough if it's just communicating a body state. It does matter when we're trying to talk to our liaison as a person in their own right and need to know that a response is theirs instead of ambient body communication.
Our body does not have its own identity in the way most humans do- we suspect it's closer to a basic "I am" than a name, labels, etc. I'd call our body sentient, but we're still working out if it's sapient, and we're still learning to give it the respect and care it deserves as an equal member of our group.
Aside from our liason and our spiritual partner, we think of ourselves as our body's headfolk.
Every so often, we try to map the spaces that we can occupy in our system. It's usually helpful for us to understand how things work, and it answers this question nicely. Keep in mind that this is only our current understanding; it may be more or less complicated, may change in the future, may work differently from what's noted down, etc. This is a map, not the territory.
Venn diagram bubble text below:
"Body": Our animal. Instinctual, physical, deeply rooted in the external world. Has its own opinions and wants that have to be respected or it might decide not to listen to directions/requests. Communicates somatically and via senses to "me" and, if respected, does what the actor or our spiritual partner directs it to do. Keeping its trust is essential.
"The Actor": Attached to our body and in very close contact/communication with it, able to carry out actions and move- AKA, body control or influence is possible here. Other circles can ask the actor to do things for them, but to do it yourself, you have to tap into this bubble. It's our direct line between the mental and the physical. Any of us can tap into the actor, but one specific person spends most or all of their time here (and thus speaks our body's language natively, not our mental language).
"Me": Center of thought, what most systems call "fronting". The feeling of mentally being yourself. Can have direct body control, but usually operates more as a central command and assigns tasks to the actor, who decides how to do them. Can hear body, but still learning how to understand its language.
"You": People not in full, direct control of thoughts- may or may not be reachable, but this is what we call "the back". Can sometimes reach forwards and occupy the actor as well without taking the mental front seat, but it's harder to do and was a learned skill. Cannot hear our body directly without moving fully into "me" or the actor. Essentially the space of "not me".
"Spiritual": We're still figuring this out, but our partner exists in this area- you could argue headspace does as well (I'd say headspace bridges the spiritual and the mental, personally- it's both). Hard to explain by nature, but it has a deeply felt reality in the same way the physical world does. Things that happen here matter just as much as things that happen there. The unseen parts of existence if you only listen to meat perception.
"The Sea": The parts of us that belong to none of us. The fragments, loose/lost memories, subconscious material, raw potential, ambient selfstuff. The things we can't see head-on or understand yet. Where we go to be remade. Has parallels to the actor for the spiritual/mental side- quietly carries out actions on the mental/spiritual level if asked politely. Represented by water in headspace.
"I just find it hard to believe some people who claim to be systems. why do all their alters have strange names and unique appearances and weird mannerisms?" queer people are disproportionately at risk of experiencing childhood trauma. autistic people are disproportionately at risk of experiencing childhood trauma. there are countless studies on this if you want to hear it right from the source. childhood trauma is the driving factor behind a massive majority of DID/OSDD system formations. I trust that you can connect the dots here!
if you intentionally choose to disregard peoples' existences based on their appearance or behaviours, you have biases that you absolutely need to deconstruct before people like me can ever feel safe around you.
you can start by saying nothing about how you "just can't believe it" when someone you don't know exists as a system where you can see. you can keep going by trusting the people in your life when they share extremely vulnerable information about themselves.
telling someone that you're part of a system feels like exposing your soft underside. I've cried from terror almost every time I've had to reveal it to someone I care about, and I don't cry easily. if someone tells you they're part of a system, they're placing a monumental amount of trust in you.
actually, another thing!!! you are seeing systems who:
1. actually know that they're systems (this is rare. being online makes resources on figuring it out WAY more accessible)
2. happen to exist in the same online space as you, the tumblr user reading this
3. are, as a result, usually younger and/or autistic and/or queer, which are all factors that can influence individual alters' identities.
so of COURSE you think we're all like this. you're looking at one damn tree instead of the whole forest!!! there are systems who are 60 years old and never had the resources to figure out what was going on. there are systems who are 30 and barely use social media for personal reasons. there are systems who are 20 and don't tell anyone because of the cruelty they've faced every time they try. there are systems who are 15 and are SO relieved to have answers to why everything felt weird and wrong their whole life, so they shout it from the rooftops. your limited interactions with systems in specific online spaces does not represent the majority of systems on earth.
even if it did represent the majority of systems on earth we STILL deserve to be treated like people. this should not be something I have to beg for!!!!!
Ive seen a few takes on how inital splitting occurs, but I've been sitting on this one for a WHILE now because I just happened to be doing dishes (literally, not metaphorically) when thinking about it
