Honestly, real talk, I feel like people largely do not understand just how much characters within those who are maladaptive daydreamers and/or were maladaptive daydreamers literally are "parts of them" and how both healing and destructive that dynamic can be and I find that a bit visible with how people in DID communities talk about maladaptive daydreaming as a "form of plurality"
Its an absolutely different experience but that doesn't mean that the label of "plural" isn't equally suitable. Since that topic has come up on our radar like way back half a year or year ago, we honestly have been thinking about it as someone who is considered "recovered" from DID and has recovered from maladaptive daydreaming but still has a brain that functions creativity and imaginative worlds with the same semi-autonomous functions whether I like it or not
And honestly? My characters are very much not "my creation", nor are they "just my OCs" - the very way all of my character are made and at this point the only way I know how to write and make characters is by taking a part or aspect of myself (conscious or subconscious) and throwing it out there with a name and face. That part of myself engages with the world I created and develops within the narrative and impacts the world itself.
I repeat and do this for all my characters and the world that I have created serves as a hypothetical exploratory way to understand, engage with, and explore very complex topics with exaggerated and isolated parts of myself. I have never really "planned" a character of given them traits or really anything other than a basic premise of a name, MAYBE a gender, and a vague role and I let them define their own story. No real character arc planning. No real likes and dislikes. No real narrative or secret message.
The function and means of which that I "created" these OCs and the level of which I don't control the way they form and grow is extremely similar to how I "create" alters, albeit one is far more voluntary and intentional than the other and one is physically sharing my life with me and the other is sharing a mental world with me.
((Additionally I don't engage in the mental world I made for them beyond the half joke that I'm the god of the gods of that world and they dont know))
The dynamics I have with my characters is WAY WAY WAY different than my parts / alters but BOTH my characters (maladaptive daydreaming) and my alters (DID) are equally fair to call "parts of me" and "parts of a whole" in a very literal not "Oh yeah Im a writer and this character means a lot to me theyre a part of me"
With my writing partner (who does this as well) we regularly use our characters as well to explain what we are going through / how we are feeling to help facilitate real talk and venting a lot because we have a mutual understanding that while this is a story and these are our characters, both of us have "built" this world by literally giving very specific aspects of ourselves the ability to explore, grow, and learn in a world and that while some have grown SO far from who we are now, they represent an aspect and potential part of us that could have been should something have gone one way in a specifically extreme way in a specific environment.
With that in mind, I absolutely feel its fair to compare DID and MaDD "plurality" with some obvious understanding that while there are similarities they are also different (AND THATS OK).
Cause honestly? If I actually talked to my characters (like a lot of people with MaDD tend to do) I could see myself calling and feeling as though they were a system and I don't think it would be all that inaccurate and wrong. I don't have that experience as my MADD and DID are mostly entirely two seperate dissociative coping mechanisms, but I know for a fact the line between the two is a lot less clear and its just food for thought
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