![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_lee"A Robust Connection to Fiction" --from the community's subheading (2009, January 1).
The primary LJ comm for soulbonders; it was created on January 2, 2002 (soulbonding, 2009 January 1), and deleted between January 18, 2018 (soulbonding, 2019 January 18), and June 20, 2018 (Lee, 2018). Its archive appears to have no back-ups, except for a few stray archives in the Wayback Machine; it is lost.
Quick Details
Created by: ???
Time Active: 2002-2018
Location: Livejournal
Lockdown
Originally, the soulbonding comm was somewhat public. However, the comm was locked down in December 2007 after a college student under the name of myprotagonist stated that they had created " a term paper which focuses on soulbonding, otakukin, and the relationship of these two subcultures to Japanese popular culture and capitalism" (soulbonding, 2013 May 9). The comments are lost, but apparently things got heated enough that within the day, myprotagonist returned to post (after numerous edits) "I’ve looked into the legal and ethical issues surrounding the matter, and I see no reason to do anything more than remove usernames, so that is what I’ll do. Hopefully this will alleviate anyone's concerns" (ibid). This post is deleted sometime between 2009 (August 17) and 2013 (May 9).
A couple months after the fight, the community's profile page reads, "If you plan on using material discussed in this community for purposes of writing a research or school paper, we would ask you to introduce yourself and state that you are writing a paper, since not everybody is all right with having their words quoted to a wider forum than that of this community. It should go without saying that, should you use specific quotes, you should ask for permission from those you quote," (2008, February 5) seemingly in reference to this event. No public posts were ever made on the community after that.
This part obviously isn't going into the Wiki, but we actually happen to have the original IM conversation we had with myprotagonist when they approached us about their term paper! They were pretty straightforward:
Conversation with wondershocked at 2007-12-12 21:41:25 on (aim)
(21:41:25) Wondershocked: Hello
(21:41:32) LB: Hi there.
(21:41:32) Wondershocked logged in.
(21:41:49) LB: Who is this? The screen name's unfamiliar...
(21:42:31) Wondershocked: I got your screenname from LJ, I believe. from the soulbonding comm
(21:43:06) LB: Oh, okay! Which group are you? We haven't visited the SB comm in a while, I'm surprised you got it.
(21:43:44) Wondershocked: I'm not really in a group; there are only two of us - me (I'm Kira) and Tag.
(21:43:51) Wondershocked: I'm writing a... term paper...
(21:43:56) Wondershocked: ...on soulbonding
(21:44:09) LB: Oh, really? Interesting. What class, English?
(21:44:24) Wondershocked: Nope; Japanese Popular Culture.
(21:44:35) Wondershocked: Well, half of it is on soulbonding. The other half is on otakukin
(21:45:39) LB: Ohhh, okay. Kickass. I'll confess to you right off the bat, we're more a multiple system, only one soulbond in residence right now.
(21:45:59) LB: If that works for you, then we're all yours.
(21:46:45) Wondershocked: It's cool; we're not really 'bonds, ourselves.
(21:47:06) Wondershocked: I'm planning on putting the paper online after I'm done, and I'm wondering how it'll be received
(21:47:15) LB: Well, what's your thesis?
(21:47:19) Wondershocked: You see, I'm not writing it from the perspective of a soulbonder/multiple.
(21:47:51) Wondershocked: My thesis is that soulbonders/otakukin are particularly drawn to Japanese fiction because of the way Japan thinks about commodities
(21:48:27) LB: Huh. Well, I'll admit, that's a cool idea, and I like it. We actually studied Japanese ourself; we're in our sixth year.
(21:48:46) Wondershocked: I don't speak/study Japanese. I just happen to be taking this particular class...
(21:48:53) Wondershocked: Pleased to meet y'all, btw.
(21:49:27) LB: Nice to meet you too. We're the Loony-Brain, currently populated by four alters and the dead guy sleeping on our couch. I'm Rogan.
(21:50:02) Wondershocked: cool. We go by Silent Duet
I guess we weren't very helpful to prove that thesis! (And it DEFINITELY wasn't what the paper ended up being about.) And they didn't really ask us any questions about that; they just asked us some general questions about our system. I remember that we DID get quoted in the final write-up, but it wasn't anything we talked about in the chat; they quoted other things we said elsewhere on the comm. The part about us is here: "Another member, says that her soulbonds often “front” during her classes, and that one of them handles most of her academic writing, whereas another takes care of her Japanese classes. It is, naturally, up for debate whether or not this constitutes a violation of academic integrity." That's it; that's the only part about us.
I remember Rogan got pretty mad about this, especially since we said immediately in our IM conversation that Mac was the only bond here (and he totally didn't cover any of our coursework at the time). I remember he was also mad because he thought Wondershocked /myprotagonist was being snide. It's probably just as well that they didn't use a citation for us. <_< (Our IM chat happened in December; the only citation is a "personal interview" in November, with who-knows-who. I think this might've been what got us on Encyclopedia Dramatica, originally...
They portrayed themselves very differently in individual IM than they did on their website here. I'm pretty sure that "Kira" who we spoke to was supposed to be from Death Note; I don't know if they were closeted or just using the name, or what. Mysterious! It is super-strange to see the parts of the IM where they talk about Kira and Tag's in-system communications and fronting and then the site where they're all like "we're not like THOSE people, gosh!" I know Rogan was mad back then, but we're not now. It's been a long time! I still think they were kind of a jerk though. >:[ We were happy to talk to them, but we didn't like being made fun of, especially since they were portraying themselves as plural themselves!
As a weird part, though, we don't seem to have the record anymore, but I could've sworn Wondershocked/myprotagonist contacted us again long after all this happened! They were um. Pretty drunk. And they said they were sorry for everything. At the time, we didn't know what they were talking about, but now I think it might've been them apologizing for this paper. Digging through my records doesn't turn anything up, though! Maybe it was someone else, or just a random stranger; I know we didn't recognize the name exactly.
Citations
Lee, LB [lb_lee]. (2018, June 20). LJ-soulbonding has been deleted [Dreamwidth post]. Retrieved 2019/03/15 from https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/947592.html
soulbonding. (2008, February 5). Profile [Livejournal page]. http://community.livejournal.com/soulbonding/profile Internet Archive. Retrieved 2019/03/15 from https://web.archive.org/web/20080205210724/http://community.livejournal.com:80/soulbonding/profile
soulbonding. (2009, January 1). Profile [Livejournal Page]. http://community.livejournal.com/soulbonding/profile Internet Archive. Retrieved 2019/03/15 from https://web.archive.org/web/20090101072848/http://community.livejournal.com:80/soulbonding/profile
soulbonding. (2009, August 17). A Bonding of Souls. https://soulbonding.livejournal.com/ Internet Archive. Retrieved 2019/04/18 from https://web.archive.org/web/20090817093541/http://community.livejournal.com/soulbonding
soulbonding. (2013, May 9). A Bonding of Souls. https://soulbonding.livejournal.com/ Internet Archive. Retrieved 2019/04/18 from https://web.archive.org/web/20130509070728/https://soulbonding.livejournal.com/
soulbonding. (2019, January 18). Deleted Journal [Livejournal Page]. Internet Archive. https://soulbonding.livejournal.com/ Retrieved 2019/03/15 from https://web.archive.org/web/20190118081527/https://soulbonding.livejournal.com/
no subject
Date: 2019-04-19 02:34 pm (UTC)experience elements (I know I thought that for a very long time... Though our core system IS still basically predominantly soulbonds and other soul relationships. Though being involved in metaphysical groups with channelers, oracles and godphones is what made us consider "maybe multiple fits better" oddly enough when we finally found the multiplicity group on LJ)
So glad that attitude is/has been changing albeit maybe a little slowly for some. Some people still hold that divide but eh it's getting some traction that soulbonders can be a plural subtype.
- Emmy
no subject
Date: 2019-04-19 03:12 pm (UTC)Yeah, off the top of my head, I remember seeing writing about soulbonding as a plural experience starting in 2001, 2002. And there was a lot of overlap between the soulbonding and multiplicity communities on LJ! The soulbonding mods that I can remember were mostly multiple or median as well! (And a lot of folks changed camps over the years, especially once fictivity became a more accepted part of multi experience, due to overlap in the LJ communities, as far as I can tell. People who think fictivity is okay in multiplicity owe a debt to that overlap, even if they think "endogenics" are ruining the community!)
--Sneak