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Your Princess is in Another Headspace
Your Princess is in Another Headspace
Series: Essay
Summary: the pitfalls of plurals seeking bookend headmates in other plurals--for example, the Princess Peach to their Mario. "Imagine book-ended twins. Outwardly different, but joined in every way possible at all times..." Crane and Naifeh, How Loathsome, pg. 73
Word Count: 3700
Notes: This was the unequivocal winner of the Patreon story poll this month! A glossary of terms is here; cited sources are at bottom. This is part of a series on plural social anti-patterns, and it’s inspired by conversations we had with (among others) Amorpha, Veterans, Rhymers, and Plures.
If you hang in certain multi circles long enough, you may hear warnings against systems who claim to have matching headmates to yours, or who claim your headmates travel into their own system. In other words, if you have Mario as a headmate, this other plural would claim that he visits their own headspace, or that they have Princess Peach or Luigi, or both or more. (Due to the clunkiness of the terminology, for the sake of convenience, I’m going to hereafter label this phenomenon “your princess is in another headspace” and conversely, the matching or shared headmates as “bookend headmates”; see endnote)
But a blanket beware doesn’t explain much. Why is this bad? Are there times where it’s not bad, and if so, how can you tell the difference? Why and how does it happen?
Let’s talk about it.
The Context
First, some explanation for the folks who’ve never encountered “your princess is in another headspace.”
Having headmates from media is a thing. We ourself have a few headmates from stories we wrote; earlier in our history, we had others who were clearly influenced by books written by other people. While treated as strange or laughable by others, it has a precedent of over twenty-five years. (Namely, a multiple states that cable TV influenced their headmates in the 1992 August issue of Many Voices, on page 9. And while I haven’t yet found proper corroboration, I have seen a stray reference that “in the mid-1980s […] Rambo, the movie character, was a possessing lwa, or spirit, in Haiti.”) (van Duijl et al, 2005)
Though it might same alien to some people, it makes sense; part of a character’s job in media is to be identified with, to reflect our own desires and natures. A hero may inspire the viewer to righteous action, or a villain may give voice to our secret frustrations and vulnerabilities. With video game protagonists, it seems especially understandable—players play as the character! They’re the ones making the character’s decisions, becoming the character. You can’t get more immersive than that! So can we truly be surprised when these kinds of folks turn up as headmates?
But they come with their own special challenges. They might have to deal with the emotional challenges of coming from a world totally alien to our own, a world other people think is absurd or childish, and never seeing said world or their loved ones again. They may have to learn how to use a vacuum cleaner, or what a car is, and their own existing skills may be totally useless.
It’s one thing to have a headmate from a piece of media nobody has ever heard of, like a random unlicensed Nintendo Bible game. At least in that case, the headmate is likely not to have to deal with the burdens of, “wait, you’re that guy from…?” Headmates from better known media have more trouble. Nobody else may have ever played that stupid Bible game, but a lot of people have played Mario. In that situation, not only is the headmate stuck with, “oh my gosh, you’re that guy!” and outsiders’ baggage or preconceptions of them, but they may run into other systems with versions of themselves or their loved ones… or their enemies. And that is an experience that our society has no way to even discuss, never mind deal with.
And just because there are two Marios doesn’t mean they will be the same Mario. Perhaps one comes from a happy, sunny world that he loves, while the other comes from a miserable pipe-punk dystopia that he’s glad to be gone from. Maybe one’s a decent guy, while the other is a jerk. One might be from the 1993 live-action movie, while the other might be from a video game twenty years later. It gets complicated fast.
Outsiders often imagine that these kinds of headmates like their fame and use it to nefarious ends… and sure, some do. But a lot don’t. Some change their names and carefully avoid any discussion of their history. But that still doesn’t solve the problem of, say, seeing their long-lost brother suddenly embodied in another system. How to handle that? Even if they know it’s not really their brother, how can they avoid the inevitable emotions that bubble up?
Now imagine that system saying, “well, actually, it is your long-lost brother. And he misses you.”
That is a bookend headmate.
Can’t You Just Avoid Them, Though?
Short answer: no. Avoidance is not protection.
Various media-identity plural spaces are the communities most infamous for bookend headmates. However, they are not the only ones. Nor is it a solely plural phenomenon; I’ve also seen variations with singlet otherkin, fictionkin, or metaphysical groups, just replacing “headmate” with “past life.” Have a past life during the Black Death? Well, this person has a past life there too, and they just happened to be your spouse or best friend! What a coincidence!
These things might seem different from each other, but at base, they all make the same claim: “we’re connected on a deep level that most people can’t hope to match.” Underneath it are often uglier sub-tones: “nobody will ever have this connection with you or understand you like we will.”
Should badness ensue (and it often does), the victim often can’t talk about it, because from the outside, it sounds ridiculous. (And the amount of explanation required to even describe what happened may be prohibitive.) Even other plurals might mock them or treat them with disdain. Faced with that kind of social pressure, the victim usually goes silent or disappears, leaving the perpetrator free to move on to someone else, sometimes over and over. (Draven pulled this on dozens of people over the course of decades.) Every time a victim comes forward, the community blames them as theatrical, gullible, or otherwise deserving (even as it happens over and over), absolving themselves of the responsibility to do anything. In the meantime, the predator learns who the acceptable victims are, and targets them accordingly.
It might sound like bookend headmates can be easily avoided: “Don’t hang out with soulbonders or fictionkin.” But we can speak from experience that it doesn’t work. We don’t really inhabit media-headmate spaces, and in current parlance aren’t considered a fictive system. Even so, that didn’t stop one multiple from claiming that they accessed some part of our headspace and visited one of our headmates. Same base claim, different wrapper.
And even if we avoided all plurals and metaphysical folks forever and ever, even if we wanted to, that still won’t solve the root problem. “We’re deeply connected” is a claim that can be utilized and misused in a million different ways. Sometimes it’s even true!
So we need to have a deeper conversation on why this happens, why it’s a problem, and how to recognize the dangers. It’s only through a deeper understanding of the problem that we can solve it.
Why Is This Bad?
Sometimes we really do find someone who is deeply connected to us. But that connection is built slowly over time. It can’t be rushed, and it can’t be skipped; even if you feel an immediate “click,” you still have to do the hard work of building boundaries together, learning each other, and proving yourselves worthy of trust. A true connection becomes stronger with that process.
Bookend headmates, on the other hand, are often an attempt to skip past that building and vetting. They’re shortcuts to get close to someone fast and hard, and the normal boundaries are tossed aside as unnecessary, sometimes even hurtful. “Mario, we’re brothers! How can you treat me like a stranger? You don’t have to do that with me, because we know each other already!” (This can be especially effective when someone claims your headmate has traveled to visit them—after all, your own headmate vetted them, right?)
Plural etiquette sometimes gives these folks more leeway than they should. There’s often a tacit belief that identities should be respected: if the guy you’re talking to says she’s your long-lost wife, then it’s best to take her at his word, since hey, you’re a plumber named Mario and who are you to judge?
This openness can be a wonderful thing, but a relationship is not an identity. A relationship with you is a two-way street. It requires your agreement, and tacit acceptance is not required. And whatever relationship you may have once had to the bookend headmate, this is your first time meeting them here. If the bookend headmate really were as close as they claim, they would be willing to wait and make certain. What’s their rush?
So when bookend headmates try to leap straight to, “we’re closely connected!” they’re short-circuiting the process that allows the reality to happen. At best, they’re woefully naïve. At worst, they’re trying to manipulate you.
Why Does the Bookend Headmate Work?
All of us long for connection at some point. All of us miss folks we’ve lost touch with; all of us hope to find people who will see us as we truly are. Who hasn’t yearned for a deceased relative, or a friend who understood what it was like to be different? “Your princess is in another headspace” plays on that common human experience. When you long for somebody, and then find someone claiming to be that somebody, it would take a hard soul not to be tempted.
There are a lot of grifts that take advantage of this—think of the number of women who claimed to be the long-lost Princess Anastasia! But plurals have even more reason than most to be taken in, because the loss of non-corporeal people can often be more ambiguous, more confusing, less certain. At least medical science was eventually able to prove that Anastasia was dead! For headmates, though, it can be impossible to tell whether someone is dead, temporarily inaccessible, or something else entirely. People are left to figure it out as best they can, and there are no cultural rites or rituals like funerals through which to deal with the experience, or even talk about it. (That I even had to make up a term like “bookend headmate” shows how clunky it is to even communicate the concept of, “my loved one from my other life became embodied in this other system.”)
So, using Mario as our hypothetical example, he might not only have lost access to his world and loved ones and everything he understands. Not only may he have nowhere to discuss his sadness, because these things are considered a game for children. He may not even be able to say, “my loved ones are dead,” because he has no way to know if that’s true! Maybe the one who’s dead is him! How does he deal with that?
This lack of socially acceptable ways of coping with that loss and yearning for healing are what leads to “your princess is in another headspace.” If someone has no way to grieve, process, and move forward, then can anyone be surprised if they end up going backwards instead, trying to undo that loss? Try to see it from Mario’s perspective. He made it here, after all. Why not his wife or brother? Maybe, if he searches long enough, in the right places, he will find them again, and make things right.
He’s not even wrong, exactly. It's highly improbable, but not impossible. And he likely knows how long the odds are. But that might seem preferable to being trapped in an unspeakable cultural space of unidentifiable pain that hardly anyone takes seriously.
Con Artists, Predators, and the Well-Intentioned
It’s easy to denounce all bookend headmates as con artists or predators, but I do honestly think a number of them come at it with good intentions. They see someone hurting, and they think they can make it better. All they have to do is get the right headmate, become the right person. Maybe their identity or system roster is fluid enough to make it happen. But it’s never that easy. If they want to truly build that special connection, it’s harder than the usual relationship. (More on that later.) Molding themselves into whatever they feel the other person wants or needs isn’t real intimacy, because intimacy is between people as they are, not people as they wish they could be.
Sometimes both bookends do this, which is especially sad. They mistake intimate knowledge and love of a story for intimate knowledge and love for each other, and end up building an illusion of a deep connection that orbits entirely around the media they share. We knew a plural marriage that was created this way; it fell apart horribly. Because rare is the fan that stays in a fandom forever. What happens when the story ends? What happens when it goes downhill? What happens when someone just loses interest?
So far, we’re giving Mario and the princess the benefit of the doubt, good intentions and pure motives. But plenty have neither. There really are some flat-out con artists and predators out there. They think they have something to gain from the identity manipulation (be it financial support or rapt adoration), and so they make it happen, building bookends. This is especially common in coercive groups like I wrote about in the Cultiples series; cults already create an identity for the followers, with their own language, in-jokes, and way of seeing the world. The bookend headmate becomes the perfect mold to force followers into.
At least the con artist is simple to get rid of—though not necessarily easy: no reward, no con artist. And while it might be embarrassing or painful to state what happened, at least our culture has something of a context for, “a con artist took advantage of me,” even if a lot of the details have to be glossed over. But when it’s the folie a deux situation, where a relationship revolves around the media, or a well-meaning helper type molding themselves into what they think they need to be, what then? How do you even broach the subject? If the person in question is someone you trust, a best friend or a lover, it’s hard to write them off as a predator—and they very well might not be! How do you tell them, “I think you’re trying to be what you think I want you to be, and we can’t have a real relationship like that”? How do you let go of the idea, which both of you may have so much investment in?
In plural camps, there’s often a hesitancy to discuss inability to distinguish fantasy and reality, since that’s a claim often used to harm and ridicule us. But we don’t gain anything if we can’t admit that this is a thing that truly happens! It certainly has with us! At some point, a relationship must be more than just liking the same things and sharing the same in-jokes. Eventually, a relationship has to build into the present in this world, not just hide in the past elsewhere.
So, how do you do that? Can it be done at all?
Relationship Hard Mode
For us, personally, we don’t think we will ever find our princesses in another headspace; either we find them in our own, or not at all. We do the hard work of getting them back, or the hard work of letting them go, but the hard work is compulsory. Nobody can do it for us.
When Mori returned to our system, a decade had passed her by. The people she’d known and cared about had aged; she had not. Such loss hurt. There was no avoiding that. Ten and a half years of unfinished business weighed on her, and in most cases, there was nothing she could do about it. No way to find her old people, no way to explain or apologize, nothing to do but mourn and move on.
Eventually she managed to bring one of her old compadres here—in our own system, not somebody else’s. But that didn’t magically fix things. There was no going back to 2004. To even get him back at all, she had to do a lot of hard work on herself first. She had to deal with her relationship to fiction, to death, to the friend in question. She had to grieve her losses, process them, and stabilize. Paradoxically, she had to move on before she could get him back.
And once she did, he was not the same man he’d been a decade prior. And she wasn’t the same either. They had both changed, physically and mentally, and they had to relearn how to be around each other in the present. They had to have hard conversations about what happened, to themselves and each other. They had to rebuild and move forward, not hide in a nostalgic shared past.
It was hard work. But it’s only through such labors that intimate relationships are built.
We have known a few plurals who seem to manage bookend headmates in a loving, healthy way. But it’s not Relationship Easy Mode; it’s Relationship Hard Mode. Why? Because on top of all the other normal things a relationship requires, there are extra challenges:
If this sounds hard, it’s because it is. A bookend headmate isn’t a, “Mario, it’s me, Luigi! We can be brothers again!” On the contrary, doing it healthfully requires intense vigilance, self-knowledge, and lack of illusions. If you met someone who looked exactly like your long-lost brother, acted like him, but somehow wasn’t quite him… would you truly be able to say you could see him as who he truly was, and not the brother you miss? Would you be able to engage with him on that level, without casting doubt on him, yourself, or y'all's experiences? I don’t know that I could.
If the feelings are mutual on both sides, the challenge factor is doubled. And the more bookend headmates, the higher it goes. Two systems with one set of bookends, I could see that working, though it’d be tough. But two systems populated overwhelmingly with bookends? I doubt it. That doesn’t say to me, “we’re deeply connected and in sync.” That says, “the only way we know how to be close to other people, or secure in ourselves, is by molding ourselves into matching pieces of furniture.”
I’m not saying it can’t be done. But it has a host of singular challenges that are unlikely to be easily discussed in couple’s therapy or in any self-help book, and they can’t be avoided.
The fantasy of the headmate princess is that of the perfect match waiting readymade, the one who will understand difference and share it with no extra effort required. It turns the hard mutual work of building a relationship into an individual quest, a video game: just search through enough castles, blow through enough levels, and eventually the relationship will just be there, waiting for you.
In video games, that's where the story ends. But in reality, it's just the beginning. Because relationships are more than just avoiding the wrong people and searching for the right ones. They’re growing together and meeting halfway, and they require the effort of everyone involved. A true deep connection is working to build a sense of self that can be with other people’s selves and love them as they truly are. It’s building a connection, not finding one tailor-made. And to have these relationships in plural space requires having hard discussions about identity and boundaries, what’s acceptable and what isn’t. It’s doing the labor to build a community with better standards.
Because sad as it is, right now we have a community where it’s still somewhat acceptable to mold your identity for the sake of someone you like, or for someone to come up and say, “you’re my bookend headmate. This is proof I’m deeply connected to you.”
If we want to have a strong community and strong relationships, we need to move past that.
Citations:
Many Voices Press. (1992, August). Many Voices: Words of Hope for People With MPD or a Dissociative Disorder. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1992_08.pdf
van Duijl, M., Cardena, E., and de Jong, J. T.V.M. (2005). The validity of DSM-IV dissociative disorders categories in Southwest Uganda. Transcultural Psychiatry 2005, Vol 42(2): 219-241January 1, 2005. This paper doesn't seem to be freely available, but feel free to ask for my copy.
End Note:
Other people sometimes call this “matching headmates,” but I’ve chosen not to use that terminology because in my mind, that conjures up confusion with the "headmate double" phenomenon, which is separate. Also, while I mostly discuss bookend headmates in the context of “Mario and Luigi” sort of matches, it's most infamous with romantic partners, such as Mario and Peach. There’s also a lot in common with traveling headmates, but I'm over the word count as it is.
Series: Essay
Summary: the pitfalls of plurals seeking bookend headmates in other plurals--for example, the Princess Peach to their Mario. "Imagine book-ended twins. Outwardly different, but joined in every way possible at all times..." Crane and Naifeh, How Loathsome, pg. 73
Word Count: 3700
Notes: This was the unequivocal winner of the Patreon story poll this month! A glossary of terms is here; cited sources are at bottom. This is part of a series on plural social anti-patterns, and it’s inspired by conversations we had with (among others) Amorpha, Veterans, Rhymers, and Plures.
If you hang in certain multi circles long enough, you may hear warnings against systems who claim to have matching headmates to yours, or who claim your headmates travel into their own system. In other words, if you have Mario as a headmate, this other plural would claim that he visits their own headspace, or that they have Princess Peach or Luigi, or both or more. (Due to the clunkiness of the terminology, for the sake of convenience, I’m going to hereafter label this phenomenon “your princess is in another headspace” and conversely, the matching or shared headmates as “bookend headmates”; see endnote)
But a blanket beware doesn’t explain much. Why is this bad? Are there times where it’s not bad, and if so, how can you tell the difference? Why and how does it happen?
Let’s talk about it.
The Context
First, some explanation for the folks who’ve never encountered “your princess is in another headspace.”
Having headmates from media is a thing. We ourself have a few headmates from stories we wrote; earlier in our history, we had others who were clearly influenced by books written by other people. While treated as strange or laughable by others, it has a precedent of over twenty-five years. (Namely, a multiple states that cable TV influenced their headmates in the 1992 August issue of Many Voices, on page 9. And while I haven’t yet found proper corroboration, I have seen a stray reference that “in the mid-1980s […] Rambo, the movie character, was a possessing lwa, or spirit, in Haiti.”) (van Duijl et al, 2005)
Though it might same alien to some people, it makes sense; part of a character’s job in media is to be identified with, to reflect our own desires and natures. A hero may inspire the viewer to righteous action, or a villain may give voice to our secret frustrations and vulnerabilities. With video game protagonists, it seems especially understandable—players play as the character! They’re the ones making the character’s decisions, becoming the character. You can’t get more immersive than that! So can we truly be surprised when these kinds of folks turn up as headmates?
But they come with their own special challenges. They might have to deal with the emotional challenges of coming from a world totally alien to our own, a world other people think is absurd or childish, and never seeing said world or their loved ones again. They may have to learn how to use a vacuum cleaner, or what a car is, and their own existing skills may be totally useless.
It’s one thing to have a headmate from a piece of media nobody has ever heard of, like a random unlicensed Nintendo Bible game. At least in that case, the headmate is likely not to have to deal with the burdens of, “wait, you’re that guy from…?” Headmates from better known media have more trouble. Nobody else may have ever played that stupid Bible game, but a lot of people have played Mario. In that situation, not only is the headmate stuck with, “oh my gosh, you’re that guy!” and outsiders’ baggage or preconceptions of them, but they may run into other systems with versions of themselves or their loved ones… or their enemies. And that is an experience that our society has no way to even discuss, never mind deal with.
And just because there are two Marios doesn’t mean they will be the same Mario. Perhaps one comes from a happy, sunny world that he loves, while the other comes from a miserable pipe-punk dystopia that he’s glad to be gone from. Maybe one’s a decent guy, while the other is a jerk. One might be from the 1993 live-action movie, while the other might be from a video game twenty years later. It gets complicated fast.
Outsiders often imagine that these kinds of headmates like their fame and use it to nefarious ends… and sure, some do. But a lot don’t. Some change their names and carefully avoid any discussion of their history. But that still doesn’t solve the problem of, say, seeing their long-lost brother suddenly embodied in another system. How to handle that? Even if they know it’s not really their brother, how can they avoid the inevitable emotions that bubble up?
Now imagine that system saying, “well, actually, it is your long-lost brother. And he misses you.”
That is a bookend headmate.
Can’t You Just Avoid Them, Though?
Short answer: no. Avoidance is not protection.
Various media-identity plural spaces are the communities most infamous for bookend headmates. However, they are not the only ones. Nor is it a solely plural phenomenon; I’ve also seen variations with singlet otherkin, fictionkin, or metaphysical groups, just replacing “headmate” with “past life.” Have a past life during the Black Death? Well, this person has a past life there too, and they just happened to be your spouse or best friend! What a coincidence!
These things might seem different from each other, but at base, they all make the same claim: “we’re connected on a deep level that most people can’t hope to match.” Underneath it are often uglier sub-tones: “nobody will ever have this connection with you or understand you like we will.”
Should badness ensue (and it often does), the victim often can’t talk about it, because from the outside, it sounds ridiculous. (And the amount of explanation required to even describe what happened may be prohibitive.) Even other plurals might mock them or treat them with disdain. Faced with that kind of social pressure, the victim usually goes silent or disappears, leaving the perpetrator free to move on to someone else, sometimes over and over. (Draven pulled this on dozens of people over the course of decades.) Every time a victim comes forward, the community blames them as theatrical, gullible, or otherwise deserving (even as it happens over and over), absolving themselves of the responsibility to do anything. In the meantime, the predator learns who the acceptable victims are, and targets them accordingly.
It might sound like bookend headmates can be easily avoided: “Don’t hang out with soulbonders or fictionkin.” But we can speak from experience that it doesn’t work. We don’t really inhabit media-headmate spaces, and in current parlance aren’t considered a fictive system. Even so, that didn’t stop one multiple from claiming that they accessed some part of our headspace and visited one of our headmates. Same base claim, different wrapper.
And even if we avoided all plurals and metaphysical folks forever and ever, even if we wanted to, that still won’t solve the root problem. “We’re deeply connected” is a claim that can be utilized and misused in a million different ways. Sometimes it’s even true!
So we need to have a deeper conversation on why this happens, why it’s a problem, and how to recognize the dangers. It’s only through a deeper understanding of the problem that we can solve it.
Why Is This Bad?
Sometimes we really do find someone who is deeply connected to us. But that connection is built slowly over time. It can’t be rushed, and it can’t be skipped; even if you feel an immediate “click,” you still have to do the hard work of building boundaries together, learning each other, and proving yourselves worthy of trust. A true connection becomes stronger with that process.
Bookend headmates, on the other hand, are often an attempt to skip past that building and vetting. They’re shortcuts to get close to someone fast and hard, and the normal boundaries are tossed aside as unnecessary, sometimes even hurtful. “Mario, we’re brothers! How can you treat me like a stranger? You don’t have to do that with me, because we know each other already!” (This can be especially effective when someone claims your headmate has traveled to visit them—after all, your own headmate vetted them, right?)
Plural etiquette sometimes gives these folks more leeway than they should. There’s often a tacit belief that identities should be respected: if the guy you’re talking to says she’s your long-lost wife, then it’s best to take her at his word, since hey, you’re a plumber named Mario and who are you to judge?
This openness can be a wonderful thing, but a relationship is not an identity. A relationship with you is a two-way street. It requires your agreement, and tacit acceptance is not required. And whatever relationship you may have once had to the bookend headmate, this is your first time meeting them here. If the bookend headmate really were as close as they claim, they would be willing to wait and make certain. What’s their rush?
So when bookend headmates try to leap straight to, “we’re closely connected!” they’re short-circuiting the process that allows the reality to happen. At best, they’re woefully naïve. At worst, they’re trying to manipulate you.
Why Does the Bookend Headmate Work?
All of us long for connection at some point. All of us miss folks we’ve lost touch with; all of us hope to find people who will see us as we truly are. Who hasn’t yearned for a deceased relative, or a friend who understood what it was like to be different? “Your princess is in another headspace” plays on that common human experience. When you long for somebody, and then find someone claiming to be that somebody, it would take a hard soul not to be tempted.
There are a lot of grifts that take advantage of this—think of the number of women who claimed to be the long-lost Princess Anastasia! But plurals have even more reason than most to be taken in, because the loss of non-corporeal people can often be more ambiguous, more confusing, less certain. At least medical science was eventually able to prove that Anastasia was dead! For headmates, though, it can be impossible to tell whether someone is dead, temporarily inaccessible, or something else entirely. People are left to figure it out as best they can, and there are no cultural rites or rituals like funerals through which to deal with the experience, or even talk about it. (That I even had to make up a term like “bookend headmate” shows how clunky it is to even communicate the concept of, “my loved one from my other life became embodied in this other system.”)
So, using Mario as our hypothetical example, he might not only have lost access to his world and loved ones and everything he understands. Not only may he have nowhere to discuss his sadness, because these things are considered a game for children. He may not even be able to say, “my loved ones are dead,” because he has no way to know if that’s true! Maybe the one who’s dead is him! How does he deal with that?
This lack of socially acceptable ways of coping with that loss and yearning for healing are what leads to “your princess is in another headspace.” If someone has no way to grieve, process, and move forward, then can anyone be surprised if they end up going backwards instead, trying to undo that loss? Try to see it from Mario’s perspective. He made it here, after all. Why not his wife or brother? Maybe, if he searches long enough, in the right places, he will find them again, and make things right.
He’s not even wrong, exactly. It's highly improbable, but not impossible. And he likely knows how long the odds are. But that might seem preferable to being trapped in an unspeakable cultural space of unidentifiable pain that hardly anyone takes seriously.
Con Artists, Predators, and the Well-Intentioned
It’s easy to denounce all bookend headmates as con artists or predators, but I do honestly think a number of them come at it with good intentions. They see someone hurting, and they think they can make it better. All they have to do is get the right headmate, become the right person. Maybe their identity or system roster is fluid enough to make it happen. But it’s never that easy. If they want to truly build that special connection, it’s harder than the usual relationship. (More on that later.) Molding themselves into whatever they feel the other person wants or needs isn’t real intimacy, because intimacy is between people as they are, not people as they wish they could be.
Sometimes both bookends do this, which is especially sad. They mistake intimate knowledge and love of a story for intimate knowledge and love for each other, and end up building an illusion of a deep connection that orbits entirely around the media they share. We knew a plural marriage that was created this way; it fell apart horribly. Because rare is the fan that stays in a fandom forever. What happens when the story ends? What happens when it goes downhill? What happens when someone just loses interest?
So far, we’re giving Mario and the princess the benefit of the doubt, good intentions and pure motives. But plenty have neither. There really are some flat-out con artists and predators out there. They think they have something to gain from the identity manipulation (be it financial support or rapt adoration), and so they make it happen, building bookends. This is especially common in coercive groups like I wrote about in the Cultiples series; cults already create an identity for the followers, with their own language, in-jokes, and way of seeing the world. The bookend headmate becomes the perfect mold to force followers into.
At least the con artist is simple to get rid of—though not necessarily easy: no reward, no con artist. And while it might be embarrassing or painful to state what happened, at least our culture has something of a context for, “a con artist took advantage of me,” even if a lot of the details have to be glossed over. But when it’s the folie a deux situation, where a relationship revolves around the media, or a well-meaning helper type molding themselves into what they think they need to be, what then? How do you even broach the subject? If the person in question is someone you trust, a best friend or a lover, it’s hard to write them off as a predator—and they very well might not be! How do you tell them, “I think you’re trying to be what you think I want you to be, and we can’t have a real relationship like that”? How do you let go of the idea, which both of you may have so much investment in?
In plural camps, there’s often a hesitancy to discuss inability to distinguish fantasy and reality, since that’s a claim often used to harm and ridicule us. But we don’t gain anything if we can’t admit that this is a thing that truly happens! It certainly has with us! At some point, a relationship must be more than just liking the same things and sharing the same in-jokes. Eventually, a relationship has to build into the present in this world, not just hide in the past elsewhere.
So, how do you do that? Can it be done at all?
Relationship Hard Mode
For us, personally, we don’t think we will ever find our princesses in another headspace; either we find them in our own, or not at all. We do the hard work of getting them back, or the hard work of letting them go, but the hard work is compulsory. Nobody can do it for us.
When Mori returned to our system, a decade had passed her by. The people she’d known and cared about had aged; she had not. Such loss hurt. There was no avoiding that. Ten and a half years of unfinished business weighed on her, and in most cases, there was nothing she could do about it. No way to find her old people, no way to explain or apologize, nothing to do but mourn and move on.
Eventually she managed to bring one of her old compadres here—in our own system, not somebody else’s. But that didn’t magically fix things. There was no going back to 2004. To even get him back at all, she had to do a lot of hard work on herself first. She had to deal with her relationship to fiction, to death, to the friend in question. She had to grieve her losses, process them, and stabilize. Paradoxically, she had to move on before she could get him back.
And once she did, he was not the same man he’d been a decade prior. And she wasn’t the same either. They had both changed, physically and mentally, and they had to relearn how to be around each other in the present. They had to have hard conversations about what happened, to themselves and each other. They had to rebuild and move forward, not hide in a nostalgic shared past.
It was hard work. But it’s only through such labors that intimate relationships are built.
We have known a few plurals who seem to manage bookend headmates in a loving, healthy way. But it’s not Relationship Easy Mode; it’s Relationship Hard Mode. Why? Because on top of all the other normal things a relationship requires, there are extra challenges:
- Despite intense pushback and lack of representation in the culture around them, they must develop a solid sense of their own identity. They don’t look to others for proof that their life was real and happened to them, even if it wasn’t corporeal. They don’t need constant bolstering and cheerleading from their bookend headmate to feel they exist, and they can look at their identity and history critically without imploding in existential terror.
- Similarly, they don’t need their shared history (or media) to anchor the relationship, and they don’t feel masochistically compelled to engage in the media, if it exists. (I’ve known many a media-influenced system who seemed unable to stop consuming the media they came from, even when it caused them intense distress every time. It was like they needed to have the media, either as a fan or a hater, or everything inside them fell apart.) If Mario decides he wants to work as an accountant, never eat another mushroom, or engage with his franchise ever again, that should not all on its own kill the relationship. The relationship has to organically grow with the people involved, not stay crystallized in the roles the media depicts.
- Most of all, they have to be able to accept that their bookend headmate may not be—maybe this Luigi came from a different world, or didn’t experience key life events that Mario sees as intrinsic to his brother. And if that’s the case, they deal with it, letting go of the illusion that they’ll be perfectly matched bookends. They don’t attempt to shoehorn reality into what they wish it were, or go into a despair or denial spiral. They can handle a “no, that never happened to me,” or a, “that one thing did, but that other thing didn’t,” without taking it personally.
If this sounds hard, it’s because it is. A bookend headmate isn’t a, “Mario, it’s me, Luigi! We can be brothers again!” On the contrary, doing it healthfully requires intense vigilance, self-knowledge, and lack of illusions. If you met someone who looked exactly like your long-lost brother, acted like him, but somehow wasn’t quite him… would you truly be able to say you could see him as who he truly was, and not the brother you miss? Would you be able to engage with him on that level, without casting doubt on him, yourself, or y'all's experiences? I don’t know that I could.
If the feelings are mutual on both sides, the challenge factor is doubled. And the more bookend headmates, the higher it goes. Two systems with one set of bookends, I could see that working, though it’d be tough. But two systems populated overwhelmingly with bookends? I doubt it. That doesn’t say to me, “we’re deeply connected and in sync.” That says, “the only way we know how to be close to other people, or secure in ourselves, is by molding ourselves into matching pieces of furniture.”
I’m not saying it can’t be done. But it has a host of singular challenges that are unlikely to be easily discussed in couple’s therapy or in any self-help book, and they can’t be avoided.
The fantasy of the headmate princess is that of the perfect match waiting readymade, the one who will understand difference and share it with no extra effort required. It turns the hard mutual work of building a relationship into an individual quest, a video game: just search through enough castles, blow through enough levels, and eventually the relationship will just be there, waiting for you.
In video games, that's where the story ends. But in reality, it's just the beginning. Because relationships are more than just avoiding the wrong people and searching for the right ones. They’re growing together and meeting halfway, and they require the effort of everyone involved. A true deep connection is working to build a sense of self that can be with other people’s selves and love them as they truly are. It’s building a connection, not finding one tailor-made. And to have these relationships in plural space requires having hard discussions about identity and boundaries, what’s acceptable and what isn’t. It’s doing the labor to build a community with better standards.
Because sad as it is, right now we have a community where it’s still somewhat acceptable to mold your identity for the sake of someone you like, or for someone to come up and say, “you’re my bookend headmate. This is proof I’m deeply connected to you.”
If we want to have a strong community and strong relationships, we need to move past that.
Citations:
Many Voices Press. (1992, August). Many Voices: Words of Hope for People With MPD or a Dissociative Disorder. Retrieved from http://manyvoicespress.org/backissues-pdf/1992_08.pdf
van Duijl, M., Cardena, E., and de Jong, J. T.V.M. (2005). The validity of DSM-IV dissociative disorders categories in Southwest Uganda. Transcultural Psychiatry 2005, Vol 42(2): 219-241January 1, 2005. This paper doesn't seem to be freely available, but feel free to ask for my copy.
End Note:
Other people sometimes call this “matching headmates,” but I’ve chosen not to use that terminology because in my mind, that conjures up confusion with the "headmate double" phenomenon, which is separate. Also, while I mostly discuss bookend headmates in the context of “Mario and Luigi” sort of matches, it's most infamous with romantic partners, such as Mario and Peach. There’s also a lot in common with traveling headmates, but I'm over the word count as it is.
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We view Canon call groups as "a great way to meet people who get your experience but very unlikely to find your
'exact bookend'".
I can't corroborate or find a citation, BUT I suspect that plurals grabbed the "doubles" term from the fictionkin community because doubles was often a matter of contention back when "fictionkin" was still called "otakukin" (and honestly still can be in some fictionkin circles).
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BUT I suspect that plurals grabbed the "doubles" term from the fictionkin community because doubles was often a matter of contention back when "fictionkin" was still called "otakukin" (and honestly still can be in some fictionkin circles).
Interesting! Yeah, I've definitely seen the sentiment in fictionkin circles.
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Mainly because we hop a bit, as well-and we also have media people.
I mean...I guess I'm an odd case because the first media person i med snarked at me in my head before they eer thought about fronting here, so there's that...but still. *interested*
-Trausio~