The gatekeeping re: soulbonding perplexes me, because there's kind of a fuzzy line between making contact with a headmate who isn't a character at all, and soulbonding one of your own characters.
Admittedly, these days, in more tumblr-inflected plural circles, I think they've kinda dealt with that by erasing the old concept of what I knew as "insourced soulbonds" (AKA: headmates of your own characters). Now the concept of "fictive" seems to be explicitly outsourced (other people's characters--Bugs Bunny, Othello, etc.) and insourced fictives are considered to just be... I dunno, labeless "normal" headmates, which to someone from our online generation is just WEIRD.
if your OC starts talking to you, do they have to make their overall debut for even existing at the same time as their first words to you, or if you've ever so much as drawn a picture or roleplayed as them or whatever even once before speaking to them then they're automatically no longer valid, or...?
I THINK the question was often treated as one of autonomy, how dependent they were on the story. For example, us non-fiction headmates (like me, Rogan) often got shoehorned into stories because we couldn't fathom us as anything but "characters missing a story." But these efforts were pretty much always failures that puttered out within a couple pages, and none of us ever said, "oh yes, that story was MY LIFE, man!" While our fictive people have, "Wow, that's uncanny, that IS my life, sort of, run through a game of Fiction Telephone..." reaction. (And then there are a couple oddballs who seemed to bounce in-between; we're still figuring THAT out.)
That said, except for those oddballs, every single one of our fictives, the story came first before we met them; that was HOW we met them.
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Date: 2020-08-13 02:45 am (UTC)Admittedly, these days, in more tumblr-inflected plural circles, I think they've kinda dealt with that by erasing the old concept of what I knew as "insourced soulbonds" (AKA: headmates of your own characters). Now the concept of "fictive" seems to be explicitly outsourced (other people's characters--Bugs Bunny, Othello, etc.) and insourced fictives are considered to just be... I dunno, labeless "normal" headmates, which to someone from our online generation is just WEIRD.
if your OC starts talking to you, do they have to make their overall debut for even existing at the same time as their first words to you, or if you've ever so much as drawn a picture or roleplayed as them or whatever even once before speaking to them then they're automatically no longer valid, or...?
I THINK the question was often treated as one of autonomy, how dependent they were on the story. For example, us non-fiction headmates (like me, Rogan) often got shoehorned into stories because we couldn't fathom us as anything but "characters missing a story." But these efforts were pretty much always failures that puttered out within a couple pages, and none of us ever said, "oh yes, that story was MY LIFE, man!" While our fictive people have, "Wow, that's uncanny, that IS my life, sort of, run through a game of Fiction Telephone..." reaction. (And then there are a couple oddballs who seemed to bounce in-between; we're still figuring THAT out.)
That said, except for those oddballs, every single one of our fictives, the story came first before we met them; that was HOW we met them.