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.
Yeah, the insourced vs. outsourced definition was what people were using the last time we were in a soulbonding community. It didn't always work perfectly (for example, if you've got someone who identifies with a particular canon, who started as a roleplaying OC or similar), but it was a lot better than what exists now, where headmates from your own works aren't, like... even really acknowledged. Or, I mean, they're technically acknowledged, but discussions of stuff like you mentioned, "the story we were writing vs. the life I remember" and similar, just don't seem to exist in the Tumblr discourse. People are assumed to not want, need, or be interested in such discussions, or that they can't be meaningfully compared to the experiences of outsourced people. Or something.
In the JFW, people often seemed to get both kinds through writing. The experience of "I started drafting/writing the story, and then the main character showed up in my head" didn't seem to be significantly different, for a lot of people, based on whether the story was fanfic or original. And a lot of the same issues would come up-- having expectations based on another world when this one doesn't work the same way, wanting to talk to people who shared experiences that don't happen at front, etc. And that was something that really didn't change for us when we switched from identifying as a soulbonder to identifying as multiple.
ETA: And when we did join the multiple community through places like Other Worlds and Dark Personalities, there were quite a few groups who were saying things like "our main person started out writing this as a science fiction/fantasy novel, but it turned out that we were real people." It seemed to be one of the most common ways for systems with large subjective spaces to become selves-aware in that era, at least within those self-selected samplings of people. There was a time when we were actually considering writing an essay for our page specifically for systems who'd had that experience, and about how, among other things, it can make you try to contort yourselves to fiction tropes even once you acknowledge you're real. (NGL, talking to people who are trying to be walking fiction cliches can be just as awkward as talking to people who are trying to be "the (insert thing here) alter" cliches. And Astraea had this thing where they wanted everyone else to have dramatic stories so they could get in on it and become the heroes.)
no subject
Yeah, the insourced vs. outsourced definition was what people were using the last time we were in a soulbonding community. It didn't always work perfectly (for example, if you've got someone who identifies with a particular canon, who started as a roleplaying OC or similar), but it was a lot better than what exists now, where headmates from your own works aren't, like... even really acknowledged. Or, I mean, they're technically acknowledged, but discussions of stuff like you mentioned, "the story we were writing vs. the life I remember" and similar, just don't seem to exist in the Tumblr discourse. People are assumed to not want, need, or be interested in such discussions, or that they can't be meaningfully compared to the experiences of outsourced people. Or something.
In the JFW, people often seemed to get both kinds through writing. The experience of "I started drafting/writing the story, and then the main character showed up in my head" didn't seem to be significantly different, for a lot of people, based on whether the story was fanfic or original. And a lot of the same issues would come up-- having expectations based on another world when this one doesn't work the same way, wanting to talk to people who shared experiences that don't happen at front, etc. And that was something that really didn't change for us when we switched from identifying as a soulbonder to identifying as multiple.
ETA: And when we did join the multiple community through places like Other Worlds and Dark Personalities, there were quite a few groups who were saying things like "our main person started out writing this as a science fiction/fantasy novel, but it turned out that we were real people." It seemed to be one of the most common ways for systems with large subjective spaces to become selves-aware in that era, at least within those self-selected samplings of people. There was a time when we were actually considering writing an essay for our page specifically for systems who'd had that experience, and about how, among other things, it can make you try to contort yourselves to fiction tropes even once you acknowledge you're real. (NGL, talking to people who are trying to be walking fiction cliches can be just as awkward as talking to people who are trying to be "the (insert thing here) alter" cliches. And Astraea had this thing where they wanted everyone else to have dramatic stories so they could get in on it and become the heroes.)
-Istevia