it is kind of bonkers that I am making one of these I am not gonna lie, but here's some questions I get asked a lot and my general answer to them, as well as my general boundaries/guidelines for what questions we're comfortable with you sending!!

rules

• no discourse; this includes LGBT+ discourse, syscourse and ship discourse.
• no NSFW.
• no negative/critical asks. if we've done something wrong or harmful, DM us. we will not have one-sided dialogues with anons that make any issues needlessly public when posted. make a burner account if you need to, our DM requests are always open.
• do your own research and google system terms before asking us about them. if you ask us something that we fully believe you could find an answer to yourself, it will be deleted. we're open to answering questions about our own personal experiences (within due reason), but "what's a fictive" is a question that google could easily provide you an answer to. we will not do labour for you if it is clear you made no attempt to educate yourself in your own time.
• don't expect quick replies. not all of us want to answer asks, especially more serious ones asking for advice.

(rules section written by 🕊️; may be refined to be gentler in tone at a later time)

FAQ

oh and these are all just my opinion/experience! I'm just some guys. I truly am not god and you are allowed to disagree with me (but if you're a singlet maybe doooon't rush to disagree with me on system-specific stuff hey)

can singlets kin mikoto/john?

you can relate to them, especially Mikoto and the other aspects of his identity/character other than his plurality (such as his overworking or people-pleasing) but a lot of systems are uncomfortable with kin terminology specifically being used, and you'll probably be side-eyed if you do this in a disrespectful way (saying "I'm literally mikoto", etc.). this goes doubly (haha doubly) for john, as you fundamentally cannot relate to integral parts of his identity and existence as someone who is not a member of a system. his lack of identity, own life and self, etc., is something innate to plurality.

I think I might be a system; how did you work out you were a system?

long story short, I'd always had symptoms of feeling like new "mikk"s. it felt as though there were multiple of me who embodied different things, but we were all still mikk because hey, of course we were. it's not like we had different memories of anything, some of us just felt radically different to others, didn't care for the same things "mikk" did, had hugely different personalities, etc. which, obviously was tooootally normal (sarcasm)

it became pretty abundantly clear that wasn't correct when, in response to a traumatic friend group falling out in 2017, there were very strongly two different "mikk"s active at the same time, with one outright choosing a new name and pushing for us to ghost everyone and assume that identity online: her identity. and yeah, her, which was weird given I'm a trans masc and had been out for 3 years at that point. eventually ended up looking into it, worked out I was a system, and importantly: talked to my therapist about it!

if you can't see a therapist, I understand completely, therapy is a very expensive and often inaccessible option; there are likewise therapists out there that don't respect or believe in systems and may be ableist about the concept when you bring it up, so it's important to gauge the language they're using and consider getting a second opinion (namely from trauma-related specialists) if it feels as though they're being disrespectful or are otherwise uneducated. regardless, please don't rush to get involved in system communities, especially discord servers, as there's often a lot of misinformation online. try and talk to systems for sure, just don't submerge yourself in a community all about system, if that makes sense? oh and write down your symptoms before you begin researching, and look into those symptoms more so than simply OSDD/DID. there's overlap with BPD, MDD, etc. and it's important to research those avenues too. but also I mean if you outright switch then yeah you're a system not sure there's anything that can be a misdiagnosis for.

oh and, let your symptoms be what they are. give them room to breathe, be introspective, analyse yourself, etc. but don't try to fit yourself into any box or criteria!! super important.

can singlets write systems? can we create characters who are systems?

for creating ocs: ultimately yes! but I think it's important to first ask yourself why it is you want to create a character who is a system, and to do adequate and thorough research and specifically, don't just google symptoms of OSDD/DID and then write based off of that. read about the personal experiences of systems, look into how specifically to write a system and what tropes to avoid. ask questions, don't turn us into trauma porn, and be mindful that maybe some stories just aren't yours to tell.

and for in general writing systems, like say mikoto, the same applies! especially that last part. is your prompt something that you should be writing as someone with no experience of it? because there's a difference between like, writing a coffee shop AU for mikomappi and writing a deeply introspective and personal exploration of john's loneliness, and one of those is something you are probably not equipped to write. try to get systems to review it if you can before publishing honestly I think that's a really good way to go about it.

oh and please please please do not create AUs/stories where system members end up in different bodies I'm seeing this a concerning amount. this is totally cool for systems themselves to explore as a lot of systems experience longing for that sort of thing, but when a singlet does it, it's equivalent to stories where say, a character in a wheelchair ends up being able to walk again as the solution to the story. you're "fixing" them, basically, and that's not cool.