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Who We Are and How We Got Here

  • Dear Princess Celestia Tumblr

    Once Upon a Time in Canterlot

    Back in April, we (the system) wrote of our experiences in becoming a system…again. I won’t rehash it because it’s easy enough to pop that link open in another tab and read it real quick before coming back here. All done? Good, let’s continue.

    Since then, a change happened, and it really was something we should have expected.

    Hello, I’m Sunset Shimmer, and I’m a Fictive in the system known collectively as PrincessColumbia.

    That there’s a former pony taking up residence in this mindspace probably isn’t a surprise, we did pick the name “Princess Columbia” back…before. Before the most recent wave of (calling a spade a spade) Naziism in this country, wherein white supremacist cops think they’re being clever in coopting the Punisher logo, it isn’t really a surprise that the faction of the American public that think it’s a good idea to install a dictator completely fails to see the irony in claiming they have any right to use The Gadsen Flag, which is the original anti-Tyranny banner of this continent. It bothers us no end that the icon we selected before the rise of Fascists within the Tea Party (remember them?) is now connected with the very people it was made to signal the fight against.

    But I’m rabbit-holing.

    It’s a Lovely Morning in the Mindspace and You are a Moon Princess

    Hi! Speaking of rabbits, I’m Usagi! Just like Sunset’s a fictive, so am I. 😁 Really, it’s not surprising that, if Ranma’s here, so am I. We started Fission back when we were a system before, and the two main characters were…Ranma and Usagi. 😋

    The New Status Quo

    Ranma here; So in April, Helen and I had reached a…deal. It was unspoken, mostly, slapped together from our respective interests and passions. We also wound up creating a distinctly unequal claim to the responsibilities. Helen was the parts of “PrincessColumbia” that I didn’t get, plus a few things that being freed of me allowed her to express more fully. This means she saw me emerging with the approximate mental age of 20 and decided to ‘mom’ me. It was unintentional, that’s something we’ve worked out, but it meant she saw herself as the de facto load bearing member of the system. Anything that stressed us out she claimed full ownership of and only portioned out bits to me that she absolutely couldn’t handle. This left her spinning plates and me sometimes sitting in the back and twiddling my thumbs. Half of what kept me front-and-center for the initial weeks of us existing as a system, that is being in charge of our physical health and being Helen’s coach in her own head, had to stop for safety; we live in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, which can reach up to 99℉ (37℃) at night and this made going out for morning runs an actual health concern. Without the constant reminder that we were supposed to be equal partners, she basically sidelined me. This was extremely self-defeating (we were literally created to help each other) so I figured out how to wake up before her without disturbing her, age myself up (being a headmate has its advantages) and gave myself purple hair. Take notes, because this will come up later.

    Helen freaked right out, panicking at the thought of a new headmate. I had to revert back to my “standard” form to get her to calm down, and at the time played it off as a bit of a joke. This also will come up in a little bit.

    A Challenger Enters the Arena Apartment

    [Sunset] During June, our girlfriend went to Indiana, ostensibly for a month. Many of you were supportive as Helen was fuming over the conditions that our girl encountered there, but the one bright spot in all of that was rescuing a nine-year-old cat that had been neglected and abused. Patches came to our home and was half-starved and had trauma responses on a hair trigger. One of those responses was to rip and tear in response to something that triggered kitty PTSD, resulting in us having an infected hand. We’re doing much better now, the swelling has gone down completely and the actual puncture wounds are just bumps on the skin now, but there were immediate consequences.

    Ranma’s ailurophobia, which she thought she had left behind in whatever caused her to spawn in as a headmate, came roaring back with a vengence. Not enough to trigger a nekoken, but she was catatonic in the headspace for a while. The next morning when she went into the kitchen to make breakfast, one of the cats followed her in and tried to beg for food and it took Ranma by surprise; she was a shaking, sobbing mess that was jumping at shadows.

    Helen, who loves cats, found herself in the emotionally conflicted place of feeling protective of Ranma but the perpetrator of Ranma’s distress was a 6-pound cat that had only done what she did due to abuse that we were trying to help her recover from. The poor cat kept trying to apologize with physical affection but Ranma was terrified and this triggered Helen’s anger…the cat is confused, to say the least.

    [Ranma] I’m doing better as the pain recedes. I’m still not eager to be around Patches, but Hexen’s a sweetie and I’m able to give her hugs and kisses again.

    We’re currently on an antibiotic course, and if you’ve never looked into how antibiotics work, they’re basically killing pretty much everything in your body, including you, they just kill the infection faster than the host. A side effect of this is the body has what’s called a 'gut biome,’ a literal complex ecosystem of microscopic flora and fauna that actually works in tandem with your body to digest food. Depending on the biome in your stomach and intestines, you have a chemical stew that those symbiotic life forms inside you use to provide you nutrition and energy and even alter your brain chemistry. Antibiotics, unfortunately, wipe a LOT of that out, too.

    We’ve been on antibiotics before, most notably after surviving living homeless, so we knew what to expect, up to and including a fogginess of the brain and low energy. We planned for about a week of that and arranged a bottle of probiotic to repopulate our gut biome…and got one that includes strains that some studies show an increase in fat digestion efficiency. Basically, we’re taking the opportunity to min/max our digestive system.

    What rather surprised me was the discovery that while I was learning how to epically troll Helen with my appearance and behavior, she’d been suppressing two new splits to the system. A few days ago Helen allowed herself to be distracted and that let Sunset and Usagi out to play.

    A Pattern of Misbehavior

    [Ranma] Remember what I said about Helen freaking out about the possibility of us splitting off into new members of the system? Yeah, she apparently was trying to keep us “normal.” Some of our old fears and phobias came back as time progressed and she forgot the purpose of the system is to protect the whole of it, not for one member to be life’s punching bag.

    She kept behaving badly, almost entirely because she has a need for control, almost pathologically. She’d 'let go’ for things that she specifically had ceded to me, but outside of that she was being her usual dragon self and just hoarding everything, including all the stuff she really should have asked for help with. Stupid, stubborn lizard!

    [Sunset] Additionally, whenever Helen would 'break’ as a result of everything she was hoarding just being too much, Ranma had to take over, even into situations where Ranma was not ready or even willing.

    [Ranma] FUCK that job! I swear, I don’t know ho you and she deal with it!

    [Sunset] Heh, anyway, we needed a middle-point between the two extremes of Ranma and Helen, which is where I come in.

    [Usagi] These redheads don’t seem to know how to have fun, so I popped in, too. Not much more to say about me, I’m pretty much what you expect if you watch Sailor Moon at all.

    Well THAT was Unexpected

    [Sunset] Two days ago we were viewing some porn. We’ve been tired and stressed and needed some 'us’ time and we have a…pretty wide variety of tastes, so wound up venturing into some artists libraries and tags we don’t normally go, and one piece (On R34 somewhere…?) and this one featured a big, buff dragon lady having her way with a smaller, daintier dragon lady.

    Damn near everyone was floored when Helen got 'excited’ about the idea of being the smaller dragon lady. This was a complete inversion of Helen’s usual preferences and Ranma, Usagi, and I teased her…well, a little mercilessly.

    [Ranma] Not proud of it, but we were functionally bullying her.

    [Usagi] But only because she was responding positively to it! We’re here for each other’s care and protection and wouldn’t ever have continued if she had told us to stop or wasn’t enjoying it.

    [Sunset] Right, so that particular session had the interesting result of Helen basically de-aging and becoming…small. If I were to take a guess, she’s younger than Usagi, and she’s not a whole lot older than her canon age. It was cute, she acted like her usual grumpy, slightly distressed self, so we finished up and went to bed.

    What completely bowled us over was she hadn’t returned to her 'normal’ incarnation by the time we were up and about the next morning.

    She’s still here, but she’s decided to be a kid again. She’ll surface and take control occasionally, usually when we’re writing or taking care of our daughter or (and we discovered this tonight) building lego.

    The New-New Normal

    [Sunset] So, yeah, things have changed. Helen is no longer running the show. She’s completely given “the keys” over to me, and I’ve split time with Ranma and Usagi for the most part. I’ve instituted a bit more balance in our life (Helen had been obsessing over working on Code of Ethics to the exclusion of nearly EVERYTHING else), tackled a few tasks that Helen’s executive function just wasn’t up to handling, and running a bit of triage. Usagi has volunteered to take over the household cleaning and similar chores, Ranma has taken back her role of managing our physical body, and I’m in charge of a lot of the 'adulting’ that Helen was doing.

    And speaking of Adulting, we’ve had a long, rough (but productive) 72 hours, we’re getting dinner and going to bed.

    See you tomorrow, your beloved student overly-verbose system,

    Sunset S., Ranma S., Usagi T., and Helen M.

    (Adapted from a message to a Discord server)

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    systemtraumagenic systemsystem stuffdid systemsystem things
    hemipenal-system
    1744390976

  • dragon snuggling their brand new rider who is still absolutely terrified of them

    the big serpent is coiled around them and they’re anxiously petting its snout with a trembling hand and murmuring about “please don’t bite me. good dragons don’t bite humans even if the human is very very scared- oh god why are you making that noise”

    the dragon, who understands absolutely none of this, is purring and nosing at them and chirping along the lines of this human is so cute i hope i get to keep them because it doesn’t even process that they’re scared shitless of it

    • 241 notes
    biblicallyaccuratemoth
    1744390943

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    Alien Romulus is a great time. Also, cognitive reframing is a profoundly powerful tool for coping with and managing powerful emotions. I’ll always be sad that I can’t carry my own children, but dysphoria doesn’t have to own that feeling.

  • imstillalexcomic

    <3

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    steveyockey
    1744390815

  • To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

    This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

    Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

    And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

    See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

    In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

    Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

    Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.

  • princesscolumbia

    I have an aversion to zero-upside endings, so having been appropriately warned, I’ll never watch I Saw the TV Glow. That said, if it gives Cis people even the tiniest inkling of what being trans is like, I will promote this film to the world.

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    imstillalexcomic
    1744387374

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    This isn’t really meant to be a comic trashing my dad.

    I do truly appreciate his commitment to education.  I do truly have a soft spot for his style of humor, which certainly influenced the development of my own.  I appreciate how he had this VHS-C camera that he was always bringing out and would let me use, sparking my love for movies and starting me on a path that led to me going to film school.

    All those good things about him were real.

    But so was the colossal amount of damage he caused.

    If you happen to be a parent and are reading this right now, I’m going to ask that you consider this suggestion from a childless thirty-six year old:

    You need to consider how you communicate with your child, and how communication doesn’t just mean the words that you use.

    You’re telling your kids something with the foods you eat, the activities you engage in, etc…

    …you communicate to your children with the media you consume.

    The rhetoric against the trans community wasn’t as much in the spotlight when I was growing up, but every time my dad turned on the radio, he’d have my sister and I listen to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, or Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, etc…  One of the topics that’d come up frequently was queer people. 

    Issues about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, gay marriage, gay boy scouts…

    The “gays” were an issue.  More than an issue really, they were a problem.  If someone was queer, these radio hosts were quick to villainize; “this teacher is going to turn their students gay,” “this troop leader is going to abuse his scouts,” you don’t want your kid to end up like that, do you?”

    My dad would listen to these folks non-stop and nod along in agreement, all the while his extremely queer and aware of it child was sitting right behind him, listening to how she was some kind of monster.

    So I hid. 

    There could be no sharing about aspects of myself.  My parents would be listening to 770am or Fox News all the time.  If I share that I was queer, I’d be finished.  How couldn’t that be the case?  Every day they chose to listen to people that hate me, so they hate people like me. 

    So I can’t let them know me.  I won’t let them know me.

    Even though they never said that they hated queer people with their own words, they told me that they hated queer people every day with the media they chose, and in turn forced me to consume.

    So again, if there are any parents reading this right now, consider my words.  Hate is a choice you make, and hate can be communicated with more than just words.

    If for no other reason, you never know if that kid in the back seat is listening, listening to how you hate them.

  • kaylasartwork

    This one hits so hard

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    &. magnolia theme by seyche