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Cry

August 2024

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liondrakes: (Default)
[personal profile] liondrakes
Imagine that you're a student. You go to a nice school, but the school is known for its controversies. These controversies get a lot of people hurt, including the students. You've witnessed and dealt with things that a teenager normally shouldn't have. A classmate dies. Multiple classmates die. Your school is put on lockdown because it’s been targeted. You and your friends are supposed to carry on like none of it happened. You hardly have a moment to grieve before the cycle repeats, and it's taking a toll on you. You fall into the wrong (or right?) crowd. Your trust in the adults and authorities around you is reduced to zero. Most of all, you’ve grown rebellious. You're not a bad kid, you tell yourself. You say it not out of comfort but out of defiance. You know you don’t deserve what you’ve been given, but life seems to work against you at every chance it gets. The whole world feels out of your grasp, but you're not helpless. You refuse to be helpless. So what do you in a world that doesn't give a shit about you? You get up and do something about it.

Now, imagine you've made your mark. You gain a reputation among your peers. You're a menace to society in the best way. Maybe the worst way, too. But as the years go by, there's no trace of you. You're not shown in the yearbooks. You're not listed as an alumni. There's no reference of your existence whatsoever. It's like you weren't even there. 
 
That's what it's like for me, a non-canonical character from Marvel Comics. I'm not an original character (OC) nor am I a self-insert of sorts. I’m a member of Homo sapiens superior (mutants), but not in the general sense. I’m aware of this because of how different this fictotype feels compared to experiences where my fictionhood ends at the species. I‘m someone who was a consistent part of my source's narrative. I am an X-Man, and I come from a specific era of X-Men comics. My fictomere is New X-Men, specifically Vol. 2/Academy X. Published in the early 2000s, this series geared its focus around a young generation of mutants. My fictomere bounces off of the original New X-Men run, which focused on our teachers and mentors. You'll likely recognize them more than us. Cyclops, Wolverine, White Queen, Beast, etc.— you know ‘em! That said, they're not my class. I remember my class clear as day. Prodigy, Hellion, Surge, Dust, Wind Dancer, Icarus, Gentle, those goddamn Stepford Cuckoos— these kids were my friends. Well, some of them were my friends. My memories are foggy, to say the least. I remember my code name, my friendships, my plurality in that world, and my attendance at the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning. What I don't remember is the events that happened in the comics associated with my fictomere. 
 
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[personal profile] liondrakes

NOTE: This essay contains spoilers for Date Everything, specifically Luna/Connie’s route and lore pertaining to the objects’ sentience. 

When I was a kid, I had a habit of anthropomorphizing everything around me. I didn’t want my stuffed animals to feel left out whenever I went to school, so I’d sneak them in my backpack sometimes. In order to help myself get better with math, I personified numbers. I’d tell myself that 2 was friends with 4,6, 8, and 10, and 1 was friends with 3, 5, 7, and 9 as a way of remembering even and odd numbers. Part of me was convinced that I could talk to those numbers in my head, too. These little friend groups were my work-around for where I lacked in mathematics, but they didn’t last long as thoughtforms. There was even a time where my books invited me to color inside them, because they were so bored of having nothing but words to show. I was an interesting kid, that’s for sure.

However, what stuck with me the most was my first handheld console. For my birthday, I got a Nintendo DS. I was pretty young; I want to say I was about 8 or 9, but my memory fails me. I admired it so much. Its design captivated me: white, compact, and an extra slot for backwards compatibility. I learned what the latter was when my cousin gave me his copy of Pokémon Emerald since I never had a GBA of my own. Once I started getting my own games, I grew attached to the device. Like other objects in my room, I anthropomorphized it in my mind and treated it as a friend. I didn’t have a name for them, but I did personify them through the characters I liked or played as in my video games. I often visualized her as Hilda, the female avatar for Pokémon Black & White. Maybe my avatar in MySims one day, or a Nintendog the next, but usually Hilda. Hilda was someone familiar and cool, but this thoughtform wasn’t Hilda as she’s known among Pokémon fans. She took her appearance because I wanted her to, and whatever I wanted changed often, so she didn’t always appear as Hilda.

She was an imaginary friend at first. I never mentioned her to my parents, and I kept it that way. Our friendship was a secret between the two of us, and it felt so fun and stealthy. It was like having a power no one else knew about, except it wasn’t much of a power and more of an act of my imagination with some brainweird things at play. Admittedly, creating a person around my DS, and every other DS I had after that, made me feel less alone at home. I needed to be distracted, especially when parents did as parents do (i.e. fight each other). She was there to distract me, to do whatever they could for a neurodiverse child who didn’t know what to do in times like that. Later in life, I stopped hearing them. I thought nothing of it. Kids create imaginary friends all the time. Mine happened to a bit unorthodox, but that’s what I chalked her up to be as a teenager. 

Now, imagine my surprise when she came back in my adulthood. 

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