more or less figured out why i've been in such a mood all day. (tldr: accidental low-key species dysphoria, resolved by a realization about myself. all through a lot of rambling on our self-discovery as narrated by an exhausted demonex at 1 am.)
a fun fact about our brain is that we all have more than one internal shape here. nidhogg and r2 have two main shapes (as far as we can tell): one "feral" (it's the best term we've found, even if we're all giggling at the image of "feral roomba" [c:]) form that they consider their main shapes, and then one humanoid shape that they mostly use when they front to lessen that entire "my body map is at odds with this entire human body thingy". for me, the situation has been slightly different so far. my "main" shape has been humanoid, and i haven't had any other "feral" shapes that i've considered a core form of mine. instead, i've just shapeshifted into all sorts of creatures. a giant wasp, a deer, the messed up centipede i wrote about last week... all sorts. all of them good and cool, some of them leaving me with immediate "i think i hauve covid", but none that were like "whoa, that's truly me".
or so i thought.
when we woke up today, i immediately found myself in a fairly familiar form. i think the best way to describe it would be something like "imagine taking a gecko, making a monster out of it, and throwing on a third pair of limbs". right now i'm too tired to give a more detailed description, but that might come at some point in the future /foreshadowing
fairly familiar, primarily because it was more or less one of the forms our mind painted us in often around the time when nidhogg was forming. at that time (how has our mind changed so much since march aaa), with us partially aware that there was more than one of us in here but with no clue of the specifics, plus we were also trying to navigate that whole "oh i'm not human" bit and exploring our recently-realized shapeshifting, we ended up drifting to that form now and again. usually it was as just a small creature, just a little critter that was happily just being. at the time, we mostly related that form as a subset of another shape. a "shape" that, in hindsight, was nidhogg forming. by the time when nidhogg and i were able to communicate, we somewhat wrote that shape off as a byproduct of our experimentation. it has stuck around since, always somewhat in the background.
so when i woke up in that shape, it wasn't a shock or anything. accidentally waking up as a giant creature? no issues. rip to kafka, but we're built different. i spent that time playing around with the limbs while browsing this site. that's around when i did that first little funni post this morning.
by the time we got up and that shape was still there it was slightly more notable, but still didn't feel like any more than me just doing a little fixation on something again. of course i was feeling the wanting to just be a creature, i'm literally one of the critters in here.
the day passed. that feeling didn't. and eventually, we made the decision to start reading some stuff on twitter, along with a really powerful essay we think we found on here.
creatures, entities, and people, that was a mistake.
i don't regret reading that essay, it was a powerful reminder of all that's going on. but that, combined with the twitters and just a little bit of previous stress, got us in a mood. perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it all-consuming anger. a furious desire to shed what we might describe as humanity, reject all bonds to those around us, and bring all our strength to tear at the system harming us all. ferality, fueled only by anger. and the creature shape remained, yearning for me to say "fuck it" and break free like that. it yelled at how unfitting this human body was for us.
eventually, even that fire cooled down slightly. i don't think we will be free of the flame until all bonds are broken. but at that point, we were burnt out by it again. the shape remained. and the pained snarls it threw at our physical form still stung. this was when i made that second post.
we went for our daily walk. we felt the shape there still. and with the clarity that fresh air and head clearing can offer, we... i made a realization:
the reptilian creature? that was me. that was my feral shape.
the last couple hours have been me largely getting used to this. i might be used to flowing between shapes (both on my own and through feeling the change as we switch out in front), but the idea of knowing of another form that's so me is.... strange. i'm just not used to it yet. but i also know how long it took nidhogg to accept his anthro shape [Nidhogg here, can confirm. Also might have been ghostwriting a bit here and there because we're all too sleepy to stick to the front and we Want to finish this now. Fun fact :)], and he has gotten rather comfortable in that shape by now. i think i can grow to love this part of myself easily. in fact, i've been spending most of this late evening, and the writing of this post, in said creature shape! it's so cool!
anyway, that's more or less it. still figuring stuff out, and absolutely exhausted from the emotions of this day plus this late night ramble (this is what you get when you give me an hour after midnight, a keyboard, and permission to write about ourselves), we're gonna need some rest now. we'll see how this works out. because it will.
-demonex and the critters
(ps: just because we briefly wondered about this while writing this post but couldn't find a place to add it: we have considered if this might actually be a new headmate, but as far as we can tell, it doesn't feel that way. we can usually tell who emotions are coming from in here, even in cases where they flood us so much that all of us get swallowed by them, and we're fairly certain that most of the anger we felt today was from me (the demonex), and the rest came from nidhogg, who also gets rather angry about the same stuff. this, plus the fact that i've taken to this shape so naturally and we're about as certain as we can be that that's my reaction, leads us to believe that it's mostly me. we might be wrong, but for now this is what we're working off of.)
