• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


I feel, at last, like I understand something that other folks probably regard as quite obvious: the reason the "normal" people are so vindictive about identity and "identity politics" is because they have, in fact, no sense of identity. They might even be waking up blank every morning like Harry du Bois after a blackout, piecing themselves together with the help of their own papers and records and everything, and that's why the notion of changing any of that stuff offends them so much.

I, we, all of us have struggled with identity, "impostor syndrome", and everything...it's taken a while. We feel like we're finally stitching together a satisfactory sense of self. It took a while. Self-loathing was my predominant emotion for so very many years....anyway, if there's a large collection of people who are all "normal" in approximately the same way and they're all reliant upon external information for their sense of self, then...what does that make them?

I have a hypothesis to propose, a metaphysical one: some clever entity set up a false Heaven in order to make instant salvation possible, or the illusion of it rather.

(cw: wacky blithering)


"Normal" people have their various ways of feeling sure that they've been given...safe passage, shall we say. They feel they've been told "you're going to make it". Normie Christians call that feeling "salvation" or being "born again" or other things, but there's secular ways to feel "saved". Anyway I think that an unknown number of human beings have been, over the decades, made to feel more or less as if they'd already gone to Heaven. Or the next best thing: they'd just have wait out some pesky mortal years until going to their true home. I assume that any reasonably clever metaphysical entity could arrange a few visions or illusions here and there in order to reinforce this idea.

It might not require much. Normal Christians put a lot more energy into imagining Hell than Heaven. "Heaven" for them is probably a composite image of radiant light, music and song, angels flapping around as if Renaissance depictions were real, et cetera. Winston Smith's "Golden Country" in George Orwell's "1984" was vague and luminous like that.

In any case, if I'm right about that, then there's a lot of people in the United States and elsewhere who, when it comes down to it, don't actually have a clear notion of who they are any more, so they lean heavily against technology and "normal" society to furnish them with something that's almost as good as an identity: statistics. They don't know who they are but they do know what they're supposed to do, because they're surrounded by people who remind them. Their momentum is maximally certain—they move in prescribed directions. Their position in spacetime is therefore maximally uncertain, and I suggest that this can be seen in their behavior. For them, history and journalism and fiction and everything else that would place them in time has become a uniform memetic soup. In his propaganda Elon Musk has become like Big Brother in "1984", unstuck in time.

This prompts a big question: when did all this "born again" stuff start? When Frisk and I were growing up it was huge, but it's not that old a trend in Christianity, is it? When did Christians start asserting they'd been saved with a fingersnap more or less?

~Chara of Pnictogen


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