One of our most persistent problems, as a plural system, is that we spent many decades not being aware that we were having dissociative episodes and developing headmates merely from reading books and watching movies and so forth. And we were devouring huge amounts of media in the first couple decades of our life. I have a feeling there was a kind of cascading effect: we'd read something, develop an unsuspected introject, and then they'd start imposing their desires upon our impulsive behaviors. And thus we'd experience a sudden burst of interest in some totally off-the-wall subject.
Hence I suspect that the Pnictogen Wing actually has an enormous population. We've occasionally had introjects suddenly emerge back into the light (ugh I'm talking like James McAvoy in Split) decades after we'd gotten to know their characters. This is worrying, because it means there's a reservoir of unsuspected influences lurking around our vast murky headspace somewhere, interfering with our actions possibly, or jabbing us with the occasional intrusive thought or harmful impulse. A fanatical Christian would say that we were plagued with a legion of demons, and strive to cast them out; but that's not the way we want to do things.
Not all of our introjects are from fiction. We have a number of "factives" around, including my own sibling, although they've taken fictive form as I have. This brings me at last to one of the oddest persons I ever got to know in my adolescence, someone I maintained a few years of Internet correspondence with: Gharlane of Eddore.
Gharlane of Eddore is a fictional supervillain from the famous Lensman space-opera books written by Edward Elmer "Doc" Smith, an actual Doctor of Chemical Engineering; there's some story that he invented the modern process for getting confectioner's sugar to stick to commercial donuts. Gharlane was also a person, and I got to know him in the early 1990s from Usenet arguments about popular sci-fi media. I'm not going to deadname Gharlane here but you can learn something about who he was in "real life" from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gharlane_of_Eddore) and other places; suffice to say he was a profoundly nerdy and overeducated computer technician (three degrees, just like me!) full of incendiary opinions about science fiction. In particular I remember his participation in the sci-fi fandom wars over J. Michael Straczynski and "Babylon 5", which engendered a loud and noxious Usenet fan culture—a premonition, maybe, of bronies and toxic "Steven Universe" discourse—and I daresay that Gharlane may have influenced my eventual disillusionment with the show. He always posted in character, as though he really were a vastly superior alien intelligence condescending to interact with humans and their follies. These days, Gharlane's shtick no longer seems charming, but when I was an adolescent (and presumptively cismale) Caltech nerd, I was quite taken with it. I had never met anyone so unabashedly weird.
I'm taken with the depressing feeling that a modern-day Gharlane of Eddore—that is to say, a modern-day computer nerd adopting the persona of a Lensman supervillain—would be spectacularly fascıst. For all I know, the Gharlane that I knew was like that, though it wasn't a topic of conversation. Doc Smith's Lensman books—I read a few of them specifically because knowing Gharlane on the Internet—have a reactionary streak, just like you'd expect from Golden Age sci-fi written by a whıte American Ph.D. There's eugenicist nonsense about breeding a race of genetically perfected heroes; there's some argy-bargy involving that favorite idol of racist pseudohistory, Atlantis. The Eddorian villains wish to hinder human progress, you see, so they contrive to destroy Atlantis and also do their best to ruin Roman civilization through covert sponsorship of a number of destructive enemies of the Roman state, both external and internal: Mithridates the Great, C. Marius (!), L. Cornelius Sulla (!!), but their crowning achievement is Nero Claudius, who is really Gharlane of Eddore in human costume. I admit I didn't get to reading the particular Lensman book which contains this wild story. Anyway, there's reason to be a bit suspicious of a nerd who's totally engrossed by a bunch of sci-fi novels with eugenicism as a major plot device...
Anyway. I've been wondering if the Pnictogen Wing hasn't been subtly cursed by those years of association with Gharlane of Eddore. I really liked the guy for a while! but perhaps it's not the best idea to be friendly with a galactic supervillain, especially one who can (as it seems) easily disguise themself as a human being. (Has Nero Claudius been informed that she's been accused of being an alien in disguise? I can't imagine she's going to like the news.) We've had a lengthy career of acrimonious Internet behavior ourselves, not to mention a lengthy history of asserting a fictive identity.
Is that you, Gharlane of Eddore? Is this me?
~Χαρά
