can I get you started on fictionkind and soulbonding clique drama? because i’m curious about how it USED to manifest as compared to the absolute shitshow it is now…
It was more private, instead of a public circus. Basically you had our version of tumblrkin – they would decide to ~suddenly awaken~ as certain characters depending on who they were fighting with that week, as a form of control. So, if X made Y upset, Y would make some long post about how they realized they were a double of X all along, and this was basically a signal for the rest of the group to abandon X for a while. Or they suddenly had a soulbond of someone that X shared a canon with (bonus points if X was romantically involved with that person in their canon). Imagine every Steven Un*iverse tumblrkin trying to “steal kins” from each other on callout posts, only these were usually adults. Embarrassing. God forbid two people realized they were legitimately doubles – whatever friendship they had was on thin ice or done with.
Canon hurts would be amplified and replayed like a myspace roleplay. I remember when I shared my awakening as Kovu for the first time, someone else decided they were Kiara, and started this melodrama with another friend who was Nala because they were apparently still angry about my banishment. Shit like this could literally go on for days. Rather than being a healthy catharsis for bad memories, it was just stupid and performative and didn’t actually help anybody.
It was worse with the soulbonds involved, imo. You could always tell when a legitimate headmate was being used as a puppet. They’d “front” from the person who was angry and become their white knight against whoever offended them, and you could pretty much always tell when it was just that person pretending. Callout posts too, but much more vague and snobby than a laundry list of perceived social justice crimes. “I was raped by this headmate/that person in canon” was a disturbingly common move when someone really wanted to be dramatic.
The person I have in mind with the majority of this behavior was a grown woman who gathered a bunch of teenagers – engaging one in an online relationship at that – and tried to convince us the veil was gonna fall, fwiw. It was fucking nuts is how it was. And tumblrkin wonder why we’re so concerned with community policing, lol…
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