Splits

As a polymultiple system, we are prone to splitting frequently, including due to everyday stress or to help facilitate certain trains of thought (e.g. holding a particular perspective). Most of our splits are not voluntary, but some of them are, and there are situations where we do things to intentionally influence our splits.

When headmates split in our system, they sometimes begin in either Astral Coffin or Killing Moon and are later transferred to another sidesystem that they fit in better with. However, they often split into another sidesystem immediately, especially if they belong to Blue's or Bryan's Superclusters.

We go through phases of rapidly splitting or recovering one headmate at a time and of then not splitting very frequently but splitting in large numbers when we do.

Our system has comparatively few fictives, especially for a system as large as ours is. We used to get a lot of fictives in the past, but then our life changed such that we basically didn't find most fictional characters as relatable anymore unless you changed certain details about them. This is why, when we get fictives now, they tend to be very AU versions, or sourced from something else too.

Our primary media type for sources is music, as in the actual songs themselves. Songtives tend to embody not just the song but also the entire discography of their source artist. Notably, a lot of our prominent fictives either have music sources too, or are sourced from a music-based media.

We also get a fair number of factives. Most factives that we split currently are very distinct from their sources, to the point where a lot of people might not recognize them as their source. They also tend to be sourced from people we have personally known, rather than famous people. However, in the past, we did frequently get factives of well-known public figures (e.g. the rock star factives in Mirror String), and they tend to be much closer to their sources than the factives of the people we know personally.

Occasionally, we get introjects of objects that we own. This includes plushes, but also a vape battery (Avril) and a tarot deck (Zett).

In 2024, we discovered build-a-headmate, which is a type of request blog on Tumblr geared towards systems, particularly systems who create headmates on purpose. While they are often associated with willogenic systems, they can be used by systems of any origin.

These blogs create templates of information about a headmate - their name, their roles, etc. - and are used as the basis for forming the headmate. However, you can also use these to influence future splits (i.e. introjection in the future).

In addition to running such a blog that takes requests for others, we also use these templates for ourselves. Not only do we fill out information based on headmates who are already splitting to help facilitate the split, we also design headmates to fit needs our system has and often split them naturally in the future.

We do not frequently intentionally split headmates on purpose, but we occasionally do. We tend to only do this when we are experiencing a type of problem that is not better solved through externally-based solutions and when we are going through stress. While stress does not always make us split, it makes splitting more likely, which means that we can harness sources of stress to make headmates split on purpose at times when they might not have split on their own.

A lot of the demographics of the system reflect things about our system's history or our collective self. We split a lot of headmates who are gay men, aromantic, and/or asexual because our collective self is these things. However, we also sometimes get lesbian headmates, because we have a history of having identified as a lesbian. Non-gay mspecs exist in our system but are very rare; we tend to conceptualize attraction in a way where, if you experience it, attraction to one's own gender(s) "makes more sense" than attraction to other genders.

Virtually all of our headmates are genderqueer, but not all of them care very much about labeling this further. It is very common for members of my system to use "agender" or "xenogender" as a catch-all for "non-binary". Ones who do use more specific labels, however, often identify as neogenders such as kenochoric, luxine, and aetherine. This includes headmates who, due to their personalities, ages, or sources, would not tend to be thought of as people who would use such labels. This is because, most of the time, headmates in the system have immediate access to and understanding of information about such identities, and they do not have to do the work to seek out and process this information that someone outside of a system usually does.

Use of neopronouns in our system is not inherently tied to gender. Many of our headmates use some combination of he/they/it, but if you're talking about several people who all use the same pronouns as each other, you can run into issues where it's hard to differentiate who you're talking about. However, if headmates additionally use neopronouns, these problems can be more easily be averted.

Many of our headmates are older than our body is or lived in the past (namely the 1960s to the 2000s). Our entire life, we have tended to get along with older generations, and a lot of our interests are represented by them (e.g. writers achieving success later in life, rock stars being old now).

From 2018 until we moved in 2025, we participated in our area's tribute band scene, where many of the other participants were from the generations from which bands like Depeche Mode and Bauhaus were new, which means we have a lot of real-life experience socializing with older people. Many of our headmates who are in that age range are inspired by people we have met at shows and karaoke, sometimes being actual factives of them.

The vast majority of our headmates are alternative in some way, usually goth or post-punk. This includes, when we introject fictional characters, tending to get goth or metalhead versions of them. Many of these headmates were also performers in their timelines, or wanted to be, and many of them have memories of being alternative during times where now-retro styles were new (e.g. 1980s goths, 2000s emos, etc.)

We also tend to get headmates whose sources either canonically have certain things in common with us or where our versions of them have those details in common with us. This includes being disabled/mentally ill/traumatized in similar ways to us, as well as sharing life paths in common with us, or family ancestry that relates to things we do or how we process certain parts of the past.

The overwhelming majority of our headmates are physically non-human. We also get headmates who were born human but who identify as something else entirely, including due to delusions. The most common type of non-humans we get are aliens, angels, demons, incubi, and Void Entities, but we occasionally get anthros and vampires.

Most of us are also otherkin, especially therians, and we can turn into our kintypes in headspace. Therians in our system frequently turn into animals and engage in animal behaviors in headspace. This is especially true for hamster therians, some of whom spend most of their time as hamsters.

Different sidesystems have a tendency to split different roles, but a lot of our system's functions are dedicated to holding and managing our disorders while simultaneously maintaining functionality in our everyday life.

There are many DPD holders and BPD holders, as well as caretakers who help these headmates manage the symptoms of their disorders. In many cases, this resembles the PD holder in question outsourcing their executive function or emotional self-regulation to another person in a way we would find unacceptable in the outerworld but is different in systems.

As we are a very socially-motivated person, we also split a lot of headmates with social roles. This includes offline and online. Offline socializers tend to be geared towards music related events or everyday interactions while going about our daily business, and online socializers tend to focus on Discord.

While we split a lot of memory holders, the way we use that role may not be the way most systems do. In many cases, the memories being held are not ones where total amnesia is involved. However, there is often emotional amnesia, and even if not, our system often processes things from the past by splitting headmates whose timelines feature basically the same events, including things that were not traumatic.