Troy: The Abuse

While it's not inaccurate or false to say that my system created a Trent Reznor-esque OC called Troy Razor when we were 12, this isn't also really the full story of where the character originates.

There are a couple of ways of describing where exactly he comes from and why exactly he was created. While we're not entirely sure who created him, we have enough memories to explain where he originates, and how he was used.

Similarly to how predators on the current-day internet use certain online spaces to trade tips for abusing children and to organize similarly illegal activities, communities like this existed on the old web. However, some of them were more niche in their focus and more convoluted in their methods of abuse.

Our adoptive father found one or multiple such communities thanks to some online searches he was doing related to fact that we were displaying possible signs of a dissociative condition.

The communities in question were, in short, dedicated to abusers who were abusing people, including children, with DID or other dissociative conditions. Similarly to a darker version of how our system participates in build-a-headmate templates in the current day, these groups would write similar things intended to serve as guides for getting their victims to split certain headmates on purpose.

The goals of the abusers varied, but basically, the idea was that they wanted to get away with abusing someone with amnesia or with different personality states, and they traded guides and advice on how to get their victims to split alters who were easier to abuse, including stories about characters who were meant to be introjected into the victim's systems and then abused.

Many alters in our system, particularly Bryan's Supercluster, are either from these stories, split in relation to innerworld events involving headmates from those stories, or are rebuilt from headmates who were originally from those stories.

While we genuinely believed we were creating our own character when we created the Troy Razor character, and we believed that Trevor was a new split when he became known to us in the context of this OC, we were actually remembering a character that someone online had created and that our abuser had told us about to abuse us with, and Trevor was coming back from earlier in our childhood.

This obviously gives the character of Troy a complicated legacy. While many people will tell you that fiction is inherently morally neutral, many people will also tell you that everything always has exceptions. A character originating from a story that was created for the purpose of harming others may be such an exception.

However, our system sees it with a perspective that bears in mind that Troy isn't just a character, he was meant to become real by way of being introjected into people's systems. We fell in love with the character before knowing his origins, and if we rejected him because of where he came from, we feel like we're saying that any headmate in any system who was abused with the same story is inherently unworthy of love.

Furthermore, in our current iteration of the self-ship with Troy, he is someone who was abused in similar ways to us with regards to being told a certain story with the intention to get him to split headmates from it. However, it was in different ways that included him developing a public offline identity that was much more similar to the character from the story than we've ever presented in person, to the point where he has the same name and comes off as pretty much the same person.

While we know the character of Troy comes from a dark place, we also see him as more than how he originated. This is especially true in the retooled version of him in which we explicitly use the character to examine our trauma. Some people may be uncomfortable with knowing the character has these origins and we self-ship with him, but we see it as no more unpleasant than if someone who was sexually abused still enjoys sex.

While we may never meet someone who had the exact same experience as we did, since the online groups associated with our abuse were so small and niche, self-shipping with Troy as a character with similar experiences as us gives us the feelings of understanding and comfort we would get from actually meeting someone like that. Loving him is loving the parts of us that were created just to be hurt and mistreated and showing them that were is so much more to life than why they were brought into it.