Troy: The OC

If you're a friend of ours, you may have heard of us talk about somebody called Troy Reiner, also known as Troy Razor. We consider him someone we've known for a long time, as well as a partner, and someone who exists in our system.

Describing his origins is complicated, because he exists in more than one form. However, one way to understand him is that he is a character we created when we were about 12 to self-ship with and have recreated at 31 for the same purpose.

As may be gathered from the character's name and our system's general interests, the Troy Reiner character is heavily inspired by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, but less based on the actual man and more based on common misconceptions of what he was like in the 1990s.

In particular, a lot of people tend to view 1990s-era Reznor as angry, misanthropic, and depressed, and emphasize his self-destructive tendencies. There's also a common misconception that he was a heroin addict, although this is untrue. It's true he was an addict, but it was to alcohol and cocaine. The commonly-repeated anecdote of him overdosing on heroin is true, but it happened because he thought the substance was cocaine. He cites his social anxiety as the reason that he struggled with substances in the past.

While it's somewhat common knowledge now that Reznor is a pretty pleasant and friendly person in real life and basically always has been, some fans are much more attached to the angry and depressed persona Reznor portrays in his music and view him that way.

When we were 12 in 2006, we didn't really know the real story behind Trent Reznor, but we DID know the music of Nine Inch Nails, and we were surrounded by people online who idolized the moody and heroin-addicted version of Reznor that doesn't exist anymore and never really did.

All we really knew at the time is that we were really, really attracted to the person we thought Reznor had been in the 1990s, and to how he actually did in fact look at the time.

While what would now be called RPF was considered acceptable in the circles we were in, we preferred to self-ship with him by way of making up an OC whose level of similarity to Trent Reznor was about equivalent to a cartoon parody type of character, as cartoons and parody media were a big interest of ours at the time, even if the character was being created for mostly serious purposes. We also had trouble initially accepting that we were attracted to the character or to the musician who inspired him, so creating him in a way that looked like it was meant to be a cartoon parody made it feel more "okay".

Therefore, we made up a character who was an industrial musician in the 1990s going by the stage name of Troy Razor, who was friends with a similar musician called Meredith Maggot (who was based on Marilyn Manson). While we consider Troy to be a fictional character and don't conflate him with Trent Reznor, we're also genuinely attracted to Reznor, and we don't mind if people consider us to self-ship with him if they aren't judgmental about that and also understand that Troy is his own entity.

After creating the character, we then had thoughts about him where we were another musician in the same scene who was close friends with Troy. Particularly, when we depicted Troy and Meredith as having a toxic ambiguously gay friendship, we saw ourself as having the healthy equivalent with Troy.

While some of the events are shrouded in mystery, we know that the part of us who self-shipped with this character later discovered a headmate in the system who seemed to be introjected from the Troy Razor character, but also considered himself sourced from Trent Reznor as a person, as well as the actual music of Nine Inch Nails. This is the headmate now known as Trevor.

The initial version of the Troy Razor self-ship was fun and helped us discover a lot about ourselves, including how our romantic attraction to people is usually tied up in close friendship and often manifests as a desire to take care of them. Unfortunately, it also got us caught up with some very bad people, including ones who personally abused our introject of the character and used the character to abuse us in general.

This led to us abandoning the character and developing amnesia over ever having him, until Trevor rejoined the system on December 2, 2025, and confirmed our suspicions that something bad had happened to us as a pre-teen on MySpace. However, Trevor remembered the Troy Razor character when no one else in the system at the time did.

The more we learned about the Troy Razor character from Trevor and other headmates who rejoined with memory of this self-ship, and the more we became comfortable with how our trauma has formed us, the more we realized we still had a lot of genuine affection for and attraction to this character, and we wanted to revive the self-ship.

However, its original version was too tied up in trauma for us to use it as-is. The original version was also set in the 1990s with a self-insert who was older than our body's age at the time, whereas when we self-ship nowadays, we prefer it to be something where we directly imagine the character living alongside us in our current life, not that we're someone else living another life alongside the F/O.

We therefore changed a few details about the character, including that his birth surname is Reiner and that, as of recovering more, he has dropped the Troy Razor stage name in favor of his real name.

The current version of Troy Reiner is an industrial/EBM musician who was born in 1996 (two years after us) to a father who was abusive in ways that were both similar to and different from our adoptive father. In particular, Troy was abused for being queer and in ways that led to the formation of a complex dissociative condition.

However, where the abuse from our adoptive father was more covert and less "expected" of the person he was, Troy's father's mistreatment of him was much more overt, and more expected for the kind of person that his father was, and the abuse was allowed to continue for reasons other than that no one suspected it in any way.

Part of the reason we write Troy as being very similar to us is because we feel that our abuse was very extreme and specific in some respects, and it's difficult to find other people with the same trauma, especially in terms of the more specific elements. However, if Troy has the same trauma as us for reasons that are explained by the narrative we've given him, this gives us somebody who understands our experience, even if some parts of it happened for different reasons or in a different way.

Meredith exists in the current iteration of the Troy character, but instead of being a contemporary that Troy has a toxic Withwood-esque relationship with, Meredith is a little more than a decade older than Troy, met him through the same venues and when Troy was the same age as where and when we met the people who abused us with the character online, and groomed Troy into dating and moving in with Meredith when Troy turned 18.

This allows us to process some of our experiences that originally led to the souring of our associations with the character, as well as to imagine another life in which things with our online abusers had gone even worse due to escalating to offline.

Due to the way our self-ships work - that is, we imagine our F/Os living a life in our town alongside the life we live here - we imagine Troy as someone who lives in our town and lives a similar life as us, which is how we know him in the current version of the self-ship.

Troy's reasons for moving here are similar to ours in that he was a disabled person on government benefits moving from a more expensive area to a cheaper one, but it was also because he was escaping his abusive relationship with Meredith.

While Troy is still dependent on heroin when he first moves, he's determined to get clean from it due to associating it too strongly with his past abuse. Our self-insert, Darian (who's really just us with a different name), befriends Troy before the detox and helps him through it. Darian also helps Troy with other aspects of his recovery, including from self-harm, disordered eating, BPD, and trauma.

Troy is still an addict, but it's to things he can get legally where he lives. He sometimes engages in unsafe substance combinations, as well as excess use of "safer" substances, but he's currently trying to recover in those areas, too.

Troy knows about our system and has different relationships with different members of it. In this AU, Trevor is an introject of Troy who split because we were having trouble making up our mind if we wanted to date him or not, and Trevor's subsystem split with romantic feelings for him.

Troy sometimes goes non-verbal, especially when stressed or talking too much about trauma. When this happens, he communicates with a mix of AAC cards (which we've helped him make and that are styled after dialogue cards from silent films) and pointing to words in a dictionary.

Troy also age regresses, usually involuntarily and as a stress response. This is sometimes associated with loss of verbal ability for him, and it sometimes frustrates him because he feels like he should be "stronger" than to become a child sometimes. However, it's because, when he WAS a child, he was expected to be already grown up, and sometimes healing from his trauma means becoming a child again and getting the gentle treatment he should have gotten as an actual child.

Troy is neurodivergent and physically disabled, in somewhat similar ways as us. He has autism and BPD, and likely a dissociative condition (although he's unsure how much of that is actually DID and how much of it is having amnesia while having BPD). He also experiences some of the same physical ailments as us (e.g. back pain, difficulty standing up for too long), although his is due to injuries instead of a condition he developed naturally like our arthritis.

Out of all our F/Os, Troy is the most real to us, and the one we are most likely to talk about in a way that treats him as though he really is real.

This is for a few reasons, but the big one is that our self-ship with him, in the current day, really does make us feel the way we would feel if we were with an external person.

We feel just as much support and comfort from Troy as we do from our actual partners. Troy also has certain experiences that our partners don't, and there are things we feel we get from him that we couldn't get from an actual person.

If you're friends with us, we'll probably talk about Troy with you often, because Troy is genuinely an important part of our everyday life. It took a long time for us to remember him and love him again, but now that we do, we're not letting him go.