I knew this was going to be inevitable.

I’ve been meaning to get some things out of my system, even before making this website, many of which have took much longer than I would like. It’s extremely hard to spill my guts out sometimes, but it’s also extremely harder not to. I wasn’t going to escape it one way or another; as the MGT song goes “Just know that if you hide, it doesn’t go away”.

It doesn’t really matter if people find it to be confusing, let alone if they get the wrong idea about it; Much like with everything regarding identity, this is something very important to me. It has greatly affected my gender, my non-humanity, my desires and how I overall perceive myself. It’s artistic, sexual, spiritual and related to my autism all at once. It’s something that I have been at least aware of for as long as I can remember.
Now, this is going to be half-thought dump, half-revision of some journal entries I made back in 2022 (when I first started to write down everything you see here) and half-unfinished essay I tried to make about my favorite TV show but couldn’t do it after trying to revise it over and over again. Then again, I guess it’s just a weird unhealthy habit of mine for things to fester. I mean, it took me about 4 months for me to fully realize that I was otherkin, which first happened around New Year’s Eve 2020 and the first two days of January 2021, when I played Celeste for the first time. It wasn’t until April when I realized “Oh yeah, I really am an anxious yet plucky trans mountain climber through and through. I’m not actually a quirky human despite how I was raised.”

And here I am again, dumping out thoughts hidden deep in my skull, jotting everything down, trying to create, trying to speak, everything feeling so different as I speak.

Well, history tend to repeat itself, even my own. But it really shows how far I have come.

Okay, here goes…

To start things off, my relationship with plurality is…complicated. I’ve been very fascinated with the concept for years. So much so that I ended up doing research on Dissociative Identity Disorder through articles and documentaries and YouTube videos, I looked at blogs made by systems, I even looked at pieces of art regarding the subject such as making your own system fursona, which I found to be such a novel and incredibly creative idea!!

So naturally, there would be times in which I thought I was plural myself! The first time was when my sibling and I were talking about plurality and the second time was when I convinced myself that I was still plural in some way in order to cope with the sudden loss of said-sibling. I realized later that it wasn’t true. I need to quickly make a disclaimer here and say that in spite of the similarities between plurality and the topic of this article, I am not plural and never will be!!

But instead of being a collection of identities in one body, I realized that I am quite the opposite. That is, multiple bodies within one singular identity. A very unusual yet artistic way of self-love.
Have you ever felt like your soul was meant to be in more than one body?

While I sometimes see myself as one being, other times I think that my soul belongs in two bodies or more, splintered if you will. My soul, mind and body going through mitosis or fission, multiplying in highly unique ways. The bodies never separate for a long period of time and they are always on the same wavelength in spite of their different behaviors. Essentially like a hive mind but also not if that makes sense. And overall, I think my relationship with myself is somewhat queerplatonic; sometimes it’s entirely platonic like very best friends, other times it’s sensual and romantic. I know that something like that isn’t possible in real life but sometimes I wish it would actually be true!!

I am certain that my kintypes factor a lot into this mindset and reflect it in spades, which might also explain why figuring out what otherkin terms truly meant due to the internet butchering the real term was a struggle to say the least, but that’s a whole other can of worms that I am not interested in opening…

Even as a young kit, when I felt extremely different from my peers and had no idea why, there were signs regarding these desires:

It’s a healing desire to literally be two individuals, one of which happens to be about anxiety and doubt. To talk to each other about the world or self-reflections, accepting each other in spite of others ill wishes about us, to hug each other every night before bed, to explore the world like I’m supposed to be, like…my most ideal forms; the ego and the shadow together. I’m Madeline and I want to hug Badeline. I’m Badeline and I want to be hugged by Madeline.

Like, I know that the ending of Celeste kind of lampshades about how I can still talk to myself without having to rely on these fantasies, but I don’t know…Can you let a creature like me dream?

I remember ending up crying in frustration when I learned an ex-friend of mine didn’t understand Badeline at all, instead seeing her as a “friend in my brain” which sounds like a very plural approach if I ever heard one! I guess it was to me to make an exercise to expand on these concepts and ideas l — like a body that represents my logical, a body that’s my inner child, etc. I was a fool thinking that these two concepts weren’t connected in any way when they clearly are.

But ironically enough, even though it helped the egg cracking processes, it wasn’t enough to break it completely.
Starting around November of 2021, I started having these desires of turning into the Holy Quintet from Madoka Magica and I have explored my gender ever since. Yeah, I ended up transing my gender thanks to characters from a show I haven’t watched yet!! Pretty weird, huh? I know how uncultured I am, haha.

But anyway, I’ve always seemed to have a connection to these characters ever since I admired a wall scroll my sibling got many years ago. You know, the types that you might find in anime conventions? I was so fascinated with it and didn’t exactly know why at the time, it felt like seeing a stain glass window at a church, painted in all sorts of beautiful colors that reflect into pretty lights. It was something about the designs of the characters and the colors that really captivated my kitty mind. This scroll is now happily present in my very own bedroom!

When I would go on my internet travels, I would recognize these characters through YouTube videos or pictures on Behind the Voice Actors. And you can imagine my surprise when I found out that there were actually five members instead of four since Kyoko Sakura didn’t appear on the poster! Things aren’t always as they seem, as they say.
And thus, my gender journey officially began as the desires went into maximum overdrive. Granted, I thought they were alternate timelines because it was around the time where I thought everything regarding my identity was otherkin, but still.

There are wholesome images, like being in a field and having tea, talking to one another. Or each one of us having the gifts referenced in the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter!

But there are ones that were a lot more elaborate; Like of a girl living in an Earthbound-esque suburban town that gets a prophecy from space to defeat evil with the help of girls with the same soul as her, each one living in a different town. Or a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon AU where someone ended up as five Eevees and ended up evolving into different Eeveeloutions (which are extremely connected to this mindset)!

But that’s not all! I have realized how gender the concept of magical girls is in general. Ordinary girls that transform into powerful beings of hope and love sounds epic enough, but add the idea of members with a corresponding color and a variety of personalities and you got some amazing gender euphoria right there!! I know that there are some magical girl shows that focus on just one hero (like Cardcaptor Sakura for example), but I think that magical girls in groups are more connected to my gender; think your Sailor Moons, your Precures, etc. and etc. The main reason why that is is because of how important self-love and all kinds of relationships are, whether it’s friendship or something much more romantic. Without accepting yourself for who you are, then your relationship with others might crumble. You got to love yourself before loving others. Not only that, but no matter how dangerous the world around them is, magical girls still persist even when the going gets tough. It’s a sense of unity that feels extremely cathartic to me!

I was able to find these words in the first place thanks to watching the YouTube Channel Dead Meat, specifically thier recounts on the Child’s Play / Chucky franchise. I can really understand why people really enjoy those movies and it honestly makes the slasher genre tolerable for me with its cool effects, lore, writing and queernees! Most importantly of all, the movies had a huge emphasis regarding souls, mostly about souls being transferred into doll bodies.

I feel like it's most apparent in the videos about Cult of Chucky and Seed of Chucky to some extent. And I say “to some extent” since Seed focused on one soul that was split in half (although the video said that it was more like two separate souls, if I’m remembering correctly) – Glen and Glenda – being put into two bodies. I mean, that has some connection to my desires of being in more than one body, right? However, thinking about it now makes me feel a bit uncomfortable thanks to how it was implemented in the plot, so I don’t really have any interest in mentioning anything else.

As for Cult, many copies of the Chucky doll were present and it is stated in the video/movie that they all share the same soul but have different traits/personalities. For example, there’s one that has shorter hair and acts more excitable or one that acts more logical. That’s what I remember from the video at least. It has been a loooooong while since I’ve seen those videos and I’ve only watched them, like, once.

But what really helped me find these words in the first place is near the end of the aforementioned video on Cult, where the host of the video implies how another character had her soul shared with a doll and a human (human as in Jennifer Tilly). And hearing those words made me feel so…jealous. It was like the Universe took feelings I suspected I had for a long time and slapped me in the face with putting these big feelings into actual sentences. I had always wished to be in more than one body in some way, but I didn’t realize what the feelings were or how to word them until that very moment.
And since then, I have discovered more about this concept and how it can be expressed. I started using they/them pronouns to begin with because of my extremely nonbinary gender, I occasionally used the royal we to address myself and have the desire to express it a lot more often. Heck, a lot of my art projects express this concept in some way, especially my story world ‘Silver Constellations’! Back then, I hemmed and hawed about what to call these desires, but ended up calling it Soul Mitosis. After all, labeling things can be comforting to society. But now I have realized that calling it something other than splintering or fission or anything like that honestly feels pointless and unnecessary; They are my desires of mitosis, nothing more and nothing less.

As such, it provides a lot of…interesting dysphoria. Always feeling alone, huge amounts of jealously and lust washing over your body when looking at certain art pieces, feeling as if something is wrong and not feeling whole, any bodily sensation like pain or tightness making you yearn the experience of splitting. Heck, even saying “I” and “me” feels so incredibly off sometimes! The dysphoria becomes really strong, it eats me up inside and makes me feel overall miserable…

Over the course of these years thinking about it and exploring it and talking to my friends about it through joke and explanations, I have realized how…truly universal the concept of fission truly is, especially because of Contrapoints’ almost 3-hour analysis about Twilight, society’s view on sex and kink and all kinds of love dynamics. The balance of yin and yang (or the lion and the lamb in this case), Eve being created through Adam’s rib, love being described as two beings become one entity, the Greek legend of a being with two faces splitting in half…Even playing with toys and imagining your own stories all by yourself is very splintered-coded in a way!

But this quotation is one that has always stuck with me:

“Asexual reproduction is fission. The cell duplicates its chromosomes and rips itself in half, creating two daughter cells. So, what happens to the mother cell when it divides? Is fission death or eternal life?

{…}

Death is the dissolution of the boundaries that define individual existence. Each individual thing is distinguished from other things by its edges; the membrane of the cell, the skin of an animal, the border of a country. In asexual reproduction, the life of the species requires the death of an individual. The mother cell must split to reproduce.”

This feels very philosophical to me because it explains how becoming my ideal selves must also means the removal of what makes me “me”, the creations of more lines, of the ego and the shadow. It’s very trans-coded in how the rebirth of the new selves also means the death to the old self.
And on January 3rd, 2024, I felt some sort of awakening. I finished watching all of ‘Love Live! Sunshine!!’ and ended up finding my favorite TV show of all time. Sometimes I don’t know where to begin.

Sure, there might be shows that could be considered to be objectively than this while others might have a drastically different opinion from mine, but I don’t care!! I never felt this brain blasted by a piece of media since Celeste, and given what I said about it earlier, that is from really high praise!!

I started the journey in November of last year and it was one of the best watching experiences I ever had in my life. I felt a flurry of emotions a soul can comprehend; joy, laughter, sadness, surprise, grief, euphoria, acceptance, wholeness. When it was finished, I couldn't help but cry HARD! It was to the point where I felt so warm and lightheaded from the overwhelming number of emotions!
I have constantly been hemming and hawing for many years - perhaps even my entire life - about what my favorite TV show is...from the Backyardigans to Steven Universe to Bluey, etc. and etc.
But I have constantly thought...Nay, I constantly knew that I found it. I finally found it! It's this, it's Love Live Sunshine!

The fact that I have something to claim as something that is toe to toe with my favorite video game and favorite movie (movies?) makes me feel extremely euphoric! It feels so right, whole even!

Even so, I think it would be best for me to keep my options somewhat open when it comes to having most favorites.
Sunshine took the already fantastic School Idol Project and made something much more personal and improved with its animation that gives much so much art inspiration (seriously, there are so many shots in this series that are absolutely gorgeous!!), a more grounded story that’s so similar yet so different at the same time and minimized the issues I noticed (i.e. the fanservice and fatphobia – I can only recall one extremely fatphobic joke from Sunshine and even then they knew that using it twice was enough), while also being SUPER QUEER AND FULL OF YURI! Sure, the songs may debatably be objectively better in School Idol Project, but you can’t deny how amazing the songs in Sunshine are!! There’s a reason why the title of this website is named after one of my favorite songs from the show!

So, why am I talking about, you might ask? Simple. It’s because it makes me feel seen in ways I never thought possible! Not just my gender, but also what it truly means to be an artist, the amount of time and passion you go through to make your mark on the world. To be your resilient and create your own path away from the art that has inspired you, to go from zero to one as they have taught me. Heck, they even talk about stuff connected to my spirituality in one of season two episodes, which really shocked me!! It’s no wonder why Contrapoints talks about how universal and erotic the ocean is because it also helps with the creation of masterpieces like these, and also why I see Aqours’ seiyuus as saints because their voice acting is INCREDIBLE!!
But it importantly made me discover what it would be like if you ended up finding your selves, how these shards will interact; your core, your masculine side, your anxieties, your logical side, your gay that’s somewhat athletic and has some angst to her that you vaguely saw a long time ago. What it would be like to truly be a part of your craft and the twist and turns that come with it. What it would be like if your gender and desires ended up being a reality. To be a rainbow while also making one.

After all, Idols are simply real-life versions of Magical Girls if you really think about, what with having cute frilly outfits and giving people so much hope and joy! (That and they are mostly seen in groups.)

Even before I watched the show, I felt a lot of euphoric joy expressing myself as Aqours all at once when daydreaming or being with my friends! I even explored my first ever ideas regarding mitosis HRT after watching the show for the first time.

In fact, there were times where I noticed that I felt like a certain member, maybe even over the course of a day. For example, one time I might feel like Hanamaru, then I might feel like Dia, the next thing I know I might feel like a mix of Chika and Yohane or maybe even all of them at once.
My gender is like…a pot of rainbow stew that fluctuates with its glowing bright color, each color connected to a myriad of kintypes that I am and concepts that resonate with me. But deep within the pot’s center are blue and red crystal hearts, beating as if they are one.
I feel so grateful that my sibling and my best friend were able to show me this incredible special interest of mine that I have been taking my own part in since 2022 through presentations and the music itself. Love Live as a whole means a lot to my heart and soul; I still remember getting emotions from seeing clips or listening to “Happy Maker” and I didn’t really know or care as to why. Much like with many pieces of art before and after this, it is something I will latch onto until the end of time…
I also discovered how I went from a duo to a quintet to an ennead with this thought dump, hah. That’s pretty funny.

But, alas…I can’t help but wonder what caused me to think like this to begin with, to be perceived as a being of multitudes. Is it because of my autism, taking words about having multiple facets like a diamond or items in a basket or phrases regarding loving yourself all too literally? Willingly being in isolation for years, content on being by yourself? A coping mechanism to deal with my sibling’s loss, amoung many other stressful ordeals and traumas? Finding a new way to express myself in a creative light? Because the Universe felt like it? Possibly all of the above.
Regardless of how I express it and figure it all out, it’s something I believe makes me unique and special and what would make me stand out as both an artist and an observer of art. You can imagine how excited and happy I was to learn that these desires are actually represented in all kinds of art, especially with characters like Cerberus from Helltaker or the Pokemon Tandemaus!

It’s strange and weird and some people might assume it’s something else, but it’s me…it’s us. We are a soul that contains multitudes and we are happy with that.