ranthimi:

necrophagist:

Also if your coping mechanism not only involves the complete and unquestioning compliance and validation of total strangers, but also requires that no one else in your presence be allowed the same coping mechanism, it’s crossed the line into being an actual part of the underlying problem.

It’s not actually helping you cope if even a slight challenge to your method leads to panic, dissociation, or extreme mental distress. IDing as a character is not actually a viable coping mechanism if 1) the benefits are only achieved through constant outside validation and 2) absence of said validation leads to a relapse in the harmful behavior or thought patterns that the coping mechanism was designed to help.

To add on to this: I had a copinglink back in high school. I hadn’t fully figured out my nonhuman stuff back then, I knew I was, I just didn’t know what due to some external fuckery by a so-called friend. Anyhow, while I consciously chose a character to identify as for the purpose of a placeholder, it became a lot more than that due to how much I was dealing with at the time, and because it went so unchecked and unregulated by anything or anyone else, it actually became distressing and harmful as a result.

I cannot imagine what sort of damage these kids are doing to themselves by choosing “IDs” for fun and then yelling at everyone else over it and allowing it to control their lives to such a degree. If I were to ever take on a c’link again, I’d do so with the explicit intent to emulate certain positive traits of the character/creature in my life with the nice little bit of buffer between my actual self and general stressors that having a coping identity generally provides.

The danger with this sort of thing lies in over-identifying as your chosen persona. That’s what all these kids seem to be doing. It’s more than just a security blanket to them anymore, it’s not an extension of them, it’s them, so if you touch it, you’re hurting them. This is never how it should work because by the time this happens you’re far into unhealthy coping territory because you can’t control the fandom, actual fictiokind, or other people choosing the same character as a c’link.

While emulation can instill more permanent positive traits in one’s life, just because you emulate your favorite celebrity or character or mythical beast it doesn’t mean you will literally become them if you believe you’re this thing hard enough. That’s generally considered to be creepy and unhealthy. A distance to one degree or another between yourself and the object of your emulation is vital for this sort of thing, but since they’ve all decided that words don’t mean things and you can be nonhuman if you wish hard enough from day fucking one it’s normal to these kids to do these sorts of things.